My Grandparents have had a beach house at Oak Island NC since my mom and her sisters were young children; once their school ended each summer they would pack up the station wagon and spend the summer down at the beach. During their summers, items around the house would sometimes “mysteriously” disappear or become misplaced after one of them had used it with or without permission from my grandmother. Now like many children, my mother and aunts did not like getting into trouble, and taking the blame for one another was not something they did, so most of the time no one confessed to knowing about the whereabouts of these various items. So my grandmother came to the conclusion that there must be “someone else” at the beach, a “person” whom she called Lizzy Longbeach; from then until the girls were in college, whenever anything went missing, poor Lizzy was usually the first “person” blamed for the missing items.
When my mother and aunts grew up, old Lizzy disappeared and was barely heard from for a few years, but with the arrival of the first grandchild Lizzy started popping back up around the house. As more and more grandchildren came along, eventually 12 of them, and gained the ability to walk, Lizzy Longbeach became more active than ever as more and more items started to show up in places they didn’t exactly belong. Now as most of the grandchildren are in or out of college and only a few remain relatively young, Lizzy antics have begun to decrease once again; but we all know she will show back up at some point, and it’ll proabably be the day the first great-grandchildren begin to crawl around the old family house.
Mark Hamblin
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