Haunted House (part 4) NF

My oldest brother, Lennie, was eaten by a bed once. My parents lost him one day when he was an infant. How hard can it be to find a baby? Several hours later he was found pinched between a bed and a wall. He had rolled over and fallen off the side of the bed into a space between the edge of the bed and the wall. The bed then somehow as if by its own will moved close enough to the wall to hold him in place, just tight enough to keep from crushing him, in a position where he couldn’t scream, but still wouldn’t suffocate. He ‘survived’ until the day he had an unexpected appointment with a guardrail and the guardrail was the more convincing. He left four young kids behind. The house was two for two, IF you believe an inanimate object could have such power.

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     My “one armed” sister, Della, seemingly couldn’t escape the spells of the house either. There was a long staircase with a dark brownish-red mahogany banister between the two floors of the house. It was a sliding kind of banister with coils at the top and the bottom. The slider straddled the banister as if he or she were riding a horse. Then a few scoots backward, a sharp left, another foot or so and then another sharp left, and then down he or she went.

“Whee!!”

 The banister threw Della off once. Fell off? No, she was thrown off. My mom said she saw the banister ‘fling’ her off, much like when flipping a spider off your arm after it landed there by accident. Della broke her arm on the fall. None of us ever slid down the banister again. Many years later Della, suffering from depression and the evils she imbibed to fight it, burned to death in a fire while sitting in her own tormented house, perhaps a ‘relative’ of the one she had grown up in. The house was three for three if…well, I don’t know.