Creepy tales from the crib

My mom sees dead people.

As a matter of fact, most people in my family seem to think they see them. The rest of us either also believe but don't talk about it or take advantage of the whole situation and poke fun of everyone.

Take my grandmother, for instance. She had a ghost in her house. We all knew about it. Even my dog did. He would bark at the room where the ghost lived, especially when the lights flickered and went off.

My grandmother's supersticious live-in housekeeper was aware of the permanent tenant and refused to enter such room. Of course my jokester grandma would take the chance to terrorize her employee. She would put a panty hose over her head as to deform her face and cover her body with a white sheet to chase after the housekeeper in the nights the lights went off.

I distinctively remember the poor maid in the corner of the kitchen, crying hysterically as us grand kids laughed our butts off while holding candles in our hands.

Thinking of my nutty grandma makes me smile. She was so unnusual... She would read poems to us by bedtime, all right, but they were all about farts. Only my grandmother could rhyme a story about a train that sounded like a toot.

She told my mom in her death bed, a day before cancer took her away from us, that my mom shouldn't be afraid, because she would be back to grab her feet in the middle of the night. You see, she was still cracking jokes right before dying.

The problem is, my mom does think ghosts are coming to grab her.

Recently she took care of my nephews at their home when she felt a presence following her. She was convinced that anytime she turned, the presence disappeared. She could tell there was a shadow right behind her while walking down the hall, until she turned, and the shadow was gone.

This presence followed her to the bathroom, when she finally looked in the mirror and realized that a helium balloon was stuck to her hair, the clown printed in it smiling at her... So that's the kind of apparitions my mom sees and if she is brave enough to tell us about it, she will never hear the end of it.

Back in Virginia, in our world war 2 house, my mom was then convinced that a presence wondered the hallway, where the stairs led to a creepy attic. Because my stepson was afraid to walk through the hallway at night and my then four year old nephew said, matter of factly and out of the blue while playing with Legos, "there's a ghost in this house," I started to dart through that hallway on my way to the bathroom as well.

Now we live in a house where the artillery training nearby makes the whole fundation shake and occasionally doors will open or close and things will fall from walls, so one can easily mistake those aftershocks as a haunting.

I seemed to have forgotten to tell my mom about those artillery training days. Our house shook recently and the door of my bedroom shivered, opening. Two seconds later my mom stood next to me, downstairs, wide eyed. She would not tell me about her ghosts suspicions until a few days later. Of course I took advantage of the situation and decided that like my grandmother, the occasion called for a prank.

Our baby video monitor has a feature that allows me to speak through the camera. In the middle of the night, as the baby fussed for a loss binky, I saw in the video from my bedroom that my mom's hand fixed the problem. I took the opportunity to whisper ghostly sounds on the speaker. The hand that held the binky stopped and retrieved, fast. This went on for a few more days until my mom figured it out.

My father jokes that the crib is protected with anti-grandmother devices. The motion detector goes off if someone picks up the baby and the camera makes ghostly sounds. He says that the next thing it will have is a pepper spray that will squirt at the sound of baby talk coming from anyone other than the baby's mom.

I am telling my husband about the anti-grandmother crib and laughing about it while cleaning bottles late at night. He is looking frantically for the baby's birth certificate because the baby is still not in our insurance.

And that's when we both hear it... Guttural voice sounds coming from the video monitor, which is propped on the kitchen counter. I try to rub it off, dismissing that I heard anything, because once you acknowledge a ghost, it starts to exist, but in my head I am thinking, wide eyed, "wtf???"

At first husband doesn't say a thing and just gets very quiet too. "Did you hear that?" he finally says, and now I am freaking out. I hate when people ask that when I think I hear something from another dimension.

So it turns out the joke is on us... The guttural, horrible, creepy and scary sound coming through the crib's monitor, we came to find out, is my mother snoring like a chainsaw in the next room.