Hare -de- Har Har Ghost

Speaking of me bringing home unwanted pets as a boy, one time a woman who lived about three blocks from us offered me a one day job of cleaning up her yard and animal cages. As payment she said she would give me a bunny.

I think I was between 8 and 10 years old. I got up early one Saturday morning and left. My parents knew I was someplace in the neighborhood and did not worry about me. I would show up when I show up.

I worked hard all day, hosing down rabbit cages and scrubbing them, moving old rotted wood from collapsed cages over to the vacant lot behind their house. And many other little jobs she told me to do one at a time.

There was a heavy set man and I think he was in a wheelchair on the front porch. He kept wanting to talk and each time I sat down to talk to him the woman would put me to work.

Across the street a one-arm man lived. He drove a jeep. I have also seen him play on the softball league. He didn’t let being handicapped stand in his way. He was one of the best sluggers and outfielders on the team. Not that that had anything to do with this narration – I am just pulled it from my memory as I was thinking about that street.

Next door was a girl visiting her grandparents about my age. On my lunch break the girl told me the empty house with the yard all grown up, two houses away was haunted. We went inside and looked around. Old furniture, covered, old portraits on the wall, and an organ or a piano certainly gave the atmosphere of it being haunted – but I saw no proof except it looked like it should be.

At the end of the day the woman kept her promise and let me pick out a young rabbit. I carried it home and slipped it into my room. Not knowing how my parents would react if I brought home a little rabbit, so I thought I would hide it a while.

I couldn’t figure out where to hide it. I let it stay in bed with me.

The next morning my mother opened my bedroom door to tell me breakfast was ready. She screamed. There was a hare in her son’s bed!

Then, I had to explain myself. Somehow we knew somebody with a cage and we borrowed it and I put the rabbit in the back yard.

In time we bought another rabbit and put it in the cage also. In time one of them, I forgot which one, had little pink hairless rabbits. They were all dead. After that, I forgot whatever happened to the rabbits.

Fast Forward: About 1995 or 1996, one of the Williamson Brothers of Williamson Brothers Barbecue opened up a seafood and catfish restaurant. It was in the same house that the little girl my age and I went into looking for ghosts.

We ate there a few times before it became a catering service for Williamson Brothers Barbecue.

The first time we ate there we overheard one of the waitresses talk about the house being haunted. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I told them about ghost hunting in that same house about 45 years ago with a little girl who was visiting her grandmother.

They were surprised. They told me only about an hour or so ago a lady was in there who was telling them she came to visit her grandmother one time and she and a little boy about her age thought the house was haunted and looked for ghosts.

Roughly 394,000 hours passed since we saw each other last in that house and we miss each other by one or two hours. Somebody up there is playing His Fate & Destiny games.