Things That Go Bump in The Night

October is my favorite month. My birthday is 6 days from Halloween, the best holiday in my opinion. Full of haunted houses, jack-o-lanterns and corn mazes. My entire family has dressed up for Halloween since I was a kid and walked around the neighborhood to trick-or-treat. I love the ghosts and ghouls, the stories of things that aren’t normal seen. But here is the thing, it’s much more enjoyable when it is someone else telling their story, not you. In the spirit of the spookiest time of the year, I share with you my experiences when the hairs on the back of your neck rise. 

I have always been more sensitive to the other world. My mom has told stories of hearing me play with imaginary friends or looking at something near a wall she couldn’t see. When I was a baby in the early 90s, Mom and Dad would hear me crying through the baby monitor. Sometimes, a woman’s voice would be heard and hum until I fell back asleep. They always thought it was a grandmother nearby that the monitor was picking up. Until they walked into the room and saw the rocking chair moving gently back and forth. 

One of my first memories was when we visited my dad in an old hotel he was restoring for his job at the time. I had to hold my mom’s hand because workers were everywhere and the windows had no glass, just an opening to the ground below. I remember watching as a man in a white shirt and suspenders walk across the doorway to the next room, crossing towards the far wall near the windows. He didn’t look like the people around him, almost as if he was playing dress up with old clothes. When we moved through the doorway I looked in the direction the man had walked and saw there was just a window there. I think it may have been the same hotel that I refused to get in the elevator and my parents had to walk with me down the stairs. 

Everyone just thought I had a very active imagination. Plenty of make believe friends with detailed stories to go with them. It wasn’t until I was 16 we realized they might not have all be make believe. We were living in Florida at the time and I had come home late from a football game at my high school. My younger brother had a friend over that always liked to pick on me. I asked them to please not mess with me tonight, I had to get up early the next day for a soccer game. Both agreed since Brother had to get up early too. I went to bed and fell asleep. 

My bed was in the corner of the room pushed up against windows to the backyard. I woke to the sound of someone knocking on my wooden bed frame. It had pulled me out of a deep sleep and I was not happy. Thinking it was my brother and his friend, I flipped over and yelled what at them. It wasn’t the boys. Standing at the foot of my bed was someone bout twelve years old, but I could see through him to the rest off the room. He was wearing a purple hoodie and jeans, had shaggy blonde hair that framed his face and wore the smile of a kid who knew he got caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. Frozen in terror, I watched as he slowly faded away. I flipped on the light and double checked that no one actually was in my room. Eventually I turned on my TV for the light and background noise and went back to sleep. 

The next morning I asked Brother if they had been in my room the night before, trying to convince myself I didn’t see anything and it was actually him. He told me no, they had gone to bed right after me and slept through the night. I explained what I had seen to the boys (who didn’t believe me at all). Mom walked down the hallway, saying she had seen him too. I had been visited be a spirit in the middle of the night, yay me. 

Strange things started happening around the house after that. We would smell cigarette smoke, even though no one ever smoked inside the house. Footsteps would walk back and forth above us, focused in my room mostly. Glasses would fly off the counter and our girl dog, Georgia, would growl so deep it was terrifying at the stairs when no one was there. I remember one time I was leaning down to get some clothes out of drawer above where I kept my books stacked. I had them by series on top of each other, in order so I knew where it started and ended. I moved to grab a bag near me and a book fell off the shelf. Picking it up, I saw that it was the last book in a series, meaning it had at least 5 big books on top of it. Someone had it pulled it out and no one was in the room but me. The entire family was downstairs one day, when a bag of chips that was on top of the fridge came off and landed three feet away. It was like the bag was hit with enough force to move that distance. 

I was able to feel that there were two different people there. The young boy, who was playful and didn’t cause any harm. And a man. The man was mean, giving off the feeling of wanting to cause pain and intimidate. I think the man was the one that was causing all the problems. It got to the point where we had to sage my room because my hair would be pulled when sleeping or I would feel like someone was staring at me, standing over the bed. I had to sleep with my door open and my TV on to feel secure enough to go to bed. 

