They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Carl W. Buechner

Leprechauns and Sugar Cookies: Grandma Dorrie’s House

My grandma Haraldson—Grandma Dorrie—was one of my favorite people in the whole world, and I still consider her a role model and an inspiration. She was a loving and generous-spirited person who loved to throw parties and have fun, and talked to all of us grandkids about interesting things like dreams and ghosts and fairies and leprechauns. She told us what the world was like when she was a child and shared her opinions on current world events. From her, we learned that, although there are hardships in life, the world is filled with magic and fun if you just know where to look. Grandma Dorrie told us that whenever you spent the night in a new bed, you were granted a wish that would come true. And that you could make a bird “freeze” like a statue if you threw a pinch of salt on its tail. At family dinner parties when we helped Grandma Dorrie fill the candy cups with mints and nuts, she always said, “Let’s have a little taste” instead of “Wait until you’ve finished your supper.”

Grandma Dorrie made popcorn balls at Halloween and a special red and green version at Christmas. She always had homemade cookies on hand—sugar cookies with colored frosting, gingerbread boys and girls with licorice mouths and buttons made of Red Hots candies, and my favorite, chocolate krinkles, which were like tiny crinkly brownies with powdered sugar on top. Grandma Dorrie was genuinely interested in our stories and questions, was positive and encouraging, and always told us we could do anything we set our minds on doing (see photo gallery).

Dinner party at Grandma Dorrie’s house, circa 1948.
Left to right: Great-Aunt Norah, her daughter Penny, Big Uncle Thomas (standing), and unidentified dinner guest.

Grandma Dorrie and Grandpa Anton Haraldson’s house was like a movie-star home, and one of the games my sister Betsy and I loved to play when we stayed there was to pretend we were movie stars. Two of the five bedrooms had ornate dressing tables with big mirrors, flowered wallpaper, and taffeta bedspreads, and we pretended those were our dressing rooms. Grandma and Grandpa Haraldson’s house also had a sparkling chandelier in the formal dining room, high ceilings, beautiful cut-glass windows that made rainbow prisms, and a piano room. There were ceramic leprechauns hidden in the plants, and small bisque dolls with ribboned hats and colorful ball gowns in a box in the playroom closet that Grandma let us play with even though they were breakable. When Betsy and I went there for visits, we ate fancy ham salad sandwiches and drank pop with our meal. We got to eat lunch in the living room with a TV tray so Grandma could watch her program, Days of Our Lives. (Even though she generally remarked on how dumb soap operas were at least once during the show.)

Grandpa Haraldson would tell us true stories about growing up in a northern Wisconsin town where the Chicago gangsters had a summer cabin, and how he had a job one summer driving one of the Mafia guys around. He made up stories with interesting characters, such as a mobster named Four-Fingered Louie. Grandpa Haraldson was an attorney, and sometime during the 1950s, he and Grandma invited one of his clients, a rather eccentric old woman, to be their houseguest. Mrs. Baits was a skinny and rather severe-looking woman who dressed in black and spoke French a lot of the time (see photo gallery). Her stay was going to be just for a day or two while my grandpa got her affairs in order, but Mrs. Baits liked it at my grandparents’ house, and soon her brief visit had turned into weeks, then months, then years. My mom’s younger siblings, who were still living at home at the time, were none too happy about the situation, as one of Mrs. Baits’s idiosyncrasies was her insistence on using a chamber pot at night and dumping its contents out the second-story bedroom window in the morning. She would also come downstairs when my teenage aunts and uncles had friends over, and sit on a chair with a stern expression on her face. Mrs. Baits had a fascination with the Dionne quintuplets and had an impressive collection of pictures and articles about the five identical sisters. She finally moved out when her health failed.

Grandma Dorrie had two precognitive experiences that I know of. The first involved my aunt Veronica, who is also my godmother, and took place in the mid-1950s. Veronica had decided to become a nun. Veronica told me that when she made the difficult decision to enter the convent, she wasn’t looking forward to telling my grandparents. The order she chose was very strict, and Veronica felt that my grandparents would not understand her decision. She came home from college with the idea that she would break the news to them that weekend. But when she started telling Grandma Dorrie about it, my grandma already knew. She told Veronica she had a dream that Veronica became a nun and she was hoping it wasn’t a premonition. Veronica did enter the convent, but after spending some time in the program, she decided that it wasn’t her true vocation, and left.

