The House

The House.

It was the summer of 1981. My parents were both wanting to buy their first home and get out of the city, so they started looking at homes in the country. They found a home outside a small farming community in south central Kansas. The house was inexpensive, it had sat empty for many years. The previous owner lived across the field, nearly a mile by road. He had purchased the home in hopes of fixing it up and living in it, but his new bride had no desire to live in such a home, she was interested in nothing but new.

The house, we would later find out, was completed in 1882. It stood on the original homestead of the Ephriam James family. A small one story shanty stood on the property, the family living in the basement for the most part. The basement would become the footprint for the future place they would call home. The house was a 2 story home, a common T shaped farmhouse, very common in the Midwest. It had gingerbread in the eaves and what made it stand out most to my parents, was that it had a very ornate walnut staircase, something you never see in Midwest farm homes. It had belonged to the same family for the last 80 years until the previous owner bought it at auction.

When we pulled up into the driveway, the home had that vacant property look. The grass was knee high, many of the windows were covered and there were bars on the windows to keep kids from breaking in. You could tell it was once a proud home, but now stood as only a shadow of itself. I had already had a history of seeing and feeling things that others couldn’t and my senses were about to get their first taste of the place I would be calling home for the next decade.

It was a warm spring day when we first set eyes on the home. The realtor met us there, he was a nice man, the town’s only realtor/auctioneer. He greeted us warmly and proceeded to show us the home. The one thing I remember about the home was that it was very cold inside. Outside the temperature was nearly 85, inside I would said it was in the 50's. The home had the smell of a place that had sat empty for sometime. As we walked through the house, it just felt wrong. I was just a kid and had some experiences with spirits in the past, but nothing that would help me with what I would be dealing with.

My mother and I walked upstairs as my father and the realtor went out and walked the land. I was overcome by the feeling that someone didn’t want us there, so I started to express my concerns to my mother. She was in love with the home from the first site and didn’t want to hear anything negative. The movie The Amityville Horror had recently been advertised and the theme song was stuck in my mind. I started to sing the theme song to it, my mother became instantly frantic. She knew that I was seeing things, but refused to think about it, knowing that she really loved the charm of the home and wanted to make it ours. After my parents left the home, they decided it was what they were looking for and decided to go ahead with plans to purchase. Thirty days quickly went by and the home was theirs. I was excited, it would be fun to live in the country, to have room to play and explore.


The first day at the new house

The first day at the new house was one of excitement and exploration. My father had his friend over to help do some work on the home before we moved in. My father’s friend brought his son Dave, I had grown up riding motorcycles with him and we both were rough and tumble kids. Dave and I checked out the property and ended up in what would become my first bedroom there. It was upstairs and you could see for what seemed like miles. Living in a one story home in the city, I never saw much more than forty feet outside my window, now my nearest neighbor was a mile away. We were up in my room playing with some toy cars and the door slammed shut. The home had a transom above every door for circulation, the room didn’t become hot and we didn’t bother opening the door. Dave’s and my father, decided to go to town to get something and yelled up if we would like to go, we yelled back that we would just stay and play. They left and a few moments later, we decided to go outside. I went to the door to open it and the knob fell off in my hand. There was no way out and we were in the home alone. The room seemed to become warmer as we were in there, most likely from nerves kicking in from being trapped and alone. We had decided to try to climb out the transom, but it was just too tall for us to reach. We sat there yelling until our fathers arrived. They ran upstairs and let us out of the room. We all had a good laugh and off we went to explore. The first day in that room started off bad, I just never knew how much worse it could become.

There were three bedrooms upstairs, the home was shaped like a T. The bedroom on the South was to be my parent’s bedroom, it was the bottom of the T. My room was to be the East bedroom and the West room was to be storage. The South and East bedroom both had a light fixture and electrical outlets. They had been redecorated in the 1950's and had most likely always been used as bedrooms. The West room was different. It was painted a dark red almost purple, ceiling and floor. It had no light fixture, it had no electrical outlets and it had a small latch lock on the door to lock it from the outside. It was clear it had not been used as a bedroom for quite sometime. I liked the East room, it had the best view. You could see barns in the distance and great views of the moon at night.

