An Iowa Garden

Now, I've never believed in ghosts, but that doesn't mean I haven't experienced some spooky things. When I first moved back to Iowa as a young doctor, the first house that I bought had been built in a woods, with no yard, just trees growing thickly all around the house, with a long, winding driveway that led out to an unlit, dead end street. The odd thing about that house was that there was a cement sidewalk extending straight out from the back door, into the middle of the woods, and it just ended in front of a huge oak tree. There was nothing out there, and no seeming purpose to this sidewalk. Well, a few weeks after I moved in, my nearest neighbor stopped by to say hello, and in the course of conversation, asked if I knew that the fellow who had owned the woods before had committed suicide; it seemed one day he just walked out into the woods with a rope, and hung himself from the large oak tree which was at the end of the sidewalk to my back door. I used to tell guests that if someone knocked at the back door, don't answer! I was a young single fellow then, and must confess I used that story to get young, blonde fluffies to snuggle close in front of the fire.
The place we live in now is also somewhat isolated, but probably only haunted by the plants I've killed in the garden, though our neighbor girl, Alex, might beg to differ. Her mom, Kim, has taken care of our cats sometimes when we go on vacation, and once when Alex was about seven, she decided that she was old enough to feed them, so we showed her what to do. The two cats could let themselves into our attached greenhouse through a small pet door, so each morning Alex would walk down the hill and fill their double bowl with dry cat food from a large plastic jug that we also left in the greenhouse, and fill their water bowl. The first day everything worked fine, and Alex thought she was really hot stuff doing this all by herself. The second morning when she came down, and went in the greenhouse, the cat bowl was just gone! She looked all over and no bowl; she didn't know whether to be afraid we'd be mad that she lost the bowl or to be upset that someone was playing a trick on her, but she went into the house and got the other, identical bowl, and filled it with food from the jug. The NEXT morning when she came down, the whole JUG of cat food was gone! She ran up the hill, yelling "Mommm!", and wouldn't come near the place again, so her mom had to come down and feed the cats until we got back. We never did find the cat bowl, but about six months later I found the lidless, empty food jug down in the ravine, where the racoon who had drug it through the small cat door, had taken off the lid, and had a picnic.