Grandma Dorrie’s other experience was a dream visit from a young woman’s spirit—the seventeen-year-old sister-in-law of my uncle Jerry. Jerry is my mom’s youngest brother and had been married to his wife Diana for about five years at the time. We had all met Diana’s sister Jillian at the groom’s dinner and wedding. Jillian was my age, so she and I had hung out together. She was really pretty and confident and happy, and over the next five years, at family parties, Diana would let me know what was new in Jillian’s life. Sadly, Jillian died in a car accident when she was seventeen. Even those of us who didn’t know her well were shocked and saddened by the news because she was so young and such a great person. Grandma Dorrie took the news especially hard—maybe because she had dealt with so much tragedy and loss in her childhood—and said she was so upset that she couldn’t collect herself and just kept crying. Grandma Dorrie had a dream that night that Jillian came up to her and comforted her, telling her she was all right and not to grieve for her. In the dream, Jillian had short hair, when in real life, she’d had long hair. My grandma did feel better after this dream, and when she told Diana about it, Diana told my grandma that it really must have been a visit from Jillian, because Jillian had gotten her hair cut not long before she died.

I believe that one of Grandma Dorrie’s gifts was to serve as a source of comfort and strength to the dying, for her family, and for others whom she loved. Her childhood experiences with death before she was thirteen years old revealed her incredible courage and sensitivity in end-of-life matters. She was in the room with her siblings James and Ethel when they died, because after her childhood experience, Great-Grandma Maggie just couldn’t be in the room with a dying person. We don’t know if Grandma Dorrie was in the room with her aunt Annie when she died, but as far back as people can remember, she was always at the hospital when a family member passed away. I believe Grandma Dorrie’s role as a source of strength for the dying has continued after her own death, as sort of a psychopomp, or guide of souls. On at least a couple of occasions, she has appeared in dreams before a family member dies. I had a dream (discussed in the upcoming Snowy Owl chapter) in which she gave me a message though a friend that “something important” was going to happen in a week. And my uncle Jerry had a vivid dream a short time before my cousin Alexandra passed away that he met Grandma Dorrie’s spirit walking down a hallway with her arms around a woman. He couldn’t see who the woman was, but Jerry said it was clear to him that Grandma Dorrie had come to help someone cross over to the other side.

My grandparents’ house had a few unexplained ghostly things happen there. Besides me seeing a little ghost girl run past the bathroom (discussed in the Ghost Girl chapter), my Grandpa Haraldson, who lived in the house for a number of years after my grandma died, said he heard voices occasionally. I was really curious to find out who the voices might be or what they were saying, but Grandpa Haraldson said he couldn’t understand them.

One of the freakiest experiences that happened at Grandma and Grandpa Haraldson’s house happened to my mom’s youngest sister, Kathy. I knew there was a story about the record player starting up by itself and playing a crazy song, but I couldn’t remember the details. Kathy filled me in on the details with the following email:

When I was young and alone (at Grandma and Grandpa’s house), Anton’s stereo began to play by itself. Heidi, my dog, started barking like crazy, with hackles up, at the dining room wall with the chimney. The song was “Lovely Hula Hands,” and the thing that was really weird was that it was on one of those old hi-fis , the kind where the 33 record had to manually be put on a spindle, up high, and then the arm had to be swung over to drop the record, and of course none of this was done. The on button wasn’t even turned on.

When Aunt Kathy’s sons Stuart and Eli were young and shared a bedroom, they saw a ghost one foggy morning. Kathy and her family lived out in the country, and one morning when Stuart and Eli first woke up, they saw a figure in the fog, out under the pine trees in their yard. Their bedroom was on the upper level of a split-level home, so the boys were looking down at whatever it was. The figure seemed to be picking up pinecones. Both boys saw this thing, and both were super scared at the time. In the past, two old homes had existed on the farm property. One was a cabin that was more than a hundred years old (which my aunt Kathy and her husband, Tom, had sold to someone who carefully took it down and reassembled it elsewhere) and the other old farmhouse they had torn down to build their home. My cousin Stuart now speculates that maybe there was once a garden in the yard where they saw the man, and what they saw was somehow related to a scene from the past of a man picking vegetables or fruit from a garden.

My cousin Clint, whose dad is my mom’s brother Anton, is a strong, tall auto mechanic with a shaved head and a biting sense of humor. He’s about the last person you’d expect to have ghost problems, but his house has ghosts the way my house has ghosts. Clint bought his early 1900s-era home back when he and my youngest brother, Sam, were both single. Sam rented a room from him. One night, shortly after they moved in, Sam was away on business. Clint woke up in the middle of the night because he heard someone walking around in the hallway outside of his room or possibly in one of the other upstairs bedrooms. Clint said he somehow knew it was a guy, maybe because of the heaviness of the steps, and that it sounded as if the man was dragging a heavy chain on the floor. The chain-dragging noise was all the more weird because the hallway was carpeted. Clint knew he was home alone, and he was freaked out. He said he rolled himself up tight in his covers, making himself into a “Clint burrito.” He believes that this first ghost visit was from the original owner.

