A year before grandma died (1988), my Dad took me on a day-long trip to see the area where his family was from. It was a small, country town, and they lived in a very small farmhouse that was far away from the town, in a rural area. The house was abandoned at that time. Dad seemed uncomfortable, and did not want to go near the house, so we only looked at it from where we stood on the road. Dad told me that it was a two-story house, but it didn’t look that way because the upstairs was just one very large room built into the attic. When he was a boy, his bedroom was in this large, upstairs room, and the others in the family had rooms downstairs.
In the months before she died (1989), our grandmother told my sister and I a very curious story about our Dad and that house. One night, when my father was about eight years old (1951), there was a very severe thunderstorm, with thunder and lightning. Dad was sleeping in his room upstairs, and he had a very bad nightmare. He woke up screaming, and he ran downstairs and woke everyone up. After that, he refused to go back upstairs to his room. He wouldn’t say why, or what happened, except he only said, “It’s the most terrible thing!” He was just too young and scared to explain. So after that incident, my grandparents let him change rooms with his sister. They lived there until the mid-1950’s, and then moved to another house in town.
Many years after that incident (1965), my Dad was drafted into the army, and he served overseas. During that time, my grandmother read a story in the newspaper about a young couple who was then living in the same house that they used to live in, out in the country. She clipped the story out of the newspaper and mailed it to my Dad. The newspaper story described how this couple had a violent fight in the bedroom of their home, which was the large, upstairs room that used to be Dad’s bedroom. The husband chased the wife all around the large room and slashed her with an old-type straight-razor, until she finally died from blood loss. There was blood splattered all over the room. Since it was in a very rural area, no one could hear her screaming. My Dad wrote back to my grandmother, saying that it was exactly as in the dream he had when he was eight years old.