The first couple of months were used getting the house clean and meeting the locals. The nearby farmer that my parents had purchased the home from stopped by frequently to check the progress. He had really liked the home, but his wife wanted new. He had visions of fixing up the home and was interested to learn my parents had the same vision. He was a nice man who’s family was the largest farming family in a three county region. He had purchased the home and the 360 acres it sat on. He told my parents, who were avid antique hunters that the home was just full of antiques when he bought it but they meant nothing to him, so he dug a huge hole out back of the home and filled it with all of the belongings of the home. As years went by, things he buried would work their way back up to the surface and I would retrieve them.

He explained the house had sat empty the last 3 years, none of the locals were interested in the home, he never said why. My first real experience that something truly wasn’t right with the home was during the second month. I had been asleep when I woke up to the feeling that I was covered with bugs. I jumped out of bed and turned on the light, there was nothing. I shut off the light and fell back to sleep. Within an hour, I woke up again to the feelings of bugs all over me. I jumped out of bed and the floor was gone. I felt as though I was falling and grabbed the side of the bed for dear life. I was screaming and my parents came running in and turned on the lights. The floor instantly felt under foot again and I spent the rest of the night in their room.

I went back to my room the following night and that is when I started to notice the lights. Over the period of the next year, I would often see lights in the room across the staircase from mine, the West room. This is the room that was painted all red, never had electricity in it and was locked from the outside. At night, I would watch as lights seemed to dance around in the room. I could see the lights through the transom above it’s door and through the hole of the skeleton key. It looked as though someone were playing with flashlights in there, but with blinds pulled and my parents in bed, I knew it couldn’t be the flashlights. I would tell me parents about the lights and they would just tell me it must have been a passing car. A passing car in the country? Blinds pulled and lights showing from all directions? It wasn’t a passing car and even at the age of 11, I knew better.

As time went on, the light show increased. In the evenings, I found myself watching the lights as they bounced around in that room. Up and down the walls and across the ceiling. I was afraid, but there was nothing I could do. I just had to sit and watch or do what I learned to do many times, cover my head with my blanket and hope for the best. The house had no upstairs air conditioning or heating, it was built in the 1800's and it just didn’t exist back then. My parents had picked the South room and it was very hot in there that summer. The sun would beat down on the South side of the home all day and really get their room too warm to get comfortable. They decided they wanted my room because it was cool and in order to get my room, they said they would fix up the West room anyway I liked if I would let them have the East room. I was scared to death of the West room, it rarely was unlocked and I had spent more than a year watching lights bounce around in there. You can only imagine what I told them. You have yourselves a deal.

The Room

We had been in the house for a little over a year when they decided I needed to change rooms. The house had not been acting up all that much yet. My parents had been stripping wall paper and bringing the home up to liveable standards that first year. The summer had been very hot, but the first winter was rough. There was only one heater in the entire house and it was in a downstairs room. We all had to sleep in that one room to keep warm, it was the original kitchen to the home, but was now a living room. Record low temperatures we recorded that first winter and it made for interesting living conditions. There was a stick near the toilet so that the ice could be broken in order to flush it and baths were taken very quickly. You could see your breath in most areas of the home, going to school each day was a treat. As soon as winter passed, my parents decided it was time to get started on my new room.

The home had a pitched roof upstairs that made the rooms resemble tents. I wanted a space mural on my wall and the rest of the walls painted white. My father installed outlets and lights in the room and put shutters on the window for privacy. I really liked the look of the room, I was very nervous about sleeping in the room, but I figured that nothing could really hurt me. My parents had purchased new furniture for the room, including one of those 70's style egg shaped wicker chairs that hangs from a stand. I really liked that chair, I could swing around in it and pretend I was exploring space. I soon found that I could sleep in the room and that the lights had not appeared since moving in.

