Scary Stories- The Clock

It's October, so I'll start off with my "scary" story.  I've received another from one of my readers, which I will publish.  I'm expecting one from you, so I hope you have starting thinking about it.  Everyone has been a bit frightened at least once in their life.  Thanks!  

Emmy’s Clock

About 15 years ago my elderly grandmother decided to move from her home into an Episcopal church home for the elderly because she was getting too frail to live alone anymore.  She asked me what I might like to have from her home and I said that if I had to choose, I would like her old Seth Thomas pendulum clock that sat on a table in her living room and whose ticking sound had dominated my visits to her quiet house when I was a child.  I’d venture to bet that if you asked any of her 10 grandchildren what they remembered most about my grandmother’s home, that all would first mention that ticking clock.  So my grandmother packed up the clock and had it shipped to me.  

At first I had it in our living room and actually tried to keep up with winding it each day.  It was wound by a key---- the turning key raising the weights located on the sides of the pendulum.  On one side you inserted the key to raise a weight that powered the clock, on the other side you inserted the key to raise a separate weight that powered the chime.  My grandmother would wind the clock each day, often letting me help if I was over spending the night at her house.  She never wound the side with the chime because she  didn’t like the dull gonging sound that it would make each hour if wound.  When I received the clock, at first I wound both sides.   I was curious about the chime that I had never heard and also wanted to make sure it worked properly.   Soon, I grew tired of winding the clock at all. 

Eventually we put the clock on a dresser in our bedroom and for several years it sat there and was never wound.  How would we sleep with that ticking sound all night?  Next to the clock, I placed an old photograph of my grandmother and her sister as children.

A number of years later, in the summer of 1999 my grandmother passed away at the age of 92.   I went back to Kentucky for her funeral.  A couple of days after I returned home from that trip something strange happened.  I was walking out of my bedroom (where the clock resided on my dresser), when I heard the clock chime once.  “Gong”     I looked at my son who was nearby and said, “Did you hear that? , the clock chimed”.  He had heard it also.  I went to investigate.  Perhaps the chime weight had been in the raised position and something had made it drop a bit and chime.  No….. Both the clock and chime weights were completely in their spent/down position.  And …we hadn’t touched the clock in years.  Interesting!  I was convinced that it was some sort of message from my dead grandmother.  My husband took the scientific approach when I called him at work to tell him about the clock.  Perhaps the vibrations of opening the dresser drawers each day finally caused the clock to oddly chime, he suggested.  Yes, I had opened the dresser earlier that morning but hours before the clock had chimed.  And, it had sat there for several years without chiming unexpectedly despite the dresser drawers being opened each day.  I told this story to various people, and many had some type of reasonable, logical, scientific explanation for the occurrence, ranging from the idea of a small earthquake to the thought that perhaps I had just imagined that the clock had chimed.  

I must tell you that the clock has only chimed once more since the incident I have just described.  That occurred in mid-November several years after the first incident, and when I called my brother a few days afterward to report the clock’s latest antics he related to me that he had recently taken the old table the clock had sat on in our grandmother’s home out of storage.  He’d refinished the table and had placed it in his living room on the same day I was now saying that I had heard the clock give it’s second unexpected chime.  By now my husband was starting to agree that maybe there was no scientific explanation and he insisted I scan my family history files to see if there was anything of significance on that November date.  Well, the only thing I found was that it was the date of my grandmother’s parents anniversary.  Maybe just a coincidence.  

The clock still sits on my dresser and hasn’t made a peep since.  And, I am still…. somewhat…….almost…….vaguely……pretty certain that the chimes were a message from my grandmother.

-Mary