Thirty Years With A Mess From Elsewhere

Here's the story of the strange disturbance that trolled my mother for several decades (ref. this post). To make it as short and accurate as i can, i will keep to the few happenings i was actually witness to myself: her experiences are just briefly summarized. Even so, this is rather long-winded. But then, the glitch did take almost thirty years to fully unfold.

...

The Braid And The Sleigh

My mother was a vet, and in 1982 she bought an old farm to start breeding horses. The place was old and littered: rusting farm equipment in the woods, garbage buried in the fields, all kinds of crap abandoned in outbuildings and cellars.

 

We spent a long summer hauling junk to the landfill, the barn was converted into stables, and my father basically tore down and rebuilt the house to make it livable.

 

In the barn we found an antique horse sleigh - a classic 19th-century "Ladies Sleigh". It was in poor condition, but my father loved it and made it his hobby to restore it.

 

A few months after we moved in, my mother started telling us about weird going-ons in her stable. Things would move to a different spot than she remembered it during the night, doors would be ajar and so on. Stuff that could have been expained away easily if we had not lived in the middle of nowhere and it didn't happen every single night. Apparently, it had been going on from Day 1, but she had taken her time looking for mundane causes, convincing herself she wasn't crazy.

 

We didn't take it seriously of course. Then she started on how the mane on one particular horse was mysteriously braided when she came to work in the mornings. We laughed it off, but after a while she started getting mad about it, so one day we came with her to see. Sure enough, it was braided. A long elaborate braid about as thick as my little finger.

 

We accused her of doing it herself, which pissed her off. My father backed off but i made fun of her for weeks, like only a self-important, snotty teen can do.

 

One day she had had enough. She dragged me off to town, where we bought two padlocks. That night she told me to follow her out and examine the horse in question, then had me bolt all windows from the inside, then put the padlocks on the stable doors. You never lock animal buildings but mom was seriously fed up, so i did, and i slept with the keys under my pillow.

 

Early next morning we all went out with her, and i unlocked the doors again. The mane was braided.

 

A few days before Christmas of 1985 my father's Big Sleigh Restoration Project was complete: the thing looked brand new. He was dying to try it out with us so we grabbed a horse, piled into the sleigh, and went off on a timber road into the woods on the sort of Christmas hijinks that looks wonderful in movies but is cold and uncomfortable as hell in reality. He'd even got jingle bells for the harness to top off the cliche.

 

It was dark, we got up to speed, and some ways in we took a curve too fast: the sleigh capsized and a pole broke free. A leather strap that secured a big metal bolt had snapped (a bolt locks each pole to the harness: in case of an accident the bolts pop and drops the sleigh). The bolt was gone, so to get back we had to lead the horse and pull one pole ourselves. It took hours; slow going in heavy snow.

...

Stable Stalker

My mother's business soon outgrew the farm; the land was mostly forest and she needed meadows and fields, so a couple of years later they put it on the market. It sold a little too quick and they ended up living in an apartment for a year or so while she operated out of a rental stable. Then she found her Dream Farm. The nightly disturbance tagged along, messing around in the stables through both moves. I had my own place by this time.

 

It never got particularly creepy - it was always petty stuff - but it never stopped either. Small things moved around or sometimes got misplaced, and that mane was braided more often than not - always the same horse.

 

Whatever it was, it got more prominent with time; my mother started seeing glimpses of it in daytime - just the "corner of your eye" sort at first. We speculated a lot. From little people to poltergeists, it got pretty stupid, but at this point she took it with a measure of humor. And began watching out for it. That never worked. A video camera didn't work either. Nobody else ever saw a thing - until i did. Years later, in 1991.

...

The Shooting Bolt

Another Christmas, and i was visiting for the holidays. When i came out there i always slept on a couch in my fathers office, and across from the couch the harness hung on the wall, one bolt missing. There was another harness in the stables now and a sleigh isn't something you bring out every day, so the bolt was never replaced.