I guess it all started at night as I would lie down waiting to fall asleep. My floor had been covered with carpet, so I never heard footsteps, what I did hear were floorboards. The floorboards would creak when walked on. You could hear them squeak and creak under the carpet whenever anyone would walk across the room. There was an especially loud floorboard near the door to the room, I knew to step over that spot as to not make the loud squeak. At night, I would hear the floor start creaking. I told my parents about it and they said that it was just the boards going back into position from walking on it that day. It sounded like a good answer and it worked to explain the nightly noises for a while. As time went on, the floorboards started to get more active. Nightly, I would hear the sound of the loud floorboard by the door, then hear the boards creak closer and closer to my bed. They would get near the bed, travel around the room and then the loud board by the door would creak and all would be quiet. I never saw anything, just heard and smelled something. I would smell the sweet smell of lilacs whenever the boards would creak. As in my other room, I would put my head under the covers and wait for all to pass.

This continued for months, the nightly visits. In the meantime, my parents decided to take out two interior walls in the house to create a better traffic flow. Shortly after the walls were removed, things started to pick up. I was always home alone in the mornings until the school bus would pick me up. Often in the mornings, the smell of lilac perfume seemed to follow me around the house. The smell would sometimes get so intense, I would almost become sick to my stomach. Something was following me around the house in mornings, never letting itself be seen, but keeping it’s presence known. It always felt as though it were protecting me, keeping an eye out for me in the mornings to make sure all went well.

Grandmother comes to stay.

When I was around twelve, my grandmother retired and came to live with us. She was very religious and a very level headed woman. My parents had told her that I was having experiences with the home and she told them there was nothing to worry about, she didn’t believe in ghosts and figured I had an overactive imagination. She moved into the room under mine. It used to be a parlor, but had been divided at some point in history to put in a restroom. It was nice having her around, she was fun to be with and helped to keep me calm when I would get nervous with the house acting up. She had a large garden in the field that could be seen from my bedroom window and always loved to garden and read.

Knowing she was just downstairs was a comfort, but it didn’t stop things from happening. Ever since the walls were removed, the house seemed to become more agitated with us. It went from a feeling of being watched all the time, to more of a feeling that it really didn’t want us around, this was mid 1982. The floorboards in my room were a nightly occurrence and I guess it decided to step things up a notch. The hanging chair in my room was a favorite of mine. I loved swinging in that chair and all my friends wanted one as well. You could swing in the chair or bounce, it hung from it’s stand by a spring. At night the floorboards would creak as usual, but suddenly my visitor decided it needed to stay a while. The floorboards would creak to the bed, then creak over to the chair. The chair was wicker and would make cracking noises anytime anyone sat in it. I would be lying there and the floorboards would stop, then suddenly the chair would start to crackle as if being sat in. It would crackle and then the crackling would stop. By this time, I was under the covers, waiting for things to stop. I didn’t much like this and really just hoped if I didn’t pay it any attention, it would just go away. Well it didn’t go away, in fact it enjoyed swinging as well. The chair would start a slow swinging motion, side to side. The chair swinging under it’s own power was frightening enough, but soon it learned a new trick.

Since the chair hung from a spring, it could rotate in a complete circle. On many nights, the crackling of the chair would be followed with the chair slowly turning to face my bed. It would then slowly swing side to side, the wicker crackling as it swung. Needless to say, that was just more than I was really able to stand. I usually would end up sleeping on the floor in my parents room on the nights that would happen. Before long, I found myself doing strange things. I would lock myself in the room at night, thinking that it would not be able to enter. Well, all that ended up happening was that I would end up locking myself in the room with it. I learned to not be afraid, but never at really at ease. This all transpired quite some time before I ever saw the spirit.

