The Return of the Spooky Stories for Halloween

I love October. I have been waiting for October since early August and, finally, here it is. October means three things to me--my favorite holiday (Halloween), nine nights of utiseta (though the Butcher and I are having our yearly fight about the sage. I say it's no worse than stale bong water and I've had my share of that smell, but he disagrees.), and the return of spooky stories here at Tiny Cat Pants. For those of you who weren't around last October, here's what you missed: The Weird Thing that Happened to Me in Rhode Island, A Ghost Story I Can't Wait to Tell, But Hasn't Happened, Yet, A Freaky Arboreal Thing, The Weird House Next Door to Where We Used to Live, and The Weird House Where We Used to Live. And you missed my thoughts on whether ghosts are real. Anyway, this story isn't spooky so much as just weird and true. As astute readers know, my uncle Bri died this past year. Bri was not a blood relative, but he'd been one of my dad's closest friends, the Other Reverend being the other one. My dad has known them since he was a kid and I've known both of them all my life. I've been thinking of the both of them--Bri and the Other Reverend--since dinner on Thursday, when Sarcastro said something off-hand that really threw me completely out of the conversation--he said that, in his experience, service people who really see shit don't talk about it. Especially in our younger days, we'd repeatedly ask Uncle Bri and the Other Reverend what they did in Viet Nam. Here, in full, are there unwavering answers. Uncle Bri: "I saw a full moon setting over the ocean so large you would not believe it." The Other Reverend: "I had a dog." Anyway, my Uncle Bri died of cancer. But before that, he and his wife had a huge old house in a small town in Michigan. It was freaky weird. The whole upstairs was painted red, for instance, and things always seemed like they weren't the same distance apart from time to time. Bri and his wife were renovating the house. When they were doing something historically accurate--like refurbishing the mural in the dining room or reattatching the wrap-around porch--things seemed to go very easy. When they were doing something historically inaccurate, but necessary to bring the house up to code, things went poorly. Equipment would go missing. Workers would come out of rooms asking why J. had told them to stop what they were doing and she wouldn't even be home. The light fixture in the front room would swing wildly. People who stayed in one bedroom would wake to find a woman sitting on the edge of their bed. Lots of typical stuff like that. Uncle Bri, though, took this all in stride and decided that the easiest thing do was to just get the ghosts to see the importance of renovating the house in order to save it. And so, he'd walk around in the morning, before the workers got there, and explain what they were doing and why they were doing it, figuring that everyone loved the house and wanted to see it preserved. This helped cut down immensely on the nonsense, and the remaining nonsense seemed much more playful in nature, not angry. One of the last things Bri said before he died was "You don't have to stay here. You can come with me. Leave the house to J., she'll take care of it. Don't be afraid. I'll go with you." Since his death, J. says there's been nothing strange in the house.