The Unsolved Diaries: People Talk About Their Life’s Lingering Mysteries

Credit: freepik

Living with Grandpa’s Pranks

Back in 2007 my grandpa finally lost his 20-year battle with Leukemia. My grandma couldn’t manage well, being alone in the house they’d lived in for almost 60 years.

We moved my grandma into an assisted living residence a few months later, and for insurance reasons (vacant property) my parents asked me if I’d like to move into the house so that I could watch the house, and also to move out and not live at home. I said absolutely.

I remember right after he passed away, strange things started happening. The portrait we had of him in the living room fell off its hook. Picture frames containing pictures of him flipped onto their front during the night. I didn’t mind though because I thought my grandma was making it up.

Before I moved in, my family got a big dumpster so we could clean some of the clutter out of the house. Since we’d spend most of the day cleaning and it was summer, we’d bring the family dog with us. My grandpa loved our dog dearly. But since he passed, my dog wouldn’t go down to the basement anymore, where my grandpa spent most of his time in his office. She refused to go into the basement at all and barked at the stairway a few times.

This was weird since our dog almost never barked. It finally made me think “he’s here”. I moved in shortly after. While I lived there, things went missing all the time. I had bought a new lockset to change the backdoor lock, brought it home and put it in the cupboard to tackle on the weekend. A few days later I go to change the lock, and it’s gone. After a week of looking around, I finally found it in the trunk of my uncle’s old BMW 2002 which he stored in the garage (I happened to be looking at the car). My grandpa was always a prankster, so I almost came to expect these occurrences.

He used to wake up at 530 every morning to listen to the early news on the radio in the kitchen. I’d wake up some mornings and the radio would be on. I often heard typewriter noises coming from his office in the basement. It became comforting. I found myself talking to my grandpa out loud. Having conversations with him. I missed him. After about 6 months, suddenly I wasn’t hearing any noises anymore. Nothing was going missing. The radio wasn’t turning on at 530.

I shrugged it off for a few days, but it started to worry me. I went back to my parents and grabbed the dog, brought her back. She was apprehensive at first, but she entered the house. There was an issue though. Every time she’d been over since my grandpa died, as I mentioned earlier, she refused to go downstairs. This time though, she went downstairs and went right to his office. Nothing was any different about the office, but she wasn’t barking. She wasn’t pacing. She wasn’t doing anything.

That was when I realized he was gone. I broke down. Suddenly I felt incredibly alone. Even though it’d been about 8 months since he died, it was the first time I felt like he was gone.