Background Info

During this time, my parents were still remodeling the home. After removing layers of wallpaper we found, “Completed April 1882.” The James family had written on the lath and plaster walls when the upstairs had been completed. We knew little of the James family, only that they had built the house. The house was like no other farmhouse in the area, it was built entirely of oak and square nails. It has an ornate walnut hand turned staircase, something you don’t see in Kansas farm homes. The basement walls were made of two foot thick limestone blocks, the house was very sturdy. Even though the house was sturdy, very large limestone slabs had been used in the basement as a floor, these would easily rock as though something were underneath. The home had been purchased around 1900 by the Blankenship family, a very large and influential farm family in the area for many years. They continued to live there until 1977, then the home was purchased by the fellow that my parents purchased it from. It had originally been a very large farm, but over the years, the land was broken up and the farm eventually died.

As the first couple of years passed, Blankenship family members would stop in and ask if they could see the progress on the home. The farm home had always been white as long as anyone could remember. The first thing my parents did was to paint the home yellow, the trim creme and brown and all the doors bright red. Painting doors bright red convinced the locals that the people that bought the old Blankenship farm must indeed worship the devil, it didn’t help that we had a mean black dog and 3 black cats. No one knew us in the tight knit community and they weren’t used to such bright displays of color, especially bright red doors. It wasn’t until the second or third Christmas that my father, an avid Christmas light fan, decorated the house from top to bottom and they all new we indeed did not worship the devil. Over time we heard of many family stories of the Blankenships, but no one knew of the James family. It was fun to hear family stories, but some stories weren’t so fun to hear about.

The home had been labeled the spook house by the locals. For years, townsfolk would drive out and watch as lights flew around the home, going in and out of the windows. We had often wondered why cars would often park out in our driveway at night when we first moved in. They would often take off in a panic if we turned on lights when they weren’t expecting it. Many people came from out of town and didn’t realize a family was living in there, they must have thought the ghosts were about to get them.

Grandmother moves out.

By 1984, the home was coming along fine. Many of the rooms had been remodeled, the exterior repainted and heat and air conditioning had been installed upstairs and down. My parents worked hard to make the home look as though it would have at the time of it’s build. Many times, my mother would already have wallpaper picked out for a particular room before starting to scrape the old paper off. On more than one occasion, the first paper found under all the layers would nearly match the paper she had picked out to cover the room. In the hallway alone, there were 11 layers of wallpaper, the paper she had picked matched nearly perfectly. The strange habit of picking very similar styles of decoration, compared to the original decor, happened many times as the years went by. It was years after my parents had completed the outside that a neighbor brought a picture of the home dated 1884. The home looked very much like the home looked in that photo. My parents had planted bushes in the same location, put yard decor up in the same locations and even added things to the home itself that we never knew were missing from the original design, until we saw the sketching. It was clear that my parents were being guided in many of their decisions, looking back, we all were.

During this time, my grandmother started to experience things in the home. She never told anyone about them until she moved out, she didn’t want to alarm anyone. On more than one occasion, she would hear people walking up and down the stairs to the basement, doors slamming and things in her room had been moved. She decided that she was no longer comfortable living in the home and had a talk with my mother about it. She told her that she never believed in ghosts and never was one to scare easily, but there was something in the home and it she believed it to be evil. She moved into town.





Back on my own, not really.

The home had taken on quite a change since the remodel. Let me digress back to the removal of interior walls. It has been said that homes that spirits occupy can become restless with simple remodeling projects. When walls are removed, homes that have never had a history of spirits have been known to become quite active. My home was already quite active before, but the spirit actually seemed to be a protector, now there were other elements in the house.

