Some Background

Now that I have a bit more time, I'll tell you a bit about myself and my home.

I am a woman in my late thirties, with two daughters, one in elementary school and one preparing to begin college.  My husband is living in another state right now, where we will all join him in a few months after the school term has ended.  He has been gone for a month or so.

We have lived in this house for ten years, having bought it when my younger daughter was still an infant.  In that time, I have witnessed many, many paranormal events.  Some of these things have been very little - small sounds that were hard to explain, movement witnessed out of the corner of one's eye, things that cannot be pinpointed or quite proven.  Some have been very large - objects moved from their original locations, very loud or obviously out of place sounds, even an apparition I have witnessed on two occasions.  These I am absolutely certain are paranormal.  Most of the things that have happened...well, I cannot prove them, and skeptics could easily dismiss them.  I accept that, because I also tend to be somewhat skeptical.  If I am not completely certain something was paranormal, I will err on the side of caution.  I am a little contemptuous of those who cry "ghost" at every creak or shadow.  That does not advance the cause of understanding the paranormal, in my opinion.  However, it is my opinion, and to each his or her own.  In my home, I am quite familiar with what is normal and what is not, and there are things I am nearly certain are not.  I do not swear by those.  What I do swear by is the things that have happened that I am absolutely certain are not normal.

The very first thing that happened to me was very vague and nebulous.  It was before we actually moved into the house, about a week prior in fact, when the realtor had very generously allowed us to come in to clean and paint and prepare the house for moving in.  At the time, the lower level of the house was in a state of disrepair and not terribly clean.  We knew that we would need to do major renovation.  I was on the lower level in what would eventually become the guest bedroom, vacuuming, and was suddenly overcome with the sense that I was not alone.  I was not frightened - and that was unusual for me, at the time, because I was easily frightened back then! - but I very definitely felt a sense of presence.  Completely out of the blue, the thought came to my mind that "what if we have bought a haunted house?"  I dismissed the thought, and the feeling, as irrational and went about my business.  I do not recall any noises or apparitions at that time.

The day we moved into the house, however, I did witness an apparition - one of only two times that I have clearly seen something.  I was looking out the front door and remarked to one of the gentlemen who was helping us to move that I was not aware he had brought his children, and that if I'd known he planned to do so, I would have kept my own children with us.  (They were being watched by a friend elsewhere, to allow us to move in without having them underfoot.)  He replied that he had not brought his children, and I asked him "then who is the little girl who is sitting in your truck?"  For I had watched a little girl open the door of his truck and climb inside, sitting in the driver's seat.  I had turned to him as I asked this, and he came to look out the window.  He said, "What little girl?  There's no one there."  I turned back, and it was true; the truck was empty.  But the door was open, and he did not remember leaving it open.

No one else saw the girl, who was small and blond, looking to be about six or seven years old, just a little younger than my own older daughter at the time.  I did go outside, thinking that perhaps a neighbor child had wandered into the driveway, but there was no one around.  Later, as I met the neighbors, I learned that there were no little girls living close by.

[A little description:  Our home sits on a hill, about fifteen feet above the roadway, and is accessed via a long, steeply sloping driveway.  To the right as you face the house, there is a steep drop of another ten feet or so to the house next door, which is separated from ours by a screen of evergreen trees and a large side lawn.  To the left of our house is a wide lawn and another screen of evergreen trees that conceals the next house over.  Behind our home is a very steep hillside, almost a cliff, which is heavily wooded.  There are no homes in that direction for several miles.  We are somewhat isolated, though we can see the homes on the other side of the road.  I love the isolation, the woods, the many woodland animals that we sometimes see.  I love that we have neighbors close enough to visit if we wish, but that we are not exposed to them nor they to us.  The very isolation - each of our neighbors is at least a hundred yards away, if not more - makes it hard to "debunk" some of the things that have occurred.  It is not as though a noise from the neighboring houses would carry to be audible within ours, or a child wander through our yard unbidden.]

