A Fitting Farewell - Part Two

by Hattie Dyck

Continued From: Barbara Simms, Crowe’s Mills

   Many years earlier, In the fall of 1973 Barb and Ed rented the main floor apartment of an old house in Debert. This house is said to have been an Inn during World War 11 when Debert was a booming little village. They had a puppy named Boots who would act really strange sometimes. She would start to run into the living

room, then stop dead in her tracks, staring up high at the air in the middle of the room. She would often cower and walk around the edge of the room until she came close to one of her owners and then would hide behind their legs. All the while she wouldn’t take her eyes off the centre of the room. This happened frequently during the evening.

   In the same apartment early one rainy evening, Barb was folding clothes and watching television in the living room. Ed was not home and the two children were in bed. The door and stairs to the other second storey apartment were on the other side of the wall behind the chesterfield she was sitting on as she folded the clothes.

   She knew the apartment upstairs was empty because the tenants had moved out the week before. So, when she heard the outside door open and heavy footsteps go up the stairs she immediately thought it was her landlord. She got up and looked out the window expecting to see his car in the driveway but the car was nowhere in sight. She then became concerned and called him thinking that someone had entered the house illegally.

   It only took the landlord about five minutes to come over, but all that time she was listening to the footsteps which sounded like they were coming from a large man. When the landlord arrived she went out to warn him that a noisy someone was roaming around his upstairs apartment. To the surprise of both of them the

outside door was locked. When the landlord unlocked it and looked inside he didn’t see any wet footsteps although it was raining hard outside. Both Barb and the landlord went upstairs, calling to the person they thought was there, but no one was.   

  There was no other exit to the two storey building so it was and is a mystery to this day who the noisy intruder could have been.

  Another mystery happened in that Debert apartment. One morning Barb had just finished cleaning up her kitchen and had put a vase of fresh flowers in the middle of the top of her refrigerator, which was beside the bathroom door. Later that

afternoon a local handyman came to do a few repairs on the bathroom. When he finished and both he and Barb were about to walk out of the bathroom the vase of flowers suddenly left the top of the fridge and came flying across the doorway. The vase  smashed violently against the wall and the glass and flowers flew in many different directions. Both stood there in amazement as the vase didn’t fall straight down, it flew across the room and landed a good six feet from its former sitting place. There was no logical explanation for this phenomenon.

  More recently, the couple also experienced a very unusual happening of déjà vu.

  One November evening (she can’t remember the year) they went to see the movie “Step Mom” starring Julia Roberts. They sat in the back row of the theatre on the left when the theatre was located on Prince St. in Truro. They really enjoyed the movie and often spoke about it. About a year later she saw ads for the “new movie” Step Mom with Julia Roberts. Barb said that confused her and she called the theatre and was assured the movie had never been there before. She has no idea how she and Ed could have seen it the year before if it hadn’t been there. So, they went again and enjoyed it a second time knowing every move that was going to happen.

  Barb is not afraid of the unknown. She believes some persons have the ability to benefit from it.