Shortly after grandmother moved out, my mother started to experience something that I would as well, though much later in life. Every morning for weeks at a time, she would wake up at 3:33 a.m. This always alarmed her. She would try to trick the clock. She would lay in bed after waking up, and then look at the clock only after a period of time had passed, 3:33. She would look at the clock the minute she woke up, 3:33. She would set the clock ahead or behind by a few minutes, 3:33. There is nothing she could do to stop the 3:33 awakenings. Eventually, she would return to normal sleeping patterns, only to return to the 3:33 awakenings later in the year. The troubling part to her was 666 has always been a popular association with the devil and half of that being 333. Many believe 333 to also be a number associated with the devil, but there are some that also see it as a symbol representing the father, son and holy ghost. My mother tried to think of it as the latter, not wanting to think that something evil was causing her to awaken at that time.

Strange smells started to appear in the home that had never been present before. In the past, the sweet smell of lilac perfume would seem to follow me around, but this new smell wasn’t the sweet smell of lilacs, it was the smell of cigar smoke mixed with what smelled like road kill. The smell would appear many times during the weeks that mother would be waking up at 3:33. The smell would usually be in the same area of the home and there was never an explanation for it. Above the area, there was living space, below was the basement, this ruled out a dead mouse or something similar. The smell always seemed to appear only during the times of the 3:33 episodes and happened during the remaining years we lived in the home.

To add to the smells, the lights began again. The house had earned a name years ago of being the “spook house” because of the strange lights and I had only witnessed them in what ended up my bedroom. The lights had started to travel around the home in the evenings. Many times while in bed, I would see what appeared to be car lights going down the wall. At first I wouldn’t think anything about it, but many times the lights would go down a wall and then behind a door and stay there. I would sit and watch and then suddenly the lights would just vanish. Once while reading in my room, the wood shutters that were on the inside started to rattle as though someone were trying to open them. I went over to the shutters and opened them to find a bright white light just outside the window, it quickly flew out towards the barn and vanished.

Other times, the lights would float through the house and end up going out a window, then circle around the home and often sit up in the trees. The lights actually seemed to like attention and to play. They would interact with one another and in one instance, seemed to appear on cue. A friend and I were talking outside and suddenly a light ball appeared just behind him. He saw my face light up and thinking someone was pulling into the driveway, he turned to see who was there. The moment he turned, the light vanished and he asked what had happened. I explained to him what had happened and he scoffed. Minutes later, we were talking again and his face lit up. As his face filled with light, I could also see the blood drain from his face, he was scared to death. He suddenly started screaming and ran to the house. I started laughing and told him not to worry, they wouldn’t hurt him. He was shaking and described how suddenly a bright light appeared right behind my head. I told him yes, that is just what had happened to him as well, but he needed proof in order to believe and that night the spirits accommodated

In my mind, the lights were good. They seemed to keep an eye on the place and would many times just sit and watch us. They never did anything that I would consider evil, they were just curious and I always felt they were standing guard against something. For some reason, the home had turned into a battle ground of sorts between good and evil.

My guardian.


Things had continued to progress in 1984, the lights were getting more active, the smell had been coming and going and my mother was waking up at 3:33 more often. 1985 arrived and with it, new activities. In the mornings before school, the normal routine of being followed around by the smell of lilac perfume was all too common and the floorboard and swinging chair had still been active as well. Many times if I would turn quickly as I walked, I would suddenly get ice cold. I wasn’t sure at first what that meant, but I had a good feeling that I was indeed walking through what ever was following me and it would be much later before I was able to confirm that suspicion. When school was out for the summer, I was home alone much more often. Grandmother was living in town, my parents were both at work and I being an only child was left to fend for myself during the day. Many mornings I would awaken to the sound of my mother calling for me from downstairs, I would get up hoping to find that she had cooked breakfast. I would run down the stairs and announce that I was awake, only to find that my parents had left hours ago for work. This happened many times over the years, I would be in bed and wake up with a woman calling, “Rich.........Rich”. At first I would often think it was my mother, until I would roll over and look at the clock. It was disappointing, there was never breakfast waiting for me, always just an empty house with the smell of lilacs.

