They Sing, They Scream, They Steal
Poltergeists
A poltergeist is, by definition, a noisy spirit. And we had those. Plural. Added to the noise, they also made rooms change temperature, you could smell them at times, and they also had the habit of moving and stealing things. I think this made me the most nervous. After all, if they can move things, then they could throw things. If they could throw things, they could probably stab and kill you. That's really not a comforting thought and isn't something that should be on an elementary kid's mind, but it definitely was.
I would add my families stories, but every time I've asked, I usually don't get anything new because they're too scared to talk about it. They also tell me to stop talking when I start to share my stories, and abruptly change the subject. I don't know everything that happened in that house to anyone else, because they just never talked about it. I just know that things happened to them, too. All I can really regale is what I experienced, what my friends have told me, and what very, very little my family decided to divulge.
What I know is that I heard things. I saw things. I felt things. I was never at ease at home, no matter how cocky I grew about it. Exposure to hauntings doesn't, in fact, make you immune to them. You don't get used to it, but you can act like you have. Or, alternatively, you can pretend it never happened.
In the case of poltergeists, ours liked to sing. There was a woman in the ground floor bathroom, who sang. The words would get stuck in my head for the rest of the day, and then by the next day, I couldn't remember even one word let alone the melody. I thought it was funny, a ghost in the bathroom, but the bathroom was an addition. It had been, previously, a back sun porch. I assume that the young lady who haunted our home frequented the sun porch in her life. I've no idea who she was. I just know that when I heard her singing, I stayed out of the bathroom.
Aside from footsteps on the stairs and other floors, there were knockings at times, like someone pounding on a wall. And then others, which I assume were children's voices, actually screamed and cried. I remember sitting on my bed, one afternoon, trying to think of what I wanted to take over a friend's house who I was leaving to visit and I suddenly heard a little boy crying followed by, "Mommy, where are you?!" It was coming from the room I was in, from right behind me. I immediately got up and ran right the hell out of the house. And it wasn't the first time that I ran out of the house.
For a while, there were infrequent times when a ghost, again in the bathroom, would slam the bathroom window shut and lock it. We'd often open the window to let out steam or let in fresh air, but one of the ghosts didn't seem to like that. At first I thought it was a burglar who was breaking in. I just heard a loud slam from the bathroom and a thud. I didn't stick around. I grabbed my shoes and ran outside and put them on in the street and went elsewhere. I got yelled at for not being home on a school night, and this was before texting or cell phones, so my parents being at work and knowing their kinds of jobs, I had no way of telling them someone may've broken in.
I also hadn't stuck around to see if someone really had broken in, so when I got a call at my friends house from them looking for me, I had to ask if anything was stolen. Nothing was. There was no forced entry. Everything was fine.
The next time I was alone and heard the window slam down and lock, I actually chanced to take a look. The window I'd just opened was closed. And figuring that the window was faulty, I tried to lift it again. (In some windows, the weights had broken, so I wouldn't have been surprised.) But the window was also locked when I went to lift the window and I tested the weights and the window was fine.
I started to tell my family not to leave the bathroom window open. The ghosts didn't like it. And at length, they came to realise that on random days, there would be a slam from the bathroom, and they'd come to find the window was closed and locked. It just became a fact of life that we had to keep that window closed, or only have it open briefly.
And there were also smells. Some rare days you could smell a woman's perfume and it was very delicately floral. Other rare days, you could smell pipe or cigar tobacco. Neither of the two had any source and would just disappear as quickly as they'd come. I only wish I knew what perfume it was, though, because it smelled very nice.
And then there were the movers and shakers. Ghosts beyond just closing windows, singing, or smoking a pipe. Things would disappear and either never return (and I don't mean one sock in a dryer) or return somewhere that no one had visited in the house in a long time. Already I mentioned my shoes having been moved and my teddy bear, but over time, more things kept doing that.
My grandma had made a clown doll for me. It already creeped me out, as a clown doll reasonably would, but there was nothing exactly otherworldly about it. I did, however, make sure to leave the doll in the shed that was attached to the house, just so I wouldn't have to look at it for a while. When I came back to get it a couple of hours later, it had disappeared. And I never did find it. It just disappeared.
