The legend of the Tokars house just won’t quit. I found out at dinner tonight (parents, sister & her family, uncle and aunt up from Talla) that the guy that Dad sold the Tokars house to turned around and re-listed it as soon as he found out (well after the closing) about Sara Tokars’ kidnapping from there (and her subsequent murder some distance away). Apparently the guy said that Dad should have told him about the ghost in the house. How did the guy find out? Well, gentle reader, this should tell you!

I can only say that said ghost didn’t make its presence known during the sixteen months the SarahCat and I lived there. Of course, I am a proper, albeit self-trained, Solitary Eclectic NonDenominational Pagan with a good chunk of that training in the Wiccan tradition. Thus, I DO know how to clean spaces of energetic manifestations (IOW bad vibes, or ghosts if you prefer). As I would say to Dad, hey, I know how to do it, it won’t do any harm and it could do some good. That’s why Annie and her friend Virgil and I spent some time physically AND psychically cleaning the house (at least the areas I would actually be living in) before I moved in. Some sea-salt water (mixed with orange cleaner) and sage/cedar smudge sticks go a long way.

DH, though, said that no halfway-intelligent ghost would dare go messing with me and my familiar, and that’s probably why Sarah and I never saw it. Chuckle.

Yesterday we went out to Westview Cemetery to visit my family’s plot, 39 years and one week after Mom passed away. There’s lots of family history there. To date, my mother, paternal grandparents, and paternal grandmother’s mother, brother, and sister-in-law are buried there. Grandpa sold cemetery plots out there for years; I find it amusing that our family plot is right in among a lot of Old Atlanta. Within spitting distance (literallyl!) of our monument are the graves of Asa Candler (founder of Coca-Cola), a bunch of Woodruffs including Robert (also Coca-Cola), and Joel Chandler Harris (author of the Uncle Remus tales). I guess Grandpa made sure he was going to have a prime seat for some good ol’ storytelling, so to speak.

We’d brought a brush to help clean the lichens we’d noticed last time off the monument. Worse, though, was the ant mound built at the top edge of Mom’s marker, with the dirt all but obscuring her name. While I sat on the monument and had a chat with Mom, DH broke up the ant mound as best he could and cleaned off the marker. I appreciated that. If we didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done, because I think we are the only ones who have been out there in the last few years. Then DH walked down the hill to visit his grandparents’ gravesite to give me a little “alone time” with my family.

I have a pretty strong fondness for cemeteries anyway. I have to say that Westview is not as pretty as Roselawn in Tallahassee, where Mom’s parents are buried, but it’s not bad (that’s what I told her while I was talking to her, anyway). I just wish Westview was in a better part of town. The West End is not the nicest neighborhood any more, and even though it’s right off of I-20 I am not comfortable going over there alone. At least DH is happy to go with me (the Ex had no desire to do so).