Stone

The story happened in the nice apartment my mother and I were renting in the 1990's. Three years had passed since my first encounter with an apparition. There were changes in our lives already.

I was in high school, two male cousins four years older than I was and a lady house help of about the same age as my cousins were lived with us. They were all from the province. My cousins stayed with us for their schooling. They attended college in one of the best universities in our country.

Despite our differences and preferences, the four of us got along well. The quiet weekends I had once became fun filled days.

One lazy mid-morning, we gathered in the living room as we normally would.

The living room would be the first area you would step into when you entered the house followed by the dining area and then the kitchen. To your right as you enter was the living room then the staircase going to the second floor, a wall that served as division between the stairs and the kitchen then the bathroom.

While we were engaged in a conversation we suddenly heard a sound of an object that fell on the middle step of the stairs. Looking toward the source of the noise, we saw it hit the wall that separated the stairs from the kitchen. Then the it bounced towards the entrance door hitting the floor first before it struck the door then it bounced back towards the kitchen hitting the floor once again before it reached and settled on the kitchen floor.

We watched in awe as the whole scene unfolded in our eyes. For a brief moment we just remained in our seats, silent, frozen, staring at it trying to grasp what had happened. One of my cousins picked it up. It was a stone. It was about the size of a jackstone ball, but it was indeed a stone not a ball to have bounced to and fro. It was an ordinary one we would step onto in an unpaved road.

"Who could have done that and why?" Were the questioning look we gave one another.

A cousin ran upstairs too to check who might be responsible of it. He wanted to think there was someone who played a trick on us although he knew it was impossible because there were only the four of us everyday.

Of course, he found no one but it was more disturbing that no one was accountable for the action.

I told my mother of the event. She mentioned to us an experience she and her siblings had roughly two decades ago regarding stones thrown at their house. According to her, it started to happen when they tried to contact my grandmother (who already had passed away) through spirit of the glass. After several attemps of contacting her, my granda eventually gave in but they were admonished and warned not to play with it again. She said that whenever they decided to do something that grandma did not agree with, the roof would be stoned.

Their generation had a slightly different experience from ours though. First, only a single stone was thrown at us while they received many. Next, the stone thrown at us was inside the house, to them on their roof. The frequency? Well, our generation was luckier because we experienced such only twice our lifetime (I hope).

I wondered what we did that warranted my grandmother's attention even if none of us grandchildren were able to meet her.