My family and ghosts: a retrospective

I grew up in a very sceptical enviroment, meaning that neither my mom and dad believed in the paranormal, in fact, they actively rejected the idea of any kind of non-tangible spiritual stuff and refused to feed my curiosity about the supernatural while growing up, even if I was just playing ghost-hunters, or investigating "ghosts" that haunted my school (they were all vague cliche-y urban legends made by older students to scare us). And then, there was my grandmother.

My grandma has always stood out for all the wrong reasons, I won't go into heavy detail, but my deceased grandpa was also very sceptic and used to mock my grandma whenever she would mention anything related to the paranormal, religion or the spirit world, not maliciously, but more in a "I want you to be reasonable and stop believing in shit you can't see or touch". With that, she was the only believer in my close family.

She would (and still does sometimes) tell my sister and I stories about how she used to do tarot readings in her young adulthood and played with ouija boards, though now she is totally against ouija, even one time she smacked me for playing it, saying it was a very dangerous thing to do, but I digress. This stories led me to ask my mom about her experiences growing up with my grandma, and, to her dislike, she admited to have experienced paranormal events herself.

This was a shock for both me and my sister, having grown up with my mother, the second most most sceptical person in the world (first is my father), constantly denying the existence of the supernatural and rejecting every single type of conversation related to it. Which made me wonder if my mom and grandpa were active refuters of the paranormal because of some kind of trauma related to my grandma's doing when she was into spiritism.

I remember a few stories that my mom told us, though she insistenly tried to push away the topic forever once she was finished.

One of them was related to an old house where she spent her childhood in, a house where I spent only the first years of my childhood and barely remember anything about it other than a strong eerie energy and very dark rooms. There, my mom grew up along her younger sister, her father, her mother and her grandmother (she was a whole other thing I will talk about in the future, probably one of the weirdest people I got to meet during my childhood, she passed when I was very young). 

My mom used to sleep in the same room as her sister, two individual beds side by side, even if it was a big house, they prefered to be by each-other's side while sleeping (my aunt has told me multiple times that she felt uneasy sleeping in that house). One night, her sister, being a little kid trying to sleep in the creepiest house I've ever walked my ass into, asked my mom to hold her hand while they closed their eyes to try to fall asleep, saying she was "afraid". So my mom reached her hand to the side where my aunt's bed was and her sister did the same, and they held hands for a while, until my aunt complained about my mom squeezing her too hard, to which my mom answered that she had stopped squeezing her hand a while ago. My aunt, in shock, opened her eyes and looked at her hand, empty, and most importantly, realized that the distance between the two beds was too big for the sisters to even had held each other's hands to begin with.

Both my mom and aunt swore to me and my sister that, that night, they felt a hand squeezing them. Whenever they tell the story, my grandma swipes away the possibility of it being some kind of ghost that haunted the house, and insist that it was probably one of my ancestor's spirit trying to comfort the sisters, who felt uneasy and scared sleeping there. However, both my mom and aunt retell the experience with fear and confusion in their eyes, and my mother is a hardcore denier of any kind of supernatural event going on there, she rather refers to it as a weird thing that happened to her that was probably due to them being half asleep and autosuggested.

It's just weird to me that my grandma has always been pictured as this "crazy bruja" by a big part of my family just because she believes in the supernatural, it makes me think that more stuff has happened involving her and the paranormal that may have left mom, auntie, grandpa and dad in shock.