This never really scared me, just a reminder that I was not alone. Another reminder that I was not alone happened that summer. My uncle had been keeping his 1965 GTO out at our home while he was away on vacation. I was in my room with the windows open, it was a warm summer night. I was reading when I thought I felt someone tap on my shoulder. I ignored it thinking it must have been a bug or something. The tap suddenly happened again, but this time with enough force to make me shake my book. I spun around and something caught my eye outside. From the light in the driveway, I could see there was a man with a rifle down at my uncle’s GTO looking up at me as I had been reading. Apparently, he had been out there watching me and had plans of stealing the car. I ran downstairs and told my father there was a man with a gun out by the GTO. He grabbed his shotgun and threw me the keys to our Jeep. We ran out the door and the man took off running, my father took off running after him and told me to take off after him in the Jeep. By the time I got to the Jeep, someone waiting down the road started their car and was waiting for the man. My father was too far behind to catch him and as I got to the road in the Jeep, I could see the man jump in the car and it hurried off. There was no way to catch him and we never had the problem again. My guardian had saved the day. When I returned to my room, I did something I had never done, I said thank you to my spirit friend, looking back, I am not so sure that was a good idea.


I think we may have company.

Now that the house was nearly complete, it seems we started to have more company than usual. My aunt and uncle from Texas came to visit for a week that summer. They enjoyed being out in the country, both had lived in Kansas City and then Houston for years, so getting out of the big city was a pleasant change for them. They seemed to enjoy themselves for the first couple of days, but soon you could tell that something was bothering them. They would sit at the table in the mornings and just sort of stare at us for a while before eating. Finally, on the last day my aunt asked the question, “Who has been getting sick every night?”. My mother, father and I just sort of looked at each other, none of us had been getting sick. We asked her what she had been hearing. She said that nightly, someone had been violently ill downstairs. We had not heard these sounds nor had been sick the entire time. We told them that none of us had been sick, but that didn’t seem to sit well with them. Later we learned that my aunt was so convinced that someone in the home had been sick nightly, that she told other family members my mother must be forcing herself to throw up at each evening. We tried to convince them that none of us had been throwing up the week they stayed with us, but they would hear nothing of it, they had heard the sounds with their own ears and had made up their minds.

Later that fall, my cousin from Los Angeles came to stay a couple of days with us. She was a very nice and level headed woman who was highly educated. She stayed in the same room my aunt and uncle had stayed in, the room directly under mine that my grandmother had lived in. It was late fall and there were Christmas items in the room, including a ceramic snowman. After the first night we noticed the snowman had been moved. She had a conversation with my mother, basically asking if we had ever noticed anything odd about the home. My mother said yes that at times, it seemed to act up. My cousin described how during the night, the snowman would turn to look at her. At first she thought she was imaging things, but as the night progressed, the snowman would seem to move slightly so that it was always looking at her, even if she moved. She said she couldn’t sleep, so she ended up moving the snowman to a place where it couldn’t be seen from the bed. The next night, she again put the snowman out where it could be seen and again, she said it would slightly move so that the snowman’s gaze would fall upon her. She ended up removing the snowman from the room and it stayed out until she left.

This was very strange for her, she had never experienced such things before visiting us and being in the medical field, always tried to look at things from a scientific point of view. What really troubled her was upon returning to L.A., she experienced strange events in her own home. For a month, lights continued to blow up in her home, not just burn out. She had no previous problems with light bulbs, but for a solid month, light bulbs would literally blow up and she had nightly dreams about our home and the snowman. She called my mother several times to see if we knew how to make this stop. My mother offered to fly out to California and see if it would follow her back home, but shortly after the conversation, all stopped. Years later, mom found another one of those snowmen and thought about sending it to her as a joke, but she never actually sent it.


Sometimes you need just to get away.

