- Barbara Robinson greets someone she never met every morning
when she steps onto her Lynnwood patio.
-
- "Hello, Mr. Gibson."
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- Her husband, Robbie Robinson, was recently gardening
away, digging around a bed on the north side of the property, trying to
figure out what was poking out of the ground like a large rock next to
where they recently removed a cascara tree.
-
- It was a headstone reading "H.B. Gibson 1863-1930."
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- Anybody know who he or she was? Barbara Robinson is certain
H.B. is for a name such as "Herman Bruce" rather than for a "Harriet
Betty." She just knows it was a man who was buried in their front
yard.
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- Barbara Robinson is in touch with all things paranormal.
The couple have a cat named Ghost. She has even seen the ghost of her husband's
ex-wife, Joan, who died four years ago. She thinks Joan made appearances
and threw stuff around the mobile home, to let them know about the inappropriate
burial of poor Mr. Gibson.
-
- The other night, right in the middle of a room, they
felt an icy cold spot.
-
- "We smelled lilacs," Robbie Robinson, 63, said.
"Joan loved lilacs."
-
- Barbara Robinson said that one time when Joan got mad,
a picture of a wolf flew off the wall and across the room.
-
- "She thought something was wrong in the yard,"
Barbara Robinson said about Joan. "Ever since we found Mr. Gibson,
Joan is at peace."
-
- That doesn't mean the house has settled down. Barbara
Robinson, 46, sees the ghost of her father. Her mother came to say goodbye
to her daughter, after the mother died. Other folks have heard her deceased
mother call "Barbara." When Robinson was 12, she got out of her
bed and announced her grandmother had died. Thirty minutes later, the bad
news about grandma's death came by phone from Connecticut.
-
- The former logger saw a ghostly man in a suit coat one
night, and that confirmed her hunch that Gibson was a mister. Robbie Robinson,
an Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965, is also sure they
uncovered a manly headstone. They speculate that roots from a huge nearby
cedar tree may be pushing Gibson to the surface.
-
- They've checked around the neighborhood but have had
no luck identifying the person under the headstone. Even the woman with
the pet turkey, who has lived down the street by Martha Lake forever, knew
nothing about any Gibsons.
-
- Louise Lindgren, senior planner for historic preservation
for Snohomish County, said people were sometimes buried at their homesteads,
although doing a home burial as late as the 1930s is unusual.
-
- "What a grisly find," Lindgren said. "And
a mystery. I have no record of a cemetery in that area. That is not to
say that there was not one."
-
- Lindgren said there are state laws about how to treat
abandoned graves. The Robinsons will have to check that out. They showed
the find to a deputy, and a person from the Snohomish County Medical Examiner's
Office dropped by to take a look.
-
- Maybe the headstone was just a discarded marker and there
are no remains underneath. Perhaps the couple could do more digging.
-
- "No, no more digging," Barbara Robinson said.
"We've disturbed him enough."
-
- To confirm the whole paranormal thing, the Robinsons
showed me a picture with a ghostly apparition inside their mobile home.
I kid you not, there was a white cloudy blob shape in a snapshot, and I'm
sure it wasn't the glare of a flash.
-
- Hello, Mr. Gibson?
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- Copyright © 2003 The Daily Herald Co., Everett,
Wash. http://heraldnet.com/stories/04/07/06/loc_oharran001.cfm
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