1.Many local regions, especially rural areas where I live, have haunted houses. Have you ever spent the night in a house that was supposedly haunted? Anything ‘strange” happen?

Most of the houses where my Grandparents lived had ghosts or spirits attached to them. So would one stand out more then another?

Most of the time- no.

When I was very little I was playing in my Grandparent’s yard and ended up at the house next door. I was playing around the garden and at some point wandered to the side of the house, and then I followed the dirt steps down to the basement.

There was an old man sitting on a chair whittling on a piece of wood. When he looked up at me and I got a good look at his face, I got scared and ran back up the stairs to the house.

I guess I was pretty upset and told my Grandparents about the man ‘with the snake mouth’ – to be honest I don’t remember seeing that but that’s what my relatives said I told them.

So, here’s the thing- the house next door didn’t have a basement, there was no one living there at the time and after I told my Grandparents what happened a Priest showed up a few days later.

Could have just been a regular Priestly kind of visit. May have been for something else.

Photographer Unknown

2. The Quidditch Cup (riding broomsticks while chasing a small ball) was a huge sporting event in the land of Hogwarts. What is the largest sporting event (or concert, etc.) that you have ever attended?

That would be the parade that we had when the Seattle Seahawks won the 2014 Super Bowl. I guess that sort of counts. Here are the numbers:

February 5, 2014

Estimate 450,000 at the Seahawks parade. The entire population of Seattle is 634,000

I work a block away from where the Parade route ended so I was there. It was AWESOME.

The 12th Man braved the bitter cold Wednesday as the Seahawks football team and staff made their way down 4th Avenue towards CenturyLink. Over 700,000 people came out to cheer on the Hawks, who won the Super Bowl after defeating the Denver Broncos. (KOMO Photos: Katie Johnson Stern)

.
3. When you go for a swim, do you prefer an ocean, the seaside lakes, or a pool?

I make my choice based on three things: Are there Sharks? Are there any stories about ghosts haunting the beach? Were murderous pirates or shipwrecks involved in the area? Because if the answer is yes, that’s where I go. if not, I’ll take a hard pass.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

4. Ron Weasley received a horrid robe to wear as formal wear to the Christmas dance at Hogwarts. Tell about the most ‘ghastly’ fashion statement that you have ever made.

Yeah. That would be every morning of my life when I get dressed.

My face ruins everything under my chin.

I do have nice hair though.

Muggle Questions (from Melanie):

1. What is the last song you sang along to?

2. What was your scariest nightmare about?

The dreams where I see people I know, but then they smile or say something and I know it’s not really them and whatever it is that is pretending to be them knows that I know it too.

Give me the creeps every single time, enough to where I will turn the light on when I wake up.

3. What food do you crave most often?

Excuse me.

I need a moment.

Photo by Jamin Djuang on Pexels.com

4. What’s your grossest bug story?

When I was a teenager my sister had a cat we called, ” The Toad “

One evening we were sitting around watching tv and The Toad was laying on the floor in front of it when all of the sudden his entire body started to ripple- it was like he was a reflection on water- the worst was his face. It was rippling so much and his eyes were squeezed shut but you could see them rolling around behind his lids.

He opened his mouth and two Spiders ran out and after they did he tried to chase them down.

We grabbed him because that was one of those

NO NO NO no way moments that at that exact moment you know that you never want to see again.

Rockroad House

August 31, 2020 / animar64 / Leave a comment

Putting My Feet In The Dirt: #31 You Inspire Me To Inspire You

Photographer Unknown

I’ll close one eye

and then the other

I will walk through your door

with the rusted locks

with reverence and care.

I will glide over your sagging floors with gentle footsteps

so as not to wake whatever is sleeping under them.

I will be careful to not brush up against

your walls covered with dust and cobwebs

I will not disturb the rats and mice that call them home.

You have my word that as I haunt your rooms

and explore the closets, the basement

and be still my heart

as I make way up the dry and creaking stairway to the attic

that I will treat each dark secret, each wicked promise that I find

as if it were my own.

You inspire me Mrs. Parson’s House

the eternal home of the Rockroad Devil’s Wife.

Forever Yours, Verona

August 31, 2020September 2, 2020 / animar64 / Leave a comment

Photographer Unknown

Sometimes she traveled by car, sometimes she traveled by bus a few times she even traveled by air because she liked the little snacks they used to give you after you were settled in for your flight.

Verona’s favorites were the salty almonds.

There were times when Verona had no choice but to walk to the house with the rats in the walls or the apartment with the dishwasher that would start on it’s own – in the middle of the night of course. Once she even had to walk to a house in the middle of the winter where an even more weary traveler then herself took refuge in the upstairs closet to keep warm and died there- as far as I know that traveler is still there.

Verona isn’t there, she moved on after spending a few nights in the kitchen where she sat on a chair with her feet up on the kitchen counter and watched the curtains in the window above the sink sprinkle dust into the sink below it.

If you looked through the window, you would have seen her sitting there eating her salty almonds, a pale figure with no place to rest her bones for longer then a moment or two.

To Verona those moments felt like a month, maybe a few weeks at the most, but the truth is Verona has been visiting countless houses – the abonded ones and the freshly painted ones the ones that seem to have always been there as the world grew and fell around them- for so many years that she has lost count and all of those houses and those roads and the fields have blended together in her mind’s eye to maybe one or two houses and a couple of roads.

She has always been partial to the kitchens and pressed, she could tell you what color they were and what they smelled like. But the rest of the houses and the sheds and the cabins were faceless in her mind’s eye.

One night she woke up and Verona was in a field, standing on the foundations of house that burned down to the ground and took with it everyone inside of it when it finally fell.

The house in the field was just as isolated in life as it was now in death and nobody was there when the fire raged and when the embers cooled and the crows and the eagles and a few stray dogs took away all that was left of the occupants,.

In that quiet field in the middle of nowhere, Verona looked up into the sky and it was full of stars.They looked so bright and they seemed so close that she thought if she reached up she could touch them.

To travel there- over to that pale star, maybe to that one high above her head, her hand reached up to one star after another and she could see, she could almost hear the places she could haunt- roads that slithered and snaked through fields under skies with dying Suns and to small mangled moons slowly crashing into dead oceans on the planets they spun around, to homes full of dust and bones on the sides of mountains buried under ice or bathed in poisonous clouds-.

Closing her eyes, Verona filled her lungs with the night air and as she did she could see it. She would be a shade on the crumbling wall, a face reflected on pools of water a figure drifting across fields of sand under skies gourged with raging storms on world after world.

The cries and laments on these worlds would sound different. The skies would look different- even the air would smell different and the sorrow was bound to taste different

and there would be an eternity of these worlds to haunt.

An eternity.