Marby Noffki

Family stories

September 9, 2008 |  3 comments
Image Credit: sxc.hu I have been very busy these days, researching my family history. It is a project my husband and I began when we were still dating, and due to the fact that it is much harder to retrieve records out of a Communist country from which my family was exiled, I abandoned my efforts about six months ago, only to get into gear again a few weeks ago and throw myself into it with renewed motivation. As I wait for replies to some of the letters I have written regarding both Cuban and Spanish ancestors, some of my older relatives have become more talkative, excited that I am doing the research, and have shared some surprising stories. Several of them have involved ghosts.

One involves my great grandfather, who was orphaned in Mallorca at the age of six. He moved to Cuba with a cruel and abusive aunt who turned him into a little slave, making him do all the difficult work around their farm, the cooking, and sending him out to the well in the dark to fetch heavy buckets of water. When my great grandfather would go out to the well, this aunt, whose name is lost to the family history so far, would fill his head with stories of nasty spirits that pushed little boys into wells. However, one night as he returned with the water bucket, he saw that she was genuinely terrified, and said that a woman had followed him all the way back to the house, then vanished. My great grandfather, in a statement that impresses me to this day coming from the mouth of a child, freaked her out further by saying that it was probably his own mother watching over him and noting how he was being treated.

Another story involves his daughter, who as a child, kept seeing a woman in her bedroom that she later identified from a photograph as being her own aunt, who had died in Mallorca not long before my great grandfather was orphaned.

On the other side of the family, we have the story of my grandmother’s sister, who died rather young, leaving two children behind. One of those children, a boy, died shortly after. She and my grandmother were very close, and though my grandmother was barely a teenager at the time, it is said that her sister’s spirit came back and said she would take her daughter too if my grandmother did not take responsibility for her welfare. My grandmother did, and the daughter is alive to this day.I find these stories fascinating not only because they involve my own relatives, but because of the way that they have endured. My great grandfather passed away a week before my mother was born, and the story lived on through his wife, who survived well into the 1980’s and died at the age of 84. Both of my grandmothers are still alive, and in all the years I have known their stories, they have not changed or been embellished since I was aware of them.

Now that my great grandmother is gone, and my grandmothers are well into their 80’s, because I have taken the responsibility of tracing and preserving our family history, I am writing these and other stories down as they have been told in hopes that they continue to endure long after I am gone.

Obviously in keeping them alive, I do not plan on putting them down as hard fact. I do not doubt the truth in what I have been told, especially since my grandmothers and great grandmother are and were highly trustworthy and not into making things up. However, I think it more fitting to classify them as “family legend.”

I am curious to know how many people have ghost stories such as these that have endured the years. We all have the black sheep stories, the rogue stories, and the tragic stories. But are the ghost stories just as common? Comments (3)

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