I’m not sure if this is a ghost story, not sure what it is, but it’s eerie and has “haunted” me for over 10 years. I’ve blogged about the different parts of this before, here and here, but have included both experiences in this one blog because I’ve always felt they were linked.
Anyway, in the last few years of my mother’s life, a marked coldness started dominating her bedroom—much more than the rest of the house. I had to buy her an electric mattress cover so she didn’t freeze at night and not have to turn the heating up until I myself was suffocating and sleeping without covers even in the coldest weather. The chill in Mom’s room was so intense and pervasive it stretched for about five feet outside of her bedroom door into a small adjoining den. Walking through the den towards her door I would hit a well-demarcated wall of icy air. Just wham! Normal temperature, then icy temperature.
Being a weird but mostly rational human being, I searched for possible sources of the chill, tried taping over even the most minor air leaks, had the heating company check the vents, but none of us could find anything to explain it. And to test the existence of this wall of cold, I had my friends walk through the den (without telling them what to expect) to see if I was imagining it, but they felt it, too. Even the skeptical one.
The day my mother died I brought her home for hospice to that bedroom. She arrived at noon and was gone by about eight that night. She was very ready to go. Two remarkable things happened after she died. First, five to ten minutes after she passed, our cat (who had not gone into her room once the cold stuff started happening at least a couple of years previously) came to the foot of her hospital bed and started rolling around, showing her belly and acting coy as she did when my mother talked baby talk to her. The second thing, which I didn’t notice until the next day: the cold had completely disappeared. No wall of ice emanating from her door, the bedroom the same temperature as the rest of the house. And it has never returned since, over ten years on (her ten year death anniversary was January 22), even in the coldest parts of winter (which in L.A. is a relative thing, but you catch my drift).
What haunts me is wondering what caused this.
Mom had two incidents of possible near-death experience in her later years and I’ve often wondered if they were related. There was the time in her late eighties when she got a severe blood infection and almost died. She told me that one night she woke up in the hospital and three shadowy figures stood in the corner. They didn’t speak aloud, she said, but in her mind. They told her that if she wanted to leave this life she could go, but it was up to her. She told them she wasn’t ready, and they said she could stay but things would get much harder from that point on. She survived, and things did get much harder. Maybe a year after this incident, her shaky kidneys finally failed and she had to start dialysis. Less than a year after that, she had a stroke. We were lucky in that it didn’t affect her mind, nor was she paralyzed in any way, but it severely affected her vision (kind of like macular degeneration but not exactly) and her sense of balance. She had to go into rehab for three months and came out of it with her fighting spirit intact.
She confessed to me, though, that those three shadowy figures visited her in the rehab center and offered her the same deal. Again, she refused, and again they said things would get much harder. And they did.
I keep wondering if the shadowy figures showed up that last time? She was in a coma and not talking so I’ll never know. Were they present those years when it was so cold in that room? Sightings of the Grim Reaper, et al., are often accompanied by an intense feeling of cold. But the cat being so coy after she passed makes me think there was nothing evil or malicious hanging around. I still live in the same house and although weird things do happen here I’ve rarely had any activity I would call malicious. Again, I doubt I’ll get answers to any of this, just more questions and speculation.