The next thing that happened, not long after that, also happened when Sam was gone. Clint said Sam was gone again and might have been out on one of his “multiple attempts at finding a wife.” Clint was watching TV and drinking beer, and he got up to use the bathroom. Since he was home alone, he didn’t bother to close the door, but the bathroom door closed itself while he was in the room. Clint didn’t think too much of it at the time, attributing the door closing to drafts. But a few hours later, the same thing happened again, and he got spooked. He went through the house to make sure no one was in there with him and checked the windows and doors. They were all closed. Clint attributed this ghostly door-closing behavior to a female spirit, and I agree with him. When you’re dealing with spirits, you have to make educated guesses about who they might be (or who they were) based on their actions and other factors, such as where they’re hanging out.

Clint believes his next ghostly encounter was also a female ghost. This time, Sam was home, but in bed in his room on the second floor. Clint was in the basement, drinking beer and watching the big-screen TV. He had fallen asleep on the couch when he was awakened by a gentle touch on his shoulder or leg (he can’t remember which). He said the experience felt friendly, like the spirit was trying to help him wake up so he could go to bed and get a few hours of quality sleep before having to get up for work in the morning.

When my brother Sam met Jenny, they got married and bought a house together, so Clint was now alone in his haunted house. During that time, Clint said there was a period of about a week where every night when he got home from work and opened the back door, it sounded like there was a party going on inside. Just like my childhood experience in South Dakota, he could hear people talking and laughing, glasses clanking, the usual party noises. The noises continued as he made his way through the kitchen and dining room. When he got to the foyer, the house instantly became silent. I asked Clint if he felt left out that the party ended as soon as he arrived. He said he interpreted it as recognition from the ghosts that he had worked hard all day and needed his rest.

After Clint’s wife Nina moved in with him, she got a ghostly welcome. The first night she was there, Nina woke up because she thought she felt someone stroking her hair. When she realized Clint was sound asleep, she thought she must have imagined the experience. The next night, the same thing happened, but this time, as she lay awake trying to figure out why she could feel someone stroking her hair, she heard a man’s voice say hello. Clint said Nina’s screams woke him up, and she spent the rest of the night stuck to him “like a wood tick.” He told Nina, “Well, the ghost knows you’re here,” and that she should let it know what was and was not acceptable. Nina informed the ghost that she didn’t want to be touched, and she has not been touched since. Clint said they still have lots of paranormal activity in their house, but it comes and goes. They have a lot of the traditional ghosty stuff, like lights flickering, doors slamming by themselves, and pounding in the walls. Recently, both Clint and Nina have also seen a spirit. Clint was in the living room one night and got the feeling he was being watched. He looked up, and out of the corner of his eye saw a man in a gray or brown suit standing in the foyer. Another time, Nina was home alone, and she saw the same man going up the stairs. She became very upset when she realized that the spirit she was seeing had a head wound and was bleeding profusely. Clint said they made some inquiries and discovered that one of the sons of the previous owner had died in Vietnam when he was struck by debris from a land mine. Clint told me things have been quiet around their house for a while but telling the stories would probably get things riled up again.

My great-aunt Norah’s children have had some precognitive or mystical experiences, too. In 1978, right after Christmas, my mom and I were talking, and my mom asked me if I was expecting. I said, “No! Why do you ask?” She said that at Christmas, Norah’s oldest daughter, Penny, had told a few people that I was expecting another baby. Molly was about eleven months old at the time. It turns out that Penny was right. I was already pregnant with Jack; I just didn’t know it at the time. When Norah’s husband, Victor, passed away, Norah and his kids were in the room with him. Their daughter Bev said her mom was leading them in saying the rosary, and when her father died, Bev saw a golden light fill the room. And when I was consulting psychic Patrick Mathews about some family questions, including a question from Norah’s youngest daughter, Kay, about her daughter Kylie, he said Kylie’s Grandma Marie had come through with some advice. I asked him if he was sure about the name, since I was expecting to hear Norah or one of the other Irish relatives’ names. He checked and said no, it’s Marie. I said, I wonder if that’s Norah’s middle name, even though it didn’t sound right. Patrick said good-naturedly, “Don’t argue with a ghost! Let’s just see what she has to say.” When I told this story to Kay, as soon as I said the name Marie, she gasped.

“Is that your mom’s middle name?” I asked. Kay told me it wasn’t Norah’s middle name—it was the name of Kylie’s grandma on her dad’s side.

