cursive ghost lock

[darkoshi]

I've gone through a few more old family documents. A couple are written in an old German cursive script that was hard for me to decipher. But I was finally able to read them using the charts shown at the top of this page.

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There are so many weird noises in this room. I saw a cockroach a few days ago; it hid before I could catch it. I think it must be making some of the noises. Several times over the last months, every once in a while I hear a distinct chewing/crunching noise from inside the wall at the top of the doorway to the kitchen. It usually happens late at night. I've wondered if a squirrel could have gotten in between the walls. Or a mouse or rat. But maybe that is a cockroach too; it's weird how small things can make big noises sometimes.

Tonight, while watching Downton Abbey, I heard a noise to the right, looked over, and even saw the cup on top of the small cabinet move/shake! I picked up a flashlight (there are bunches of flashlights in this house) and carefully peeked behind the cabinet. Nothing there. I peeked into the cup. Nothing there.

If I believed in ghosts, I'd think there was a ghost in this room.

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Sherlock season 3 is being aired on our local PBS station on Sundays right after Downton Abbey. It starts at 10pm and is scheduled for 2 hours each episode. That would make me late for bed. I decided to watch the rerun instead, which starts an hour earlier on Thursday. Last Sunday I was tempted to stay up and watch part of it anyway, but had to nix that due to dealing with a malfunctioning washer.

I ended up watching it online on Tuesday and on TV on Thursday. For the TV broadcast, I turned on closed captions, to catch some of the dialogue I missed during my first viewing.

Today I was good again and turned off the TV before Sherlock came on. I'm still up late for other reasons, but I'll surely be in bed earlier than I would be otherwise.

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Oh gosh now a noise is coming from behind a different cabinet.

Comments

[marahmarie]

1) Mouse or rat, most likely. I hate that sound (and I know from what because I worked in a store maybe five years ago that was so infested with them they were chewing through the metal-mesh-reinforced sheet rock in between the walls - the place looked and smelled hideous; worst nine months I ever spent working anywhere).

2) We had a hutch caddy-cornered by itself in the dining room of my NY apartment that when I was about 25 - we'd lived there maybe 15 years by then, and it was a brand-new building when we moved in so we were its only tenants that whole time - that began rattling by itself a few times a week. Never figured out what that was about even after ruling out every normal possibility.

3) Within the same year the ghost showed up. Three times. I bumped into him once, my mom twice. Mom met him before I did, I think. We had the exact same description of him each time we compared notes (right down to the same medium-tall black top-hat). And he got us all three times in the same place - third step up from the bottom on the full flight of stairs connecting upstairs bedrooms to the bottom of the place.

What was weird was when he brushed by me on his way down he was dark, like muddy-dark, more like an aura/silhouette than a person, felt cold and sort of messed with the gravity around me in a bad way. Very not-nice aura but not harmful in any discernible way, either. Fortunately we got out of there just a few years later.

I'm also German and think it's neat you have those old documents. Things like that didn't stay in my family for some reason. Wish I had stuff like that to look over now that my family is gone.

[darkoshi]

#3 - spooky!

Do you know from what area in Germany your family was from? And when they came to the states?

[marahmarie]

Mom's side: Berlin. We never new if it was East or West Berlin. Dad's side: unknown part of Germany. Dad's mom was in/escaped from Auschwitz so likely emigrated in early to mid 1940s. Mom's side was here maybe 20 or more years before that.

I'm only the fourth or fifth generation on my mom's side and only the third on my dad's to reside in the US. For that reason I sort of feel more European than American at times. :)

[darkoshi]

If your mom's side came over in the 1920s, that would have been before Berlin was split into east and west.

My mom's family was from Silesia, which was in eastern Germany but is now Poland. They fled to western Germany at the end of WW2. My mom ended up marrying an American (my dad).

[marahmarie]

If your mom's side came over in the 1920s, that would have been before Berlin was split into east and west.

I know. But the split between East and West fascinates me. I wonder which side my mom's family hailed from; assuming they left relatives behind who continued to live on there for many generations after my mom's great-grandmother/great-grandfather left, some of them might have been involved in the later split. Part of me wonders how they felt about it/how they got through it, if so.

I also wonder which side her remaining relatives were on in WWII (which is a slightly upsetting/thought-provoking question, since there's a chance I have both Jewish lineage and could possibly be related to Nazis* - it happens, even if it's rare, and even though it's kind of fucked up).

*Sometimes people had no choice but to at least visibly support the Nazi party, from what I understand, so the answer to this could be No, Yes But Only Under Duress, or just plain Yes!.

It's that last possible answer that bothers me most.

[darkoshi]

I suppose even if your relatives lived in the east, they might have fled west like mine did, before the borders were closed.
"In the 12 years between the establishment of East Germany in 1949 and the construction of the wall, over 2.7 million East Germans fled to West Berlin." (http://library.thinkquest.org/20176/berlinwalltimeline.htm)

I've always been somewhat uncomfortable about my German ancestry too, because of the holocaust. I felt that way more so when I was young. As I got older, I realized that not all Germans supported the Nazis, and even the ones who did, didn't all know the extent of what was going on. In the same way how not all Americans support everything the U.S. government does, or how a lot of people don't know all the underhanded things that the government does.

I have worried about what I might find going through some of these documents. I do know that one of the family (not a direct relation though) was a soldier or officer in Africa under Rommel. He died before I was born.

I remember hearing that my aunt, when she fled to the West, was detained by the Nazis and had to work for them for a while (she was a dentist).

When I found out that I had a Jewish ancestor on my dad's side, I think a part of why it pleased me was because it meant that no longer was I only descended from "those oppressive Germans" but also from someone on the other side.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, we have...quite a heritage, don't we? *shakes head*

[darkoshi]

I was just re-reading some old posts, including this one:
http://darkoshi.livejournal.com/110671.html

and apparently I remembered wrong about my aunt. She was detained by the Soviets, not the Nazis.