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Written by LFN  contibutor Deidre O'Dwyer Lucasi

There is a story my aunt always told about ‘Benjamin.’ What exactly Benjamin was no one really knows. My aunt was the only one who could see him. She described him as around two feet tall wearing a green plaid suit and a derby hat. His face always seemed to be in shadow so his features could not be discerned. He hung around in the basement of her parent’s house in which she lived and she was terrified of him.

As our family is Irish I always thought my aunt was teasing about a leprechaun – a total fantasy that she was making up to get a scare out of younger siblings. I thought that until she felt down the cellar stairs. She said she was pushed. Luckily she escaped any injury only complaining about a sore butt.

The basement was a typical 60s basement and was remodeled with paneling and a tile floor with an area rug here and there. It was used mainly for parties and celebrations but a corner of it served as a small sewing area and another closed off area held the washer and dryer. It seemed that Benjamin was fascinated with the sewing machine and it would often be finishing a run just as you went down the stairs. Small things around the room would get moved as well like ashtrays and knick-knacks. Nothing major and nothing that wasn’t easily blamed on another family member.

It seemed that Benjamin also liked to go out at night, as my claimed she’d seen him late at night climbing out a cellar window and running across the backyard out into the woods. One night she stayed awake and watched clocking him out at 1:00 am and back for 4:00 am. There would be no physical evidence of him out in the yard, or near the window or even inside the cellar. No muddy footprints or grass or anything else.

After a while my aunt stopped going down into the basement to sew and waited until she had a lot of laundry before going down there to do wash. Eventually she became engaged to marry and was always afraid Benjamin would follow her since it seemed she was the only one who had seen him. The day before her wedding she went down in the basement to retrieve some laundry that her sister had folded for her and left in a laundry basket. She fetched the basket and went back to her room ready to finish packing for her honeymoon.

About halfway through the stack of folded clothes she found a folded gum wrapper.

It said: