Ghosts Along the Mississippi, Haunted Odyssey II
By Jim Longo
Copyright ©1993 Jim Longo

"The lady down the road has had things happen too. She kept seeing something in her house, and it was a new house. She got some other people up there and they saw it too. It was a young Confederate boy that was all alone and seemed lost. All he would say was that he was looking for his mother. The woman finally got a priest to bless the house and nobody has seen that boy since. But that house is right where the old road used to be where my daddy saw the woman crying.

"We’ve never seen the boy, but we have seen a woman in blue over there. The lady who owns the house has seen her three different times. We don’t know who she is, or what to believe. But I do believe my daddy above all men on earth and know that he once saw a crying woman on that road where that house now stands.

"And it’s not just the men and boys in the family who experience these kinds of things. My daughter started working part time for the veterinarian. She’s so kind to animals. Somebody brought a dog in that had really been abused. It was so sick that the people just dumped it off and said to put it to sleep or do whatever the doctor wanted to do with it. Well, the doctor and my daughter decided to try to save it. She just fell in love with the dog. She took it out and tried to walk it each day. She gave it as much attention all day, every day, as she could. But it was so sick.

"She told me all about the dog. Then early one morning, she called because she knew I’d be up. She said that when she was sleeping, she’d felt something at her feet between her and her husband. She kept fumbling around and feeling with her feet until she finally lifted the cover up and found that dog in bed with her. She was half asleep and didn’t think too much about the fact that the dog didn’t belong in bed, or even in her house. Then she began to doze off, but woke up with a start. She thought, what was that dog doing in her bed?

"When she looked, it was gone. So she got up out of bed and searched every corner of her house. She figured she must have been dreaming. But she was up anyway, and called me before she to work to tell me about her dream. About an hour later, she called me again. She said that when she got to work, she told the doctor she was going back to see the dog. The doctor told her. ‘It hadn’t been dead too long.’ He told her the body was still warm when he got to work that morning.

"I just told her. ‘Sarah, you were the only person that ever loved that dog. It just had to come and tell you good bye.’"

Before we left Helena, Mr. Harcourt shared some parting thoughts about his stories, and stories like them.

"I’m sure you’ve read about Jung. He was a world famous psychologist and friend of Sigmund Freud., In time, he came to believe in spirits; all kinds of spirits. There are times when we feel a presence, when we know we are not alone, whether we see anything or not. I have seen things, maybe for just a second or two, and sometimes it gets us thinking. Something flits in. Something flits out. Maybe it’s our imagination. Maybe it’s not. But there are some connections here. More connections than we realize. Maybe our job is to figure out just what these connections really mean."