~”SAVED BY A GHOST”~
Lois Caywood Guffy
When I was a young girl growing up in the 1940's, we lived on a farm in far North central Oklahoma. It was a five room house with a path out back. One day, I felt the call of nature and went running to our outhouse that sat behind the house in some trees. Just before I got there, I suddenly had an eerie feeling and as I looked toward the toilet I was stunned to see an apparition of a tall man dressed, such as Abe Lincoln, with a tall black hat, and a black tailed jacket. It sort of floated very quickly around the outhouse. I stopped frozen in my tracks, bewildered and very frightened, to say the least. The apparition sort of faded out just below his knees.
I watched in disbelief for a while, then, the apparition made another pass around the toilet. I put my needs behind me and high tailed it back to the house as fast as my legs could carry me. I sat on the bed for a while, still in disbelief as to what I thought I saw, and forgetting what purpose I had there. I told my story to my sister, but she did not fully believe what I told her either. I talked her into going back with me to prove what I saw. We hid behind a small cedar tree a few yards away from the toilet and waited. After a few minutes in hiding, the apparition made its run again, My sister and I fell over each other running back to the safety of the house. We sat and discussed what we both saw and decided not to tell our parents that day. For a few days we would go back and hide behind the tree and we still saw the figure making a quick run around the building.
After a few days, we did not see it any more. Only then, did we decide to tell mama and daddy. Mama sort of looked at us in wonderment, but our daddy said he knew what the sighting was all about, he said he had found a rattle snake coiled behind the "throne" about the same time we were seeing our floating man. He said the apparition we saw, was to scare us away from the toilet. Daddy said he did not tell us when he found the snake because he thought it would frighten us. I can say one thing for certain, we never used the outhouse for a long time after that and only after checking for snakes. That apparition surely saved us from a deadly snake bite. My curiosity was why the ghostly man was dressed as he was.
After I wrote this story, a distant cousin sent some pictures to me of our Great Grandfather Mason Caywood. In every picture, he was wearing a long black coat and wore a black hat. Grandpa Mason was very tall and slender and could have easily passed for Abe Lincoln with his beard and black attire. Could this have been our great grandfather Caywood watching over us from above? I would like to think that was what happened.
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