My ghost story

I'll go to my grave believing I saw a ghost.

On the farm I grew up on southwest of Canton, our newer house and my grandparents homestead were separated by a grove a spruce trees. In my high school years I moved from a bedroom upstairs to one of the coolest rooms in the basement a kid could ever have. Dad built it. One wall was peg board. Another wall was cork board. All walls were covered with sports photos I'd cut out of Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, Viking Report, etc. Only a poster of Farrah Fawcett in a swimsuit indicated I might have an interest in something other than sports.

My room sat at the far end of the basement from the stairs. Lying in bed, if my door was open, I could see down the hall to the stairs. On the other side of the basement was a family room with a fireplace, a small library and another room with a pool/ping pong table.

This has nothing to do with the ghost story, but Dad made the ceiling of my room out of sheets of styrofoam to cover up the floor joists (is that what they're called?). That was all well and good until the mice started running around up there. The tick, tick, tick of little feet above me while trying to go to sleep added to the ambiance. Even better was when they started chewing and clawing at it and through it. Scratch, scratch, scratch. One day I came home from school and there was a hole in my ceiling and a pile of styrofoam crumbs on my bed. You think you have trouble sleeping? Try doing it waiting for mice to fall on your face.

So one night, guessing freshman or sophomore year, I finally fell asleep with visions of Farrah or Tommy Kramer in my head. My faithful cocker spaniel, Buffy, was curled up beside me. I was awakened about 3 a.m. by my dog's growling. That'd never happened before. I sat straight up in bed, wide awake, and watched this white shadowy figure flow from the bottom of the stairs, down the hall toward me, before stopping at the foot of my bed.

Buffy stopped growling but was tight against me watching the show. I rubbed my eyes a couple times like you'd see Scooby and Shaggy do when they saw a ghost.

The figure was female, old, but not frightening. If anything, she was calming, friendly, protective. Oddly enough, I wasn't frightened. I felt like somebody was checking on me. She stood there for a few seconds looking at me, then calmly turned and floated away.

The next day I asked my parents if they'd come downstairs for some reason. They hadn't. And if they had, there would be no reason for the dog to growl.

The image kind of reminded me of my grandmother, Lydia, but she was still alive and unlikely to be wandering through the evergreen trees and into our house at 3 a.m. So I'm kind of left to believe that maybe it was her mother, or my grandpa's mother.

I don't think it's crazy to think there are spirits or ghosts among us. (But then again, crazy people don't general recognize they are crazy. Maybe I am.) But, heck, if you're a Christian you pretty much have to believe in that stuff. Don't you? So a friendly ghost it was, and I'd pass that lie detector test.

I have other stories, but this one makes me seem less crazy, so I'll stick with just it for now.

A home for the birds and the Haugens

My grandpa, Edwin Haugen, grew up on a farm by Menno. We called him Pa.

Pa and Ma moved to Sioux Falls when my dad was a senior in high school (Washington). Pa worked at Old Home Bread until retirement, where he then worked as the maintenance man for three apartment buildings on Spring Ave.

During retirement Pa had a workshop where he was always working on projects. I never paid too much attention to them as a kid because he was one of the first people I knew who had cable television, which interested me more. I'd stay over at his house and watch all-star wrestling late at night and eat sardines.

One of the things Pa built was birdhouses. This one in particular was a replica of the house he grew up in. He must have built it 40-45 years ago. My dad then had it on a post by his garden on the farm by Canton.

When Dad died, it was one of the few things I took, in retrospect not even really sure why. It's been in my garden for fourteen years as the home to more wasps than birds. It started looking pretty rough a couple years ago, but just now decided to bring it in the garage with hopes of making it my winter project to fix up.

Trouble is, I'm not much of a fixer-upper, don't have the tools or the aptitude. My grandpa did, my dad did, but I don't. Somehow that gene got lost on a gravel road between Menno and Canton.

As I took the roof off and looked inside, I was surprised at the detail. There are working doors on hinges, with doorknobs. There's trim around the windows and doors, inside and out. There were even curtains on the windows, but they've since rotted away. There's also a small porch with a roof you can see on the bottom photo.

My goal is to mostly just clean it up and repaint it. But it's going to need a new roof and that will definitely test my abilities and patience.

Stay tuned. If you never see a post on the finished project, you'll know how the story ended.

New Prince CD eases the pain

Picked up the new Prince CD last weekend and listened to it on the way home from Champaign last weekend.

Other than listening to Prince when a song came on the radio, my heart just hasn't been ready to listening to his CDs. This was a good segue to getting back into it.

Online reviews have been mixed, but I enjoyed it. It's pretty mellow, just his voice and awesome piano playing. It's a little rough, not mixed. So it's kind of an intimate CD. Was kind of hard to listen to on the interstate, with all the outside noise and all, but it is much better with headphones.

People are always going to get upset about which songs his estate chooses to release, but I was fine with this. Someone suggested letting Wendy and Lisa pick the songs and mix them to Prince's standards, and I like that idea.

Either way, I'll listen to whatever they put out from Prince even though I'll always listen with the thought of what might have been.