READERS TALES
My Experiences
With The Paranormal
Hi, my name is Samantha, and
I've experienced many things that could not be explained from a scientific
viewpoint throughout my life. The earliest thing that I know of happening to me
occurred at a cemetery in a ghost town in Wyoming around 1983, when I was two.
My parents told me that I was insistently pointing at a particular gravestone,
declaring "baby" repeatedly. When they got a closer look at the gravestone, it
was indeed a baby's grave.
The next brush with the
paranormal that I distinctly remember occurred when I was five, in October or
November of 1986. We lived in rural Monticello, IN, and my mother went to work
very early in the morning. My dad would get me ready for school, and prepare my
baby brother, who had just been born in April, for the baby-sitter. One morning
I was standing with my dad at the changing table while he was getting my brother
dressed. We heard someone open the back door and holler "Mick!" My dad's name
is Mike, but a lot of his family refers to him as "Mick"
short for Mickey). My
dad told me to go see who it was, so I ran to the backdoor, but there was no one
there. Now, I was only five, and it was still dark outside, so needless to say
I was a little spooked. I ran back and told dad, and he checked too, but no one
was there. When I was older and I discussed this with my parents, we agreed
that it must have been one of my father's deceased uncles.
The previous encounter happened
in a house we lived in from the time my brother was born until I was about
eight. One of my chores was to feed the cat. His food and water dishes were in
the basement, which was really big. Half of it was finished, there was a
wet-bar that my dad used as a workshop to put together his RC airplanes. The
other half was very rough, just the hot water heater and water softener and some
storage. This is where the cat's dishes were kept. I very distinctly remember
how uneasy I felt in that room, it always felt like someone was staring at me
from behind the hot water heater. I also remember waking up one night to see
one of my dolls walking around and bumping into things... (this causes me to
shudder even now). Also, one night my parents and I awoke to hear what sounded
like someone fanning out a bundle of papers with their thumb (like if you
flipped a book open and kept your thumb on the pages as they fanned out).
When I was eight we moved to
another house in the country outside of Brookston, IN. It was an ancient
farmhouse on about eighty acres of woods, and I particularly remember two
terrifying things happening to me there when I was ten. The first was while I
was walking in the woods with my brother and our neighbor. They were both about
the same age (six), and soon ran off by themselves. As I passed the remains of
an old well in the woods, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I
looked over my shoulder and saw an old man dressed in old Quaker clothing
staring back at me. I bolted, and when I got a couple hundred yards away, I
turned and looked back, and no one was there. Secondly, one night before I fell
asleep, I heard the wardrobe in my room open. Someone walked across the floor
and climbed into bed with me, but no one was there. I have never forgotten the
eerie unsettling atmosphere of that house and the property surrounding it.
Several years later when I was
around thirteen we rented the Methodist parsonage in the tiny town of Yeoman,
IN. The man that donated the house to the church was an invalid and died in the
house. I asked for, and received a Ouija board for Christmas, and my friends
and I were more than eager to conduct seances with it. Most of these were
carried out in my bedroom, which had a door leading into the attic. We
contacted the deceased owner of the house. After that, there would be thumps on
the door to the attic, and several times I woke up in the morning to find the
locked door standing open. One night as I lay awake, the gooseneck reading lamp
clamped to my headboard switched on and off repeatedly of its own accord.
A couple of years later we moved
down the road to a house sitting on the edge of Hollow Acres golf course. The
house had been built by our landlord's parents in law, who had owned the golf
course, and the house the landlord lived in, right next door. The house was all
on one level, as the owners were advancing in age and couldn't get up and down
the stairs as well as they had used to. I am not aware of whether or not they
died in the house, but many times at night we would all wake up to hear someone
tromping up and down the hallway.
When I was 19, I moved to
Wichita KS to be with the man who is now my husband. When I had our baby in
January of 2002, we moved back to Pratt, KS to live in the apartment in his
parents' basement (big fun, let me tell you). My husband and two of his friends
used to do incantations and summoning of demons in the room where we had the
nursery (I didn't have any knowledge of this prior to putting him in there). We
lived there for two years, and I have never experienced as many things as I did
when we lived there. We could always hear someone moving around, and touching
things in the front room of the basement, where the baby slept. After being
confronted several times, my husband admitted that they may have forgotten to
close a circle, or send something back where it came from. This particular
spirit or energy was restricted to the front room and the small kitchen of the
basement. Many nights I would lay in bed and watch the shadow in the kitchen
pacing back and forth. the entrance to our room must have been sealed to it,
because it would stand in the doorway for long periods of time.
The upper level of the house was
also haunted. When the in-laws were out of town my husband and I would stay up
there pretty late, to watch television, or just hang out. One night my husband
was in the bathroom, and I was sitting in the living room. I heard someone
knock at the back door, and was a little wary to open it considering that it was
around midnight, and no one ever came to the back door. Whatever it was,
knocked again, and the cats ran into the kitchen and stared, transfixed at the
door. I figured that someone must be there, so I opened the door, and no one
was there. One evening when I was alone in the house with my son, he ran off, I
assumed, to play in his toy room. I heard someone banging on the bathroom door,
and as my son has a habit of closing himself in the bathroom, I thought it was
him. It sounded just like him hitting the door, at his level with an open
palm. I opened the door to let him out, and he ran up behind me, scaring the
holy hell out of me. No one was in the bathroom. Another thing that happened
was shortly before we moved out. I was alone with my son during the afternoon,
and he had laid down for a nap on the couch. I stepped out the back door to
smoke a cigarette. About halfway through it, I heard a child coughing and
choking and crying "mommy" from inside the house. I ran in, and my son was
sound asleep on the couch in the front of the house.
We now live in an apartment on
the other side of town, and apart from the occasional sound of someone talking
in our son's bedroom (he doesn't EVER sleep in there, and we're currently
discussing switching rooms with him), and rippling of space, as though someone
was walking through the house, not much happens here.
thanks,
-Samantha.