My mom’s cousin Margie had a supernatural experience when her father died, even though he and her mom, Nellie, had been divorced for many years, and Margie hadn’t seen him very often in the previous decade. In the mid-1970s, when Margie was married to her first husband, Stan, she woke up one night at 3 am and said, “Someone close to me is dead!” Margie said she hadn’t dreamt of the death and didn’t know who it was (except it was someone really close—even closer than a cousin or friend). She was absolutely certain someone had died, and she was afraid it was her mom. But she didn’t want to call her mom, because of the late hour and because if her mom was okay, then her mom would start worrying about who it might be, and if she wasn’t okay, Margie didn’t want to know because she couldn’t handle it. The next morning, Nellie called Margie and told her that her father, who had lived in South Dakota for many years, had died the previous night. He had lived at a veteran’s home, and they told Nellie that he had been out for a walk at 3 am when he apparently had a stroke and died.

Nellie had also tuned in to Margie needing help one night. It happened when Margie and Stan were dating. One of Stan’s friends had a Shelby Mustang, and they were out with him, riding around on a crooked road. He took a corner too fast and hit the guardrail. Margie said the guardrail probably saved their lives, as the car was so smashed up it wasn’t drivable, even without going over the steep embankment. Margie called Nellie to tell her what had happened. Nellie said she already knew Margie had been in an accident. She had felt it and was worried sick, waiting for the call.

It is my belief that we still have a relationship with our family and friends in spirit. We can honor and connect with them by telling their stories, and we can help them by saying prayers and remembering them with love. In return, I believe our family in spirit wants to connect with and help us, too. Grandma Dorrie’s spirit has come through for both my mom and me when we needed her. Twice, my mom has heard Grandma Dorrie offer specific advice in response to health issues my mom was having, and the advice turned out to be correct. And one evening when I was feeling completely stressed out about the book release party I was getting ready to host at my house, a clear visual image of my grandma Dorrie appeared in front of me. I was in my kitchen, but I saw my grandma clearly in my mind. She was smiling and said, “Annie, relax! Your party is going to be great. And I’ll be here helping.” It was the first and only time I got a spirit message like that from my grandma Dorrie, and it was a huge help to me. In the final week before the party, whenever I felt overwhelmed, I reminded myself that my grandma was helping me, and she had always thrown fabulous parties. And my book release party, which more than three hundred people attended, went off without a hitch.

Grandma Dorrie died in 1989, just a week or so after she hosted a formal Christmas Day dinner for the usual crowd of sixty or seventy people. Maggie was staying with Molly, Jack, and me at the time, and I came home one night to find them all sitting at the kitchen table, somber and quiet, with a single candle lit. I asked Maggie was what was going on.

“Grandma died,” Maggie said.

I didn’t know what Maggie was talking about at first, because Grandma Morgan was already in spirit, and I knew she couldn’t mean Grandma Dorrie. I said something like what do you mean, and Maggie said, “Grandma Haraldson died. She and Grandpa were on their way out to dinner, and she had a heart attack.” I walked out of the kitchen and went into my bedroom and cried. I couldn’t imagine the world without Grandma Dorrie in it. I couldn’t even imagine what our family would be like without her. It seemed like Grandma somehow made everything okay with her strength and love. And one of my biggest dreams was to get published and dedicate my first book to Grandma Dorrie. But I hadn’t yet made that dream come true, and she was gone. I cried some more, then went out to the kitchen to sit with Maggie and my kids.

After Grandpa Haraldson died some years later, a bunch of Grandma Dorrie’s belongings were given to me, partly because I have a big, old-fashioned house that has extra room and an attic, and partly because of how close I was to my grandma. I love looking around my house and seeing Grandma Dorrie’s formal sofa and beautiful Irish rose lamps. Vintage knickknacks that she gave me long ago, including my favorites, a cat in a seashell and a baby riding a swan, are on display in the china cabinet in my dining room. Her fur coats and silk and taffeta dresses, including the one she wore to the first formal dance she attended with my grandpa in the 1920s, are in the guest room closet.

When my mom and aunts were cleaning out my grandparents’ house after my grandpa died, my sister Betsy and I went down to take pictures before the house was put up for sale. It was really heart-wrenching to think of Grandma and Grandpa’s house being gone forever. As we made our way through the house, down in the basement, tucked back on a shelf in a storage room with a bunch of gardening stuff, we found the pink planter in which Grandma Dorrie had always planted clover. We picked up the planter to take it upstairs with us and discovered a little ceramic leprechaun half buried in the dirt. I brought him to my house, washed him off, and once again, he is bringing good luck to the plants in my parlor and to anyone who happens to discover him in his leafy hideaway.

I did eventually write a book, and my grandma was one of the people I dedicated it to, in this way: This book is dedicated to my grandma Dorrie, the most loving, interesting, and fun grandma a girl could have.

Years ago, psychic Patrick Mathews told me that my grandma Dorrie and I have such a strong bond that she is like a guardian spirit for me. Every now and then, when I walk through the doorway between the kitchen and the parlor or when I’m upstairs by the linen closet, I get a whiff of my grandma’s Emeraude perfume, and I know that Grandma Dorrie is paying a visit, her love and support still present in my life.