Dear friends: My memoirs are nearly finished. I'd like to share with you this childhood memory from the early thirties.

One afternoon in South Boston, MA, during 1933, when eight years old, I rushed home in panic, screaming and trembling. I couldn't speak to answer my mother's questions and sobbed and sobbed from terrible fright. Slowly, I told mom how I went to the abandoned house across the street, on the East Ninth Street side, and climbed the porch stairs to peek inside through a broken glass panel.

Between sobs, I described the interior hall covered with eerie looking cobwebs, the stairway leading upstairs, the closed door to the right and the corridor that ran on the left into the darkness. The long electric cord hanging from the ceiling ended at an empty socket with no shade. Just inside the open window, there was a weight of lead about eight inches long, attached to a rope. Other houses had them, so I knew they helped close the door after opening. The weight swung from its pulley. Easy to reach, I pushed it out from the wall letting it fall back with a noisy crash. While watching the interior, I pushed the weight repeatedly increasing the deafening sound. Suddenly, four unsteady, wrinkled fingers appeared at the bottom of the closed door slowly pushing it open. A bearded man lying on the floor stared at me with scary eyes.

Shivering, I again screamed loudly "I saw a ghost." I couldn't be calmed. Mom and dad hugged me saying "Jacky that was a homeless man sleeping in the deserted house, there are no ghosts."

My panic and fright lessened, but I avoided that side of the street and the abandoned house for weeks just in case mom and dad were wrong.

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