Ann's tourquise-blue eyes peeked out from underneath a pair of dark-tinted glasses. It had been so long since she last saw her friend Casey.
"Hey, you aren't wearing the blindfolds anymore." Casey exclaimed with surprise.
"Yeah, my eyes are a lot less sensitive than they were before."
"It's hard to believe that it's been a year since I saw you last time. "
"I think I remember that. You visited me in the hospital, didn't you?"
"Uhhuh, I came as soon as I heard about your car accident."
"Oh! Anyway, what are you doing here?"
"My dad got transferred back here, we are moving into the old house down the road," Casey announced with a smile.
"Cool, gosh I've missed you so much!"
The girls hug, the bond that they’d had two years ago hadn't faded.
Casey invited Ann to spend the night, talk, and help her unpack her things.
They had so much catching up to do and this way they could do two things at once.
"Hey, great idea. Let's go talk to my mom."
Twenty minutes later, the girls were at Casey's house, the old Devillaforte Mansion. The gray paint was showing signs of peeling on the old wood boards of the once beautiful Victorian house.
As Ann stepped onto the front porch, she wasn't sure whether she had shivered from excitement, cold, or an unconscious fear.
The girls placed their coats in the entry closet, and proceeded up the ancient curved stairwell to Casey's room, second door on the left. The room was filled with boxes, all sizes and shapes. There were only two pieces of furniture in the room, the bed and a chest of drawers. The room smelled of Pine Sol, but still felt cob-webby.
Ann dropped her sleeping bag on the newly polished oak floor.
They set themselves to work at the task of unloading the boxes. They thought they would tackle the smaller boxes first, and work their way to the larger boxes.
Casey's father had gone to the trouble of identifying the contents of each box, to save time. They soon developed a strategy as to which of the smaller boxes to unpack first.
"Hey Ann, could you hand me the box labeled "pajamas'?"
"Pajamas...okay. I saw them around here someplace. "
After five minutes of thoroughly checking the labels on all of the boxes, they could not find the box labeled "pajamas". Ann knew that she had seen that box just a few minutes ago. They decided to check in the moving van to make sure that it wasn't overlooked when the van was unloaded. The box was no where to be found. They even asked Casey's dad where the box could have been put. Finally, after a half-hour of searching, they returned to Casey's room, only to find the missing box sitting smack-dab in the middle of the room.
"I knew that it wasn't here when we checked." A baffled Ann exclaimed.
"Yeah, we would have seen it."
The two girls decided to take a break from searching and unpacking and just talk.
Casey started telling Ann about what her life had been like back where she had lived for two years.
Ann talked about how much her life had changed since her car accident.
The most drastic changes were her light-sensitive eyes and the "visions" she has had.
The "visions" started out to be about things that were from her childhood. Her first house, that she lived in only until she was three, was a common sight.
Then she started having visions of people and places she had never seen before. A day or two days later, the vision would come true. At first these visions would startle Ann, but eventually she even got used to them.
In the middle of telling Casey about her experiences, Ann shivered.
"Are you cold?" Casey asked.
"Yea, but I don't know why."
Ann scanned the room, and spotted that the window was open. "Hey, did you leave the window open?"
"I thought I closed it before we went looking for my pajama box," Casey replied.
"Well, it's open now."
"Oh, I'll go close it." Casey closed the window and locked it down. The girls went back to talking.
Casey got up and told Ann that she was going to the bathroom. When she came back into the room, she turned the light down and left the door open.
Again, they resumed talking.
"Wok" the door swung shut with a thud.
Ann and Casey investigated; but there was no one there, and the only other people in the house were her parents.
After a rough evening the girls decided to go to sleep. They shut off the light and Casey got into her bed. Ann crawled into her sleeping bag. They had just settled in, when the lights flickered on and off.
"That's it Casey, we're holding a seance."
"A what?"
"A seance, a channeling, you know like mediums do."
"Can you do a seance?" Casey wondered out loud.
"I think so, I don't see why it wouldn't work.. It certainly couldn't hurt anything. At least I don't think so."
The girls sat facing each other. After two minuted, Ann went into a trance.
" 'ello, 'ello? Is anybody dere?" A child's voice asks.
A startled Casey asked, "Who are you?"
"I'm Jaimie, 'oo are you?"
"Casey, my name is Casey. What are you doing here? What do you want?"
"I, I, I, " the voice stammered with a slight sigh.
Ann's head dropped to her chest. Casey checked to see if she was okay. It seemed like Ann was sleeping. Casey covered her up with a blanket and tried to go to sleep. When Casey woke up, Ann was laying awake in her sleeping bag.
"We need to find out who Jaimie is," Ann said in a quiet voice.
"We have a library with lots of books here in the house, books that the former owner left behind."
"Are there any other libraries in this neighborhood?" Ann quietly asked.
"Yea, the County Library."
"Let's go!" Ann seemed to snap out of the trance.
They looked through the house library and found a Family Register.
There was the name Jaimie McCallum in it, along with the date that she was born: June 10, 1820, and that she died on March 20, 1925. The only thing that it didn't say was how she had died. All that Ann knew was that was the girl that she saw in her trance.
At the County Library, they found Jaimie's obituary, she had drowned in the river in back of the house.
Ann decided that she and Casey would hold another seance that night. Maybe they could convince Jaimie to leave the house alone.
That night they sat down facing each other. Ann went into a trance.
"Jaimie, are you there?" Casey asked Ann.
" "ello? " Jaimie asked through Ann.
"Are you the one that is playing all these tricks on us?"
"Wellll, yeah I guess, but I have a good reason."
"And what's that?" Casey asked.
"You’re taking over my house, and I don't got no where else to be."
"Well, why are you still here, anyway?
"Like I said, I don't got no where else to be. 'Specially since I fell in the river back of the house."
"Do you even know where you are?" Casey continued to push for answers.
"All I know is, this is my house, and there is a lot of bright lights."
"Bright lights? But the lights are turned off. Are the lights nice and are they warm? Or do they scare you?"
"They're warm."
"Well, then walk toward them." Casey suggested.
"Okay. Bye Casey."
"Bye Jaimie."
A minute or two later, Ann started to come out of her trance.
Casey's folks never had any other odd incidents happen while they lived there.
Ann learned that she had many gifts.
This was always one of her favorite stories to tell.