Though I did not dwell on the matter, I was quite certain of what I had seen.  Now, while I have never precisely believed in ghosts or spirits, I have never precisely disbelieved, either.  I have always taken the position that there are more things in heaven and earth than we will ever understand, and left it at that.  But as time passed in this home, it became impossible for me to stand aside.  It became very clear to me that we were not alone in our home.  However, I did not at any time feel threatened, and so it was easy to simply share living space.  I did not quite dare to discuss it with my husband at the time; he is very pragmatic and practical and not given to belief in things that he cannot see and touch and measure.  Well, he is an engineer; it behooves him to demand proof and believe in the concrete.  I love him for that, and would not change him.  I simply didn't bring up the subject.  Over the years, he has seen or heard things, however, and I know that in some part of his mind, he is also aware that we are not alone.  I do not force him to discuss it, because he would have to deny it and that would be a shame.  Also, I have never wished for my children to be frightened, particularly when I do not think there is a threat.  So it is simply that "Mom thinks we have a ghost" and I am content with that.  Children always think their parents a bit mad, do they not? 

As we made ourselves comfortable in the home, the activity commenced immediately.  It fascinated me that the presence - which I felt continuously, more strongly at night and in particular parts of the house, like the lower-level bedroom, the lower-level kitchen area (now a wet bar and storage room) and the family room - seemed, at times, to want to be helpful.

My younger daughter, as I have said, was still an infant.  I was expressing milk for her, and at night-time I would set out a bottle with frozen milk on the corner of my dresser.  By the time she woke for her night-time feeding, the milk would be at room-temperature and ready for her.  I am a very light sleeper - well, what mother is not? - and would wake at the first sound that she made over the nursery monitor.  I would take the bottle and go into her room, which is just across the hall, to feed her.

One night, I found that the bottle was not on the dresser where I had left it.  I went into her room and found that it was sitting on a shelf at the side of the crib.  The lid was still on, and the bottle was still full.  Several things made this strange:  First, that I am, as I said, a very light sleeper.  It was impossible that my husband could have left the bed without waking me.  It was likewise impossible that my younger daughter could have entered our room without waking me.  It was possible that I might have walked in my sleep, and I concluded at the time that I must have done so.  Any mother with a young child is generally sleep-deprived, so sleepwalking is not impossible.  I know mothers who have risen, fed their child, changed a diaper and returned to bed, with no memory of any of those things in the morning.  So I discounted the occurrence, fed my daughter and got us both back to sleep.  That proved, however, to be only the first of many such nights.  I finally accepted that something strange was happening when it happened on a night when my husband was unable to sleep, and assured me that I had not left the bedroom after going to bed.  This was the first mention I made to him of my thought that we might have a "ghost".  I approached it jokingly, and he laughed it off.

For a time, much of the "activity" seemed to center around the baby.  In retrospect, I imagine that the entity was interested in her.  If it is a child entity, as seems likely, it would be very natural for her to be fascinated by a baby in the house.  However, as my younger daughter got older, she became very fearful and while she could not articulate her fears, I suspected that she was reacting to whatever the presence was.

This was the first time I spoke directly to the entity.  I was quite stern, and explained that I did not want to have to take steps to get rid of it, that I knew that this was its home and was quite comfortable with it remaining, but would not tolerate it frightening the children.  I appealed to it to "leave them be".  I was shocked when this appeared to be effective.  The most interesting part of that encounter was that as I was speaking, I had the same sense I generally had of the entity being present - but after I had finished, there was something I can only describe as a lightening of the atmosphere, a lessening of the air pressure as if someone had just left the room.  I've had many of these "discussions" with the being over the years, when activity would become more intense than we were comfortable with.  Each time, they seemed to make a difference.