Along those same lines, I used to collect toy animals. (Puppy in my pocket, kitty in my pocket, littlest pet shop, the whole shebang. If it was a small animal figurine, I wanted it or had it.) I had gathered some of my favourites into the living room, including a small brown dog I'd named Shadow. I went upstairs to gather a couple more of the dogs so I could play in the living room. When I came back, all my toy dogs were on the ground. The thing was, Shadow was missing. I looked everywhere for him. I cried (because in the soap opera type time line I had going, he was married to Krista and they had two wonderful puppies together and both were doctors). Despite cleaning and everything else, I never found him. He simply disappeared into thin air.
And then one evening I got yelled at by my mom. I'd used her special chopsticks and she only found one. We emptied the utensil drawer and I went through everything, every fork, spoon, and knife, everything one piece at a time. I was extremely thorough. I checked the dishwasher. Just one chopstick. That was it. My mom helped, we tore the kitchen apart looking for it, and then I asked my fiance to help find it. He picked apart the kitchen drawers just like we both had. No where to be seen.
The following month I opened the utensil drawer and saw both chopsticks right on top. "Oh, good! You found it! Where was it?" "Where was what?" "The other chopstick." "I never found it." my mom and I were living alone together at the time. No one else had been there. "You had to have, it's sitting right here. The pair is sitting right here on top." She came over and looked and looked at me, "I didn't put them there. I never found the chopstick. Are you fucking with me?" "No... I honestly thought you found it somewhere."
The chopstick had reappeared with its match just as it had suddenly disappeared. Neither of us had touched them. I also had a hair decoration disappear from my room, and that never returned.
The day also came where I turned around in my computer chair to grab my CD case. I had three on the table, full of CDs and the other two were sitting there, but my third one was missing. No one wanted my CDs, and I always kept them right there to slide into the CD ROM to listen to while I scripted pages. I didn't find it for over a week, when suddenly something told me to check my room. Now mind you, at this point, I'd moved rooms. My mom was in the attic room and I had the first floor to myself. I most definitely didn't go into my old room and used it mostly as storage. I hadn't been in that room for months. It honestly was creepy in there and I wasn't going to sleep in there anymore.
I slowly made my way into the room, squirmed past boxes of stuff I'd left in there, and on the bed sat my CD case. Not only did it move up a floor all by itself into an abandoned room, something had told me it was there. I go back to the statement that ghosts don't necessarily have to speak in order to communicate with you. Sometimes you hear it in your head, and sometimes they talk to you in dreams. And as crazy as that sounds, because clearly that's a sign of schizophrenia, I have been seen by many psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists, and never once was that even a closely suggested diagnosis. I'm totally sound of mind. It's just how ghosts do it.
And in one dream, one of the ghosts came to me. It was a little girl, she was black, and she apologised for taking my things. "I never had anything nice like the beautiful things you own. I didn't have any toys. I'm sorry I took them." And I can only make the assumption that this girl lived in the carriage house and likely as a slave's child. I told her she didn't need to apologise and that she can take whatever makes her happy, I won't miss it. She said something was coming and she was scared and had to leave and the dream was over. I never saw that clown doll, my toy dog, or that hair decoration again. Nothing went missing again, either. I'd like to think she took them and it gave her peace to move on.
That did not, however, mean that stuff stopped moving. I had about 5 classmates over one day, after school, and I was totally addicted to the internet (and still am), so while they got stuff to eat and drink in the kitchen, I snuck over to the dining room to check my email. While my computer booted up I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. On this glass door case my mom kept plenty of breakables. (Inside the case were ceramics and glass decorations.) On top of the case were a lot of candle sticks with votive holder cups in them. They were held in place by rubber stoppers that took effort to take the votive cups off the sticks. I watched a votive cup lift out of the candle stick, straight up vertically, move in a straight line horizontally, and drop to the floor, shattering.
