The story below is the kind of thing I wish would happen to me… it’s from a book called A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters, which, amusingly enough, turns out to be written by the father of Dan Ackroyd:

Judy and I pried open the rusted metal clasp with a screwdriver. We had expected to find either junk or emptiness. Instead, we found history.

Inside were a photo album of black-and-white prints attached with triangular corner mounts and yellowed newspapers from decades back, saved for articles germane to the family. There was a scrapbook of recipes, and our father’s sheepskin from Queen’s University, Applied Science 1913, and a bundle of notebooks of the type that children used in school. They were bound together with kitchen twine.

We untied the bundle and began to read page after page of penciled handwriting. Not good handwriting. Very hard to read. With no anticipation of doing so, we had come across Grandpa’s journals (83 of them, to be precise), written in his own hand from 1905 through 1931 and containing thoughts, observations, and conjectures that he clearly had hoped might someday be shared with others.

Within the now fragile pages were handwritten copies of letters to his family and friends and to the editors of local newspapers. The majority of the words he recorded are actual accounts of séances, most of which took place in the small farmhouse on the north shore of Loughborough Lake, near the village of Sydenham, Ontario. Other passages are his musings over what it’s all about. The notes and letters aid my remembrances of the taciturn elderly gentleman who lived in that farmhouse, where I spent many gloriously happy days and nights.

(Emphasis mine.)

How cool is that? My grandmother saved all kinds of weird things and it was a huge job to clean out her house after she died, but she didn’t leave any journals. She always told lots of great stories, and had an interesting life, so I wish she had written more things down. But then I think about my own journals and how embarrassing it would be for someone to read them– in a way I think it would be cool for some future descendants of mine to find something really old that would tell them about the life of someone in the past… but I haven’t done anything as interesting as going to lots of séances!

via ‘A History of Ghosts’ explores paranormal past – TODAY Halloween Guide.