For some reason, the house really started to get active that year. I had been hearing something walk around my bedroom for years, but the rest of the house always seemed to stay inactive for the most part until that summer. My mother and I started to hear footsteps in the home. They would sometimes be heard going up the wooden steps of the basement, grandmother had heard this often and we were hearing it more and more now as well. The steps sounded heavy and labored, they would travel up the stairs slowly, as if an old man were fighting to make it up each step. Many times we would fling the door to the basement open, expecting to see something, but each time there would be nothing there. This became a more common occurrence, but soon it decided to travel outside just the basement stairwell.

I had spent the night at a friend’s house in town and it was close to 8 a.m. on a Saturday. He and I decided to go ride bikes and we happened to pass my grandmother’s home. My mother was there, which was odd for her to be there that early in the morning. I stopped in to see what was going on and something was clearly wrong. My mother, who would never leave the house without looking just perfect, was sitting in the living room and looked horrible. Her hair wasn’t fixed, she had no makeup on and she was wearing some of my dirty clothes. She was all shaken up and told me what had happened.

Dad had left to go in to work around 6 that morning and she stayed up after he left, to clean the house. She was out in the kitchen when she thought she heard something. She went and checked all the doors and they were locked. She went back out into the kitchen and again she thought she heard someone in the home and then started to smell the cigar smoke. She became nervous, but didn’t think all that much about it. She said suddenly, it sounded like it was running through the home upstairs and then running down the staircase, hitting walls as it came down. The laundry room was attached to the kitchen, so she quickly put on the only clothes she could find, went out the kitchen door, locked it and hurried into town to my grandmother’s house.

I had just turned 15, but I really wasn’t all that afraid of the house. I had always felt things while at home and knew the house was active, but I just had never really considered it to be all that dangerous of a place. I told her that I would go back home with her and we would check it out. When we arrived at the home, I went to the door and it was unlocked. My mother swore the doors were all locked when she left but I entered anyway. I called out that if anyone was in the home, they had better leave. Now, I know that wasn’t the smartest decision, but I just didn’t feel as though what she had experienced was anything of the living. As we entered the home, a bird suddenly came flying towards us. The bird was in the house. Keep in mind, there were no open windows or open doors. We had no fireplace or attic vents, yet here was a black bird flying from the dining room straight for us. We ran through the home and started opening windows and doors. The bird soon left the home as did the smell of cigars that still lingered in the air.

We checked out the entire home and there were no more surprises to be found. My mother called my grandmother and told her all was well and I stayed home with my mother the rest of the day until my father arrived from work. It was years later that I heard that a bird in the home is considered a sign of rebirth. It all sort of makes sense now, because from that day on, the house was never the same.

Trying to get some control.

As the frequency of negative energy events seemed to pick up, so did the frequency of those that I had never worried about before. My bedroom had continued to be just as active as ever. The floorboards were creaking at night, the hanging chair was crackling and turning towards my bed more and more. I had thanked the room for helping me after the GTO incident, if it were not for the tap on the shoulder, I have no idea what may have happened that night. I had no idea who I had thanked, but it appeared that they were becoming more attached to my room and perhaps to me as well.

I had started to notice that my nightly visitor was starting to get carried away with the amount of time spent wandering in my room and swinging in my chair. In the past, it would enter the room, then sometimes approach my bed and then sit in the chair for a few minutes, watching me. Now, it would enter my room, walk around the bed several times and then sit in the chair and swing for quite sometime. I never really minded when the visits were short, but now that they were increasing in length, I just didn’t like the feel of them any more. I decided I would try to control at least one portion of the visit. The chair had a chain and hook on it for hanging it from ceilings or trees if you had decided not to use the stand. I took the chain and hook and wrapped it around the chair and stand, so that the chair was chained up at night, facing away from my bed.