My dad had a friend that was psychic. Not one of the phony, give me money and I will make some vague prediction. But a real woman who had met us all and knew what was happening with Dad never telling her. She said that I was special and had to be protected. I was sort of a beacon, or a lighthouse to the spirit world because of my white aura. She said to look into crystals and help me imagine a barrier between my mind, and those that I didn’t want in it. She knew that I was scared and didn’t want anything to happen to me. Dad and I brought home crystals and pure candles to help cleanse my room with the sage. It helped and I didn’t feel overwhelmed to be in it anymore. 

There are so many places all over the world that hold spirits and ghost stories. People take tours and trips just to try to see if they can see something extraordinary. Hotels and Inns even have specific rooms that can be rented for that reason. Savannah, Georgia is claimed to be the most haunted city in America, and I have stayed in one of their more famous hotels. My family was driving back home from a vacation and we decided to stop in Savannah to rest for the night and get outside of the car. I remember driving up to the Marshall House Hotel and thinking it was absolutely beautiful. It is a historic hotel built in 1851 that has served as a hospital on two occasions, one for the yellow fever epidemic and one as a union hospital during the civil war. It looked like something out of a movie with the wrought iron and dark wood. It wasn’t until we had checked in and put our bags in the room that Dad told us it was a haunted hotel. It may have been my imagination or real but I didn’t sleep at all that night. I felt like someone was standing over me, even when I got as close to my mom as I could. I kept hearing someone walking up and down the hallway outside our room with what sounded like spurs on. We were in the middle of downtown, no one needed spurs! I think I even heard the fire alarm go off and no one got up at all. I was not happy with my dad for the rest of the trip home. 

We moved to North Carolina in 2009. The two in Florida didn’t follow but I have seen others. In West Virginia I was driving my family home down a dark road towards our cabin when a blue mist darted in front of the Jeep. Slamming on the brakes, my dad asked why I stopped. I told him that there was something out there, not an animal but a spirit. He didn’t see it, but Mom did from behind me. We have seen a man walk outside the house that isn’t there. 

Recently in my parents’ previous rental house, Mom had her share of a spirit. Sometimes you get a sense of a name that goes with it. I think the young boy was named Richard and the lady in the rental house was Eleanor. Mom would have dreams about a huge plantation with fields and a family. The woman was the wife and would show her places in the house. Mom felt depressed and distraught in the dreams because her husband (not my dad) had killed their son. She said he was a plantation owner and would do horrible things to people. She would have these dreams, the same one multiple times a week. Finally they could feel Eleanor in the house. My younger brother, who lived with them at the time, refused to go in the laundry room by himself. He could feel her and that was where she liked. His friend asked him one night when picking him up who was the woman in the window wearing the white dress. No one was home. 

Mom would hear light footsteps and cries from Eleanor. It was as if she was heartbroken and trying to have her pain noticed by Mom, another with children. My parents did research and found most of their neighborhood, including their house, was part of an old plantation. And the plantation house was still standing and for sale! Mom had to go see if it was the same one from her dreams. The minute she drove on to the property, she knew it was the same. It held a feeling of darkness and despair that echoed from the walls. That is what she told me afterward. When the agent began moving towards the basement, Mom heard a loud scream saying NO! It was after that Mom left. I even heard Eleanor whistle when helping Mom in the kitchen. She was a kind spirit. 

You may think I am crazy, that I am making this all up. That’s okay. I don’t live my life based on what others believe, only what I do. It isn’t something that I share with the general public, but it something that is part of me. It has taken my a long time to be able to know if it is just my mind playing tricks or if it really is someone trying to contact the living world. I don’t share this with the hopes that you will automatically believe me, most people don’t. It is what I have experienced, and I am a first hand witness to thing that go bump in the night.