Because everyone was in the kitchen, I think two others saw it happen, too, but everyone heard the smash and came in and saw me on the other side of the room from the incident. The candle stick itself still sat there on the case while we all stared at the mess on the floor. I cleaned up the mess while a couple of others made quick haste to leave. "What happened?" "Ghosts." "Could it have been anything else?" "Test the other candle stick with the same votive cup. If you can offer me any other explanation, I'll welcome it. I sat here and watched it with my own eyes, but you didn't. So if you can offer some way that the cup managed to come out of the candle stick and move away from the case without it taking the stick with it, knowing I was on the other side of the room when it happened and therefore no human being did it... well, I welcome your explanation." But no one had one to offer. They just avoided coming over again.
And there was a friend's sister who didn't believe any of the stories she was told about my house. She didn't believe in ghosts and she eventually did come over. Her mom wanted me to baby sit her (although honestly, she was too old for a sitter, but I was okay with getting paid for an easy job, so I agreed) and she came over to fetch me. I called up the stairs to my mom, telling her I was leaving and the girl stood on the landing next to me. "Ah... the usual." I said quietly as she stood frozen there. "The door is moving." "I know." "It's opening and closing." "I see that." "No one is UP THERE." "That's pretty obvious." "What the hell?!" "We all told you the house is haunted. I guess you had to see for yourself?" She ran out, I followed after her to sit her for the night. I explained it's probably better for me not to be home, anyway, if the ghosts are acting up.
It usually went the same way, no matter the visitor. A lot of people didn't believe in ghosts or believe my house was haunted until they spent the night, or a couple of nights. A classmate and I were sleeping in one room after I'd moved out of my original room. I turned out the light and she asked I close the door because it felt like someone was watching us from the hall. I closed the door and laid down and moments later, the music box in my original room (that I rarely ever went into) suddenly started playing. "That.... is creepy as fuck." "For that music box to play, you have to pull a stick out to unstopper the spring. Honestly, I haven't even wound that thing up to play." "It's freaking me out. Can you get it to stop?" "Only if I go out there and turn it off." We suffered through the music box playing its sad, quiet tune, and we started to wonder which was worse, the music box or the eerie silence that followed when it finally played its last note.
But I think the house was worse than just the premises. It had a problem with following me.
A poltergeist is, by definition, a noisy spirit. And we had those. Plural. Added to the noise, they also made rooms change temperature, you could smell them at times, and they also had the habit of moving and stealing things. I think this made me the most nervous. After all, if they can move things, then they could throw things. If they could throw things, they could probably stab and kill you. That's really not a comforting thought and isn't something that should be on an elementary kid's mind, but it definitely was.
I would add my families stories, but every time I've asked, I usually don't get anything new because they're too scared to talk about it. They also tell me to stop talking when I start to share my stories, and abruptly change the subject. I don't know everything that happened in that house to anyone else, because they just never talked about it. I just know that things happened to them, too. All I can really regale is what I experienced, what my friends have told me, and what very, very little my family decided to divulge.
What I know is that I heard things. I saw things. I felt things. I was never at ease at home, no matter how cocky I grew about it. Exposure to hauntings doesn't, in fact, make you immune to them. You don't get used to it, but you can act like you have. Or, alternatively, you can pretend it never happened.
In the case of poltergeists, ours liked to sing. There was a woman in the ground floor bathroom, who sang. The words would get stuck in my head for the rest of the day, and then by the next day, I couldn't remember even one word let alone the melody. I thought it was funny, a ghost in the bathroom, but the bathroom was an addition. It had been, previously, a back sun porch. I assume that the young lady who haunted our home frequented the sun porch in her life. I've no idea who she was. I just know that when I heard her singing, I stayed out of the bathroom.
Aside from footsteps on the stairs and other floors, there were knockings at times, like someone pounding on a wall. And then others, which I assume were children's voices, actually screamed and cried. I remember sitting on my bed, one afternoon, trying to think of what I wanted to take over a friend's house who I was leaving to visit and I suddenly heard a little boy crying followed by, "Mommy, where are you?!" It was coming from the room I was in, from right behind me. I immediately got up and ran right the hell out of the house. And it wasn't the first time that I ran out of the house.
