ARE GHOSTS FOR REAL?

Books and movies with a paranormal theme are quite popular now: those with ghosts, vampires, zombies, werewolves, witches and other paranormal or fearful beings. I haven’t heard much about aliens from another planet lately, but at one time there were serious believers in them and there probably still are. With any topic – even climate change – you’ll find believers and non-believers.

I’ve always been pretty much a skeptic although some of the articles and stories from people who claimed they’d actually been examined by aliens made me wonder a little. My mother believed in them. For me the other paranormal beings I never considered them anything more than something spooky for Halloween. But as I grew older that started to change as I listened to the stories I heard from family and friends and to a lesser extent from my own experience.

My grandmother was a fearless woman, who one night chased off a peeping Tom with a broom when my grandfather was on a fishing trip. However, after my grandfather died, she saw and heard the doorknob turning on a side porch door. She got out of bed and checked to see who was out there. Not only was no one there, but there were no footsteps in the snow on the porch and no wind to cause a rattling. Sometime after my grandmother died, my cousin Linda’s husband was working on the house one evening prior to their moving in when he heard a shout coming from the basement. He packed up in a hurry and left. When he told my cousin about it and imitated the voice, she said it sounded just like her grandpa, who he had never met. One evening after they moved in Linda went into labor with her second child and my aunt, a very unimaginative person, came to stay with their first born child, a one-year-old. Towards morning, the baby awoke and was fussing and my aunt lay there listening and wondering if the child would go back to sleep since it was still dark. Then she heard the back door open and footsteps coming across the floor. She called out to her son-in-law asking if they’d had a boy or girl and there was no answer. So she got up to check. There was no one there and the door was still locked.

Fast forward to the old house I bought after my divorce. My son, never given to flights of fancy, was in the basement working one evening with another man on replacing the wiring when they both heard footsteps. He called out and getting no answer went up to check. No one was there.

When I finally moved into a house not completely finished inside, I would see shadows out of the corner of my eye; but nothing more. I didn’t mention it to my youngest daughter, Mary, because I didn’t want to spook her. But early one morning after working a midnight shift when it was not quite light, she was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast and she saw something white at the foot of the steps going upstairs. It was the shape of a man with what looked like a dark belt in the middle. At another time she heard men’s voices talking where the back door originally was, and once she even heard someone riding a horse through the living room. It had to be Chick, the former owner who had lived there over fifty years before he died. He raised Arabians and bred them. I’ve never seen or heard him, and I know he’s gone now, but sometimes when I’m relaxing in my bath at night, I hear the low murmur of men’s voices coming through the wall in the direction of the library. It’s sort of like talk radio, but so low no words can be made out.

My sister-in-law told me of a time when she was almost asleep and had turned over not realizing she was so close to the edge of the bed. She almost fell out when she felt a small child’s hand on her back pressing to keep her from falling. Many years ago, a small child had fallen down a well on their 1842 farm and drowned.

A few years ago, my daughter Mary’s best friend, Tracy, from grade school, died of ovarian cancer. She was a great friend with a terrific sense of humor who liked to play pranks. Even though my daughter had moved to California years before, they stayed in touch joking and laughing over the phone or on visits when Mary came home. Long before she found out she had cancer, Tracy would tell my daughter if she died, she’d come back to haunt her. Sometime soon after she died, Mary was sitting quietly in her apartment when a large candle inside a glass jar suddenly went out. There was no wind and no reason for it to go out. At another time the water faucet in the kitchen started dripping for a while on its own and then just as suddenly stopped, and her cat started staring at a wall and growling. A few days later when she was at work on the midnight shift and feeling sad, she brought Tracy’s obituary up on the computer to show a nurse she was working with. It was then that a clock on a wall near one of her patients came loose and fell. Mary and the other nurse had never known that to happen before. Later that evening another nurse, one who had given Mary trouble ever since Mary had started there, dashed out of the break room where she’d been taking a nap saying the room was haunted. A chair had started rattling and moving. She said she'd never go in that room again. Mary had complained about this nurse to Tracy in the past. Those things stopped after that, but Mary feels Tracy was letting her know she was there.

Do I believe ghosts communicate with the living? I don’t think so except maybe briefly as in the case of Tracy and also a few experiences my son, daughters and I had after my son died. At one of my Sisters in Crime meetings we had a mother/daughter paranormal team come who had been featured on some ghost hunters TV show. They said the vast majority of cases of  a haunting they get called about have a rational reason for what seems to be a haunting and it’s not ghosts. However, they do believe there are actual hauntings. What they seemed to think and I tend to believe, too, is it’s someone who has not accepted their death and can’t leave a place they feel is their home. Maybe Chick was upset with what we were doing to his house. We totally gutted it. But he must have come to accept it because he seems to be gone now and I’m alone again. I think.

Have you ever had a paranormal experience?   Do you think ghosts are real?