Since the first day we moved into our trailer there have always been weird things happening. Sounds, breezes, smells, voices, just all manner of weird but harmless things.About a week after we moved in, I was at the kitchen sink which had a window over it that looked out on the back yard, washing dishes, I glanced out the window and saw a woman in an old outfit hanging by her neck in a tree that stands out there. It was a quick glance up and when I looked again I didn't see anything.
So as humans are prone to do, I wrote it off as "I didn't see that. My mind is playing tricks on me." and "It was just a quick glance, you didn't see what you think you saw"
That was almost 20 years ago now. And that seems to be what will now be called 'the beginning'
I grew up in a haunted house. Genuinely haunted.
Typewriters going in the middle of the night with actual print on the paper the next morning. My Dad, after the first night of hearing the typewriter going, put a piece of paper in it the next night before he went to bed and sure enough the next morning it had been typed on. Sorry, nothing as awesome as WE ARE HERE or anything like that, just a bunch of letters and symbols in no particular order. Which I am sure some fanatic somewhere could obsess over and come up with it meaning something. But trust me, it was just a random bunch of letters and numbers and symbols.
My parents saw our ghost one night, actually many nights, but the first night is always the story that got told.
My parents had and armoire in their room that stood about 6 foot tall. One night when they were lying in bed a man (neither one of them knew how they knew it was a man) stepped out from behind it. Or as my dad would say, more or less unfolded from behind it as he stood over 7 foot tall. With lumberjack clothes on and a black cloak, he just stood there at the foot of their bed. Just standing there. My Dad, thinking someone had gotten into our house dove out of bed and grabbed nothing but air. And he was gone.
Over the years we lived in that old house we grew quite accustomed to seeing him. My whole family, my parents, me, my sisters.
There was never anything threatening about the man so we never were afraid of him popping up and showing himself. Tho we never saw a face.
He seemed to be a benevolent spirit until the day my Dad moved to another state for a job and we stayed home packing everything up. Things started getting very tense in the house. The man no longer 'visited' us. The typewriter went berzerk one final night then was silent. And the last time we saw the man? I woke up to him standing over my little sister's bed holding, what to me, looked like a huge cast iron skillet over her head.
I grabbed my sister and we ran screaming to my Mom's room where we stayed every night until we moved out.
Even though I had grown up with one, as I grew older I became more skeptical. If ghosts were real, why is there, after all these centuries, no physical proof? Is there some kind of instruction sheet you get when you pass that tells you to never leave behind any proof that there is such a thing? And as far as what happened in our little house in the woods? A simple form of mild mass hysteria? Can't you convince yourself that you did see, did hear what you think you did as long as everyone else is seeing and hearing it too?
Sit by yourself in a dark room and start thinking about something scary, all the sudden you are hyper aware, you hear noises, see flashes, something brushes past you.
The mind is a powerful thing.
So the more years that passed since our last sighting of 'the man' the more I stopped believing in ghosts and spirits. Demons? Yes! I will always believe in those whether real or perceived.
Then we bought this trailer. After the initial incident, there really wasn't that much more that happened. Just little things here and there that could be brushed aside. Missing items that were not where you looked for them ten times, then the eleventh there they were. Sounds that could be explained away. Glimpses, but always out of the corner of your eye.
Then we had the trailer removed and built a house in the exact same spot.
Not long after we had moved back in, my DH was having a very bad bout of snoring. As I always did when it got too much for me, I grabbed my pillow and headed to the living room to sleep on the love seat. Since it was something I did often, my DH would come in if he woke up and touch me and try and get me to come back to bed. So when I felt his hand on my face I turned toward him, but there was no one there. I know I felt it. My cheek was warm from the touch. That night he was woken up by his wife curled up in a ball hugging as close to him as I could get!
About a week later, DH had gotten up and was cooking breakfast for all the grandbrats and left me asleep in our room. I heard his phone ringing and woke up enough to think, I wonder why he changed his ringtone? I fell right back to sleep after it stopped, (yes DH had kept me up most of the night with the snoring) then it started ringing again. The Nokia ringtone we all know from back in the day. Once again I wondered who he had set that ringtone for and was he ever going to answer that stupid phone? By now I was awake and laying there debating whether or not to just go ahead and get up when it started again. I rolled over to his side of the bed to grab his phone, (I was going to march into the kitchen with it and grumpily demand he not leave it in the room while I was trying to sleep) but the phone wasn't there. That's when I realized the the ringing was coming from our bathroom, and more specifically, my husbands closet.
The ringing was coming from a box that had an old phone in it that he had put up in case anything happened to his new phone. I snatched it down and took it to the kitchen and handed it to him and told him someone was trying to call him, he really should take the sim card out of that phone then marched my grumpy butt back to the bathroom.
When I came back out, he had the phone out of the box and he told me "honey, neither the sim card nor the battery are in this phone"
I told him how it had been ringing off and on for the last half hour, and it rang the last time as I was headed out the bedroom door with it.
We threw the phone away and the Nokia ringtone quickly became named "that creepy ringtone" at my house. I can't stand to hear it. Sorry Nokia
A few weeks after that, I was on the phone with my youngest son who had called me early in the morning while he was at school, I'm sure to see if I would come get him out for some supposed stomach ache or something, and as we said Goodbye, I heard a woman's voice saying "Laura" like you do when you have a bad phone connection..."Laura"
First of all, I do not use my first name at all. Only a few immediate family members call me that. And it sounded like my Mother, I kept saying "ma'am" "ma'am" "can you not hear me?" I thought the lines had gotten crossed in between my son hanging up and my Mom trying to call me. But my phone was disconnected. I figured, ok, it could happen lines mixing up if the timing were perfect between the incoming call and the disconnection of the first call.
So I called my Mom, and woke her up. I explained to her what happened and she thought maybe it had been my Grandmother who had died years before.
I still hate being on the phone after someone hangs up now. I just don't want to hear it again.
I play with my ghost radar but I try not invite any unwanted attention to me or my house. I guess I still believe more than I thought.
So I ignore the little things, like items still disappearing and reappearing where you left them, but not for a couple of days. Smells I can't find where they are coming from. All those little things you can explain away.
Until this morning.
This morning when we woke up, DH has 4 scratches on his hip. He said they were burning. We checked his nails thinking he had done it with a hangnail in his sleep, no hangnails, we checked the sheets to make sure there was nothing in them and no pajamas so it couldn't have been that.
When I looked at them they look like four perfect kitten scratches from his hip bone to the top of his thigh.
Now, Houston, we might have a problem..............
No comments:
Post a Comment