For a while, there were infrequent times when a ghost, again in the bathroom, would slam the bathroom window shut and lock it. We'd often open the window to let out steam or let in fresh air, but one of the ghosts didn't seem to like that. At first I thought it was a burglar who was breaking in. I just heard a loud slam from the bathroom and a thud. I didn't stick around. I grabbed my shoes and ran outside and put them on in the street and went elsewhere. I got yelled at for not being home on a school night, and this was before texting or cell phones, so my parents being at work and knowing their kinds of jobs, I had no way of telling them someone may've broken in.
I also hadn't stuck around to see if someone really had broken in, so when I got a call at my friends house from them looking for me, I had to ask if anything was stolen. Nothing was. There was no forced entry. Everything was fine.
The next time I was alone and heard the window slam down and lock, I actually chanced to take a look. The window I'd just opened was closed. And figuring that the window was faulty, I tried to lift it again. (In some windows, the weights had broken, so I wouldn't have been surprised.) But the window was also locked when I went to lift the window and I tested the weights and the window was fine.
I started to tell my family not to leave the bathroom window open. The ghosts didn't like it. And at length, they came to realise that on random days, there would be a slam from the bathroom, and they'd come to find the window was closed and locked. It just became a fact of life that we had to keep that window closed, or only have it open briefly.
And there were also smells. Some rare days you could smell a woman's perfume and it was very delicately floral. Other rare days, you could smell pipe or cigar tobacco. Neither of the two had any source and would just disappear as quickly as they'd come. I only wish I knew what perfume it was, though, because it smelled very nice.
And then there were the movers and shakers. Ghosts beyond just closing windows, singing, or smoking a pipe. Things would disappear and either never return (and I don't mean one sock in a dryer) or return somewhere that no one had visited in the house in a long time. Already I mentioned my shoes having been moved and my teddy bear, but over time, more things kept doing that.
My grandma had made a clown doll for me. It already creeped me out, as a clown doll reasonably would, but there was nothing exactly otherworldly about it. I did, however, make sure to leave the doll in the shed that was attached to the house, just so I wouldn't have to look at it for a while. When I came back to get it a couple of hours later, it had disappeared. And I never did find it. It just disappeared.
Along those same lines, I used to collect toy animals. (Puppy in my pocket, kitty in my pocket, littlest pet shop, the whole shebang. If it was a small animal figurine, I wanted it or had it.) I had gathered some of my favourites into the living room, including a small brown dog I'd named Shadow. I went upstairs to gather a couple more of the dogs so I could play in the living room. When I came back, all my toy dogs were on the ground. The thing was, Shadow was missing. I looked everywhere for him. I cried (because in the soap opera type time line I had going, he was married to Krista and they had two wonderful puppies together and both were doctors). Despite cleaning and everything else, I never found him. He simply disappeared into thin air.
And then one evening I got yelled at by my mom. I'd used her special chopsticks and she only found one. We emptied the utensil drawer and I went through everything, every fork, spoon, and knife, everything one piece at a time. I was extremely thorough. I checked the dishwasher. Just one chopstick. That was it. My mom helped, we tore the kitchen apart looking for it, and then I asked my fiance to help find it. He picked apart the kitchen drawers just like we both had. No where to be seen.
The following month I opened the utensil drawer and saw both chopsticks right on top. "Oh, good! You found it! Where was it?" "Where was what?" "The other chopstick." "I never found it." my mom and I were living alone together at the time. No one else had been there. "You had to have, it's sitting right here. The pair is sitting right here on top." She came over and looked and looked at me, "I didn't put them there. I never found the chopstick. Are you fucking with me?" "No... I honestly thought you found it somewhere."
The chopstick had reappeared with its match just as it had suddenly disappeared. Neither of us had touched them. I also had a hair decoration disappear from my room, and that never returned.
The day also came where I turned around in my computer chair to grab my CD case. I had three on the table, full of CDs and the other two were sitting there, but my third one was missing. No one wanted my CDs, and I always kept them right there to slide into the CD ROM to listen to while I scripted pages. I didn't find it for over a week, when suddenly something told me to check my room. Now mind you, at this point, I'd moved rooms. My mom was in the attic room and I had the first floor to myself. I most definitely didn't go into my old room and used it mostly as storage. I hadn't been in that room for months. It honestly was creepy in there and I wasn't going to sleep in there anymore.
