| The
Ghost cat!
Of all the stories my mother told, this is the one which most unnerved her! Until the very end of her life, this story upset her even though she was not a very excitable person and certainly not one who saw "spooks" but she did once see something very strange; and... I have seen two other people swear to the same story. Now there are people who seem to be seeing strange things all the time; and, frankly I have my doubts about them. I think that most, probably all, are just a little too quick to accept a supernatural explanation and not to bother trying to find a more probable cause. As shown elsewhere, one of the people in this
story could be superstitious; but, knowing her for thirty years
before her death, I know that that was not a big part of her
life. Her sister did not strike me as one to find a spook under
every rock either although I did not know her as well. Mae and Della were non-identical twins and first cousins to my mother and her oldest brother, Nelson, whom Della married. I remember Nelson and Della as an elderly couple who lived on 23rd Street, in the Tallyrand Area, just a house over from where my family was living when I was born. It was an older house with an upstairs that no one ever visited and a bathroom on the porch. Nelson and Della never had children. Being first cousins, they had decided to forego that. Instead they raised two of my cousins and lots of cats! They also took care of my uncle Doc off and on; and, after my grandmother's death, my grandfather stayed with them. |
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| But this was
1931 in
Eastport, Florida. It was the depths of the depression and times
were hard. So it is understandable how excited and hopeful some
of the local people were when they believed they had found a
buried treasure! And there was something buried there, some kind
of box; but, as anyone who is familiar with Florida knows, you
dig down any depth at all and water starts to fill in. So it was
in this case and the box kept shifting in all that muck in such a
way they couldn't get it up. This went on for weeks and
weeks. Most of the neighborhood men spent just about all their
free time trying to get that box up. My father fooled with it for
a while, then got a chance to deliver some lumber down state, so
took off.
My mother was at the time pregnant with Beverly. So she, along with Walter and Mildred, stayed her parents while he was gone. In was just to be on the safe side in case anything happened. There was no 911 back then! One night a man was killed while attempting to
recover the treasure. |
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