Ghost Stories

I know I'm a couple days late for this topic however, it didn't occur to me to share these stories until they were requested. While I happen to believe in hauntings I know how completely hokey it sounds to say it out loud and I tend to only tell people about my experiences that I know personally. I'm also a person that only believes in what I can see, hear, feel, touch, or taste. That happens to be why I believe in hauntings. Enough prattling. Here goes.

My first real encounter with something that I couldn't explain happened at the house that I lived in during high school. It was an old house that had used to be a duplex I guess you would call it. That made it a pretty big house with 2 bedrooms and 1 bath on the first floor, a living room, kitchen, and then an "other" room that was off of the stairs. Upstairs were two more bedrooms, a bath, and a second kitchen that we didn't use. My sister and I had the upstairs bedrooms. The shocking part of this whole experience is that I didn't kill myself on those stairs. In the 4 or 5 years that I lived there, I don't think I ever sedately walked up those stairs. I flew. They creeped me out like nothing ever has before or since. Once, I was in my bedroom and my stepmom was calling my name, or so I thought. Several times I heard my name called and being the lazy teenager that I was, I kept calling out "what" in response rather than go see what my stepmom wanted. Finally, my stepmom came to the bottom of the stairs and asked me what I wanted. She hadn't been calling my name. I don't know who was because we were the only ones home, but somebody had been.

My next story takes place in Jacksonville, N.C., ironically, when I was 16. I was visiting my brother for the summer who was stationed at Camp Lejeune at the time. My nephew had just been born and everyone was at the hospital visiting. A friend and I left the hospital and went back to their house for reasons that I can't remember now and we were the only ones there. I sat down on the coffee table that faced their entertainment center and all of a sudden, the stereo with all of its components, turned on and started playing Metallica. Amy (that's the friend) and I looked at each other with huge eyes and then I ran up and hit the off button real fast.

Later that summer, I developed a roll of pictures that I had taken and in a reflection on the glass of one of their framed pictures that was hanging on the wall, you could see a boy in a white t-shirt in it. We didn't have an explanation for who that boy was. Sadly, I no longer have the picture or the negative. I was an idiot and gave it to someone to make copies and never got it back.

Fast forward to when S was born in 1999. I was staying with my mom in Marion, Ohio. My mom was at work and I was alone with M who hadn't turned three yet and S who was only a few weeks old. M was taking a nap and I had S in one of those battery operated swings that had three settings in this order: Off, low, high. S was swinging away on high when all of a sudden, it shut off. The slider had moved from high to off by itself. I didn't tell my mom that happened until a few years after she had moved out because I didn't want to her to be creeped out living there by herself, lol.

Now, we're in California. Weird things started happening about two weeks after we moved into our base housing. The kids were still little with S being about 5 months old and M was 3. The first oddness occurred at night after we were all in bed. C and I were just dozing off when the hallway light turned on. The kids were sound asleep. Things like that happened the whole time, about 4 1/2 years, that we lived there. Another time, my mom was visiting and we were standing on our patio while she was having a smoke. The kids were in bed and C wasn't home. We looked up when we noticed the light come on in S's bedroom. She was still in her crib at the time and M was sound asleep. My mom freaked a little but by this time, I was used to it. Lights came on all the time by themselves. We had vertical blinds in all the windows. In the largest living room window, the very first panel on the end would start swinging and tap against the wall. I would usually get up and stop it but once I timed it to see how long it would go and it swung and tapped for over 30 minutes. There weren't any drafts and the window was closed. And it wasn't all of the panels, it was just the one on the end. Also, if you tried to get one to swing manually, it would for one or two taps and stop like it normally would. And the most weird of our experiences happened about 2 am or so. Again, everyone was asleep and then I was rudely awakened by a loud noise. I woke up disoriented, not being able to figure out where the sound had come from when I heard trickling water. By this time, I was thoroughly freaked and I woke C up. He didn't hear it because he sleeps like a log. He slept through a 5.2 earthquake once, heheh. Anyway, I made him get up and turn on the light because I wasn't about to leave the safety of my bed. That's when was saw the source of the noise. My glass floating candle bowl had split into two pieces and the water was everywhere spilling onto the floor. The bowl was a very nice one from Illuminations and it wasn't even a year old. When it split, there were no shards of glass; it was just two clean pieces of bowl. And as you can see in the picture, it was pretty thick glass. Maybe there was a defect in the bowl or something, but it had never been dropped or frozen or anything else. I was pissed because it wasn't cheap and I really liked it, lol. After that, I took the breakables off of my dresser that I didn't want to be mysteriously broken and put them elsewhere.

And that's about it. We haven't had any experiences since moving out of our base housing in December of 2003 and we've lived in three other houses since, one of which was a 200 year old Victorian that had suffered a fire. I was sure I'd feel something in that house, but I never did. Not that I'm complaining.

So, you can believe me or not but all that stuff really happened. C doesn't even believe it and he was there for most of it. I guess some people are just grounded that way.