I slowly made my way into the room, squirmed past boxes of stuff I'd left in there, and on the bed sat my CD case. Not only did it move up a floor all by itself into an abandoned room, something had told me it was there. I go back to the statement that ghosts don't necessarily have to speak in order to communicate with you. Sometimes you hear it in your head, and sometimes they talk to you in dreams. And as crazy as that sounds, because clearly that's a sign of schizophrenia, I have been seen by many psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists, and never once was that even a closely suggested diagnosis. I'm totally sound of mind. It's just how ghosts do it.
And in one dream, one of the ghosts came to me. It was a little girl, she was black, and she apologised for taking my things. "I never had anything nice like the beautiful things you own. I didn't have any toys. I'm sorry I took them." And I can only make the assumption that this girl lived in the carriage house and likely as a slave's child. I told her she didn't need to apologise and that she can take whatever makes her happy, I won't miss it. She said something was coming and she was scared and had to leave and the dream was over. I never saw that clown doll, my toy dog, or that hair decoration again. Nothing went missing again, either. I'd like to think she took them and it gave her peace to move on.
That did not, however, mean that stuff stopped moving. I had about 5 classmates over one day, after school, and I was totally addicted to the internet (and still am), so while they got stuff to eat and drink in the kitchen, I snuck over to the dining room to check my email. While my computer booted up I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. On this glass door case my mom kept plenty of breakables. (Inside the case were ceramics and glass decorations.) On top of the case were a lot of candle sticks with votive holder cups in them. They were held in place by rubber stoppers that took effort to take the votive cups off the sticks. I watched a votive cup lift out of the candle stick, straight up vertically, move in a straight line horizontally, and drop to the floor, shattering.
Because everyone was in the kitchen, I think two others saw it happen, too, but everyone heard the smash and came in and saw me on the other side of the room from the incident. The candle stick itself still sat there on the case while we all stared at the mess on the floor. I cleaned up the mess while a couple of others made quick haste to leave. "What happened?" "Ghosts." "Could it have been anything else?" "Test the other candle stick with the same votive cup. If you can offer me any other explanation, I'll welcome it. I sat here and watched it with my own eyes, but you didn't. So if you can offer some way that the cup managed to come out of the candle stick and move away from the case without it taking the stick with it, knowing I was on the other side of the room when it happened and therefore no human being did it... well, I welcome your explanation." But no one had one to offer. They just avoided coming over again.
And there was a friend's sister who didn't believe any of the stories she was told about my house. She didn't believe in ghosts and she eventually did come over. Her mom wanted me to baby sit her (although honestly, she was too old for a sitter, but I was okay with getting paid for an easy job, so I agreed) and she came over to fetch me. I called up the stairs to my mom, telling her I was leaving and the girl stood on the landing next to me. "Ah... the usual." I said quietly as she stood frozen there. "The door is moving." "I know." "It's opening and closing." "I see that." "No one is UP THERE." "That's pretty obvious." "What the hell?!" "We all told you the house is haunted. I guess you had to see for yourself?" She ran out, I followed after her to sit her for the night. I explained it's probably better for me not to be home, anyway, if the ghosts are acting up.
It usually went the same way, no matter the visitor. A lot of people didn't believe in ghosts or believe my house was haunted until they spent the night, or a couple of nights. A classmate and I were sleeping in one room after I'd moved out of my original room. I turned out the light and she asked I close the door because it felt like someone was watching us from the hall. I closed the door and laid down and moments later, the music box in my original room (that I rarely ever went into) suddenly started playing. "That.... is creepy as fuck." "For that music box to play, you have to pull a stick out to unstopper the spring. Honestly, I haven't even wound that thing up to play." "It's freaking me out. Can you get it to stop?" "Only if I go out there and turn it off." We suffered through the music box playing its sad, quiet tune, and we started to wonder which was worse, the music box or the eerie silence that followed when it finally played its last note.
But I think the house was worse than just the premises. It had a problem with following me.
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