Many other things have happened, but this is becoming too lengthy so I will recount one other occurrence: the second and last time (so far) that I saw an actual apparition.  I was standing at an internal window in the kitchen that looks out into the formal living room and hallway.  At that time, the kitchen sink was in front of that window, and I was washing dishes and talking on the telephone.  I had called a friend because my husband was away and I had become a little uneasy after the children had gone to bed.  I was alone, but did not feel alone.  So as I was talking to this friend, I saw what I thought was my younger daughter, who was about four at this time, pass the window.  I thought it was her because I could see only the top of her head.  My older daughter, who was eleven at this time, would have been clearly visible from the waist or so up.  I asked the friend to hold on, and I went around the corner of the wall to see where my daughter - I will call her Raven - had gone.  There was no one around.  I told my friend I would have to call back and hung up, then went searching the house.  Both children were still in bed, deeply asleep.  Raven, in particular, had definitely not left her bed.  I had lain down with her until she fell asleep - because that was the only way she would go to sleep.  I knew what her bedcovers had looked like at that time, and they had not been altered - she did not even appear to have changed position since I had left her, about twenty minutes or so before.  My elder daughter - let's call her Jewel - was likewise deeply asleep.  But I had clearly seen a child pass the window. 

So it seems to me that the being who shares our home, or at least one of them, is a child.  I will leave this at that and recount some other happenings at another time.  Cheers!

A Beginning...

This will not be much, for a first post, as it is late and I am tired. But I wanted to put down the thing that happened tonight.  There are things that happen all the time, many things throughout the day, small things and things that are not so small, and I have not made it a habit to remember them all.  I have, for years, accepted them as part of life in this house, and for the most part they do not distress me unduly.  But lately I have thought that it would be good to keep a sort of record of things that have happened, to look back upon later, and on the chance that it might help someone, somewhere.

Tonight, my daughter and her friend and I were sitting in the living room, talking.  The cat had been playing and had left the room a few moments before to go into the kitchen.  We were talking, I forget what of, and suddenly there was a "knock-knock" that sounded very clearly from the kitchen.  At almost exactly the same time, a sort of creak came from the family room.  I hear these creaks all the time, usually in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep and I am awake, working on my laptop or reading.  I do not usually hear them in the daytime, or when anyone else is around, so this was surprising to me.  It was a sound like a piece of furniture shifting - as if you were to put pressure on a desktop or the top of a table that had been assembled.  Not a loud sound, but just a small creak. 

The knock was even more surprising, because it was very clearly a knock.  We all looked at one another and grew silent, because we were alone in the house and it was dark outside and becoming late, perhaps 9:30 in the evening.  The door in the kitchen leads to the backyard, which is bordered by a wooded area.  It would not be impossible to go back there, but it would be very strange for anyone to be in the back yard and knocking on the door.  We were a bit frightened, because if someone was at the back door, it would be quite possible that they were up to no good.

There was no one at the back door.  I went to check and the kitchen was empty.  I thought perhaps the cat was in there and had done something to make the noise.  However, as I stood in the kitchen peering into the back yard, the cat came up the stairs from the lower level, so I knew that it had not been him.  Also, I do not know how he could have made such a noise, that was so clearly a double knock.  It was very strange.  I was surprised to see that he was downstairs, because I had thought surely one of the noises must have been made by him, coming so simultaneously as they did.  But no; he had been downstairs.

It wasn't a threatening thing, nor was it especially outrageous.  Just odd, as are most of the things that happen here.  It could make me a bit uneasy at being alone here now - my daughter and her friend have gone out to see a movie - but I have lived here for ten years and have sensed no threat nor come to any harm.  It is unsettling, but not unusual for this house and so I will not be overly frightened, though perhaps a bit on-guard.  In truth, it bothers me more to think that there perhaps was a living person skulking around outside; I would feel more likely to come to harm from a living person than from my spirits.

The most significant thing about this event is that there were other witnesses - both my daughter and her friend.  My daughter "pooh-poohs" the idea that we have spirits, at least officially, though I have sensed her fascination with one or two other events - but her friend was clearly a bit spooked by this.  It was so clear, and so strange...

More later, but I hope that this is all for tonight!  :-)