The Minnesota Farm Woman

When I was a young teenager, my family moved to my mother’s dream house. This was a house that was uninhabited for  years, and for the kids of the neighborhood, it was known as “the ghost house”. We would watch the attic window carefully, certain that the curtains moved every once in a while. If we stared at it long enough, it would seem that they would.  We shivered with the feeling that someone was watching us. The house was built by George and Agnes Herreid sometime around 1918, if my memory serves me right. George was a Minnesota state representative and businessman. He died in the 1950’s, and Agnes lived in the house until the early 1960’s. The house was then empty until 1971 when we moved in.  Moving to the ghost house took some degree of bravery on my part. Not wanting to share a room with my sister, I chose to put my bed in the attic, and although there were no ghosts peering out the windows, there were occasionally a few bats in the attic. They didn’t bother me too much, as they weren’t there all the time, but I do remember one scary fall evening when one got loose in the house when my parents had gone out to dinner. My sister and I, believing that the bats would entangle themselves in our hair, wrapped towels around our heads and ran screaming to Mr. Kozisek’s house for help. She was wielding a mop and I had a broom, and we waved them above our heads as we ran down the street. I’m sure we were quite a sight to see.  The house may have had no ghosts,  but there were a few spirits there, for sure. Shortly after we moved in, my dad was checking out the wiring in the basement and discovered a stash of whiskey bottles in the rafters. They were located in the room where coal had once been stored for heating. Since George was a pillar of society and some of the bottles dated to prohibition times, I’m sure he kept the house toasty warm by putting coal in the furnace several times a day. Minnesota can be quite chilly, after all.  When Dad died and we were all home for the funeral, my daughter, who was sleeping on a mattress on the floor came to breakfast one morning and said that during the night birds were flying around her room. My sister and I looked at each other in horror, remembering the bats of our childhood. Mr. Kozisek no longer lived in the neighborhood to rescue us, but thank goodness we had husbands to take care of the problem.

Another family now lives in the house. The attic has been fixed so bats can no longer get in. The whiskey bottles have been collected, and I display one to this day in my own home. For some strange reason, though, every time I pass by the house I become ten years old again, and look up at the attic window to see if the curtains move. If I stare at it long enough, it seems that they do.