 

On Boxing Day i woke up to my mother yelling. I stumbled out into the kitchen, where my father was making breakfast. The shouting came from the hall; my mother stood there by the open front door, pointing hectically to the doormat outside.

 

On it lay the missing bolt.

 

We lost that thing in deep snow in a forest six years earlier, in a different county. There was fresh snow this morning too and the road up to the house was undisturbed: the bolt simply had no business being there. My father picked it up, went straight to his office and plugged it into it's hole.

 

How do we know it was the same one? It was identical to the other one, and half of the leather strap was still tied to it. The other half was still tied to the harness and matched perfectly.

 

A few hours later i was back in there to pack; it was time to go home. I was stuffing a bag and happened to glance up at the harness. Right then, that damned bolt suddenly shot out of it and landed in front of my feet. It flew maybe three or four meters. My father heard me swearing and came in. I don't actually know if he believed me or not, but with all the other small things always going on it was never really brought up. He just plugged the bolt back in and tied it down.

 

More years went by. My mother often saw it now and sometimes tried to explain what it looked like but never could, it was fuzzy to her and she just described it as "a mess" - so the Mess became its name.

 

Then one summer in the mid nineties, i was there with my wife and toddler for a few days. We sat on the terrace chatting one morning, when my mother suddenly came marching out of the stables and past us into the house, pale and shaky as hell. I followed to see what was wrong. She just said, "I saw it". I asked what it looked like. She refused to say. Tried again a few times later on, but she got increasingly angry about it, so i stopped. Then the Mess surprised us by leaving.

...

Ice Cream Pigs

My mother often travelled to Horse Shows, and sometime in 96 or 97, she wanted to bring a horse to a show in a different country. It was a long trip, so my parents found accomodations with a local couple that were "horse people" too and had stables close to the event. Let's call them The Ice Cream Pigs (for reasons they might find amusing, should they by some off chance read this one day). They stayed with them for a few days, attended the show, then came home. Afterwards, the Mess was gone.

 

Except it wasn't: the Ice Cream Pigs had it now.

 

My mother had infected the Pig stables with the Mess, and it stayed there. From then on, similar stories started coming from them. Braiding, stuff trading places, the exact same kinds of things. They kept in touch, even visited my parents at some point, and their stories were just as numerous and just as strange. My mother never saw it again.

 

The End, right?
Not quite.

 

Around the Millenium my parents divorced, and my father moved to the city. The divorce was bitter enough that he got petty, so he took everything not nailed down on the farm with him - including the sleigh he once restored. Which did not fit in his apartment so he had to rent a garage space for it, where it gathered dust for years.

 

When he passed away i got the job of sorting out his estate. He left behind all kinds of business crap it was difficult to clear up, so it took me several weeks to notice that the sleigh was missing. My father was not really a horse person. His affection for the sleigh came purely from all the work he had put into it all those years ago, and he would never have thrown it away. He didn't need the money it would have brought and the empty storage space was still being paid for - it was odd.

 

The sleigh would have been a nice thing to return to my mother, so i asked around among his friends and family; nobody knew what i was talking about. It had vanished.

...

Peekaboo

In 2011 my father's cousin called me out of the blue one day to ask about something in my city. I am rarely in contact with the old woman and we had not spoken for ages, so we did the typical who does what now, who got married type of thing. Oh, and did i know she had met the Ice Cream Pigs and had been to visit in their home? Did i know they had my father's sleigh??

 

The Ice Cream Pigs had come to my father before he died and convinced him to let them take it.

 

I decided that, if the Mess wanted the sleigh back that bad, they could keep it. So today, the Ice Cream Pigs has both the Mess and the old ladies sleigh it came from. They are welcome to it.

 

I guess some readers will say this is a ghost story. I disagree: the Mess was a property of the real world that we were unable to interpret, not some magical being. My mother still refuses to tell me what she finally saw, though - and that is 18-19 years ago now.