The first night I did this, you could hear it enter the room and eventually head for the chair. The wicker did it’s usual crackle as if being sat in, then the chain began to rattle. It tried for a few moments to turn towards the bed but quickly gave up. Over the next couple of nights it became more agitated with the chain, the chair would begin to thrash about, trying to turn towards my bed. It would pull so hard at times, paint started to chip off the stand from the chain being pulled on it with such force. It never was able to get the chair free from the chain, but it didn’t stop it from sitting in the chair. Nightly it continued to sit in the chair, but would just sit in it with the chair facing the corner and not my bed, this made me feel better. If only I knew what had been entering my room every night, maybe that would make me less determined to control the chair. I felt bad about chaining it up, but the idea of not knowing what was watching me sleep had really been bothering me. The visitor must have picked up on this and decided it was time to partially get to know each other.

Lights, no camera, action.

I was in my room watching television when I thought I heard a noise coming from the staircase. In my peripheral vision, I thought I saw my mother come up the stairs. I called out to her, asking her what she was doing. I didn’t get an answer. I walked out into the landing area of the staircase and there was nobody there, so I went back into my room and continued to watch television. About an hour later I heard someone come up the staircase again. This time, I took the time to sit up and watch. The staircase was poorly lit from above by a hanging fixture and below from a hanging fixture, neither were all that powerful. First I saw the top of a head appear as she walked up the staircase, she was glowing. I don’t mean radiant with beauty or anything like that, I mean glowing. As she continued up the stairs, she didn’t bounce as you would as you were walking up stairs, she actually glided up the stairs, as if she were riding an escalator. She had on what appeared to be a very long and fancy night gown, full of lace and ribbons. Her hair was long and pulled into a pony tail of sorts, very natural in appearance. She continued up the stairs and out of my range of view. I knew she was still out there, just outside my door but I was afraid to look. I knew if I was to just stick my head outside my door, I would be face to face with what had been in my room every night for years.

I grew up seeing things, but for some reason, never saw any spirits in the home. I had felt the presence of others in the home from day one. I had experienced lights, smells and sounds for years without so much as a glimpse of what I was dealing with. That is what had always scared me most, I couldn’t see who I was dealing with. I was now faced with the decision to see my roommate or hide. I wasn’t sure if hiding would really work, so I figured it was time to meet my spirit guardian face to face. I made a plan, I would run out into the landing and if I didn’t like what I saw, I would continue to run downstairs to where my parents were. Just as I was about to take flight out the door, the lilac perfume started to hit me, I knew it was her. I jumped out into the landing and there she was. She had just completed the journey up the stairs. She appeared to be between seventeen and twenty five years of age. Her style of clothing and hair appeared to be that of the late 1800's, early 1900's. She was still glowing, she was as detailed as you would expect anyone would be in appearance, just that she appeared to radiate light.

I froze in my tracks, the idea of running gone in an instant. She turned the corner and we were now facing one another. She started to come towards me and I just stood there. She was expressionless, it was as if I wasn’t there. It was strange, it were as though she were looking through me and you could tell she was headed towards my room. She was fifteen feet from me when I think she finally saw me. Her blank expression suddenly looked like that of shock and within an instant, she vanished. I suddenly became ice cold and heard the shutters in my room rattle. She had passed right through me, into the room and out the window. I finally was able to see what had been in my room all this time and even though it was terrifying, it was slightly comforting to know it was a girl around my age or a little older. This would be one of the only times I saw the girl, but one of many interactions she and I would have over the years.

Peekaboo.

One of the advantages of getting older, was the fact that I was able to get my driver’s license. Before when the home would act up, I was forced to either just sit at home and deal with it, or take off walking and meander around the fields until my parents came home. Arriving home was always interesting. The home sat in a field, the nearest home being nearly a mile away so there was always the feeling of being isolated.

In the summer, I would try to stay out of the home as much as possible. I stayed in town and hung out with friends and when I didn’t have anything else to do, I would go over to my grandmother’s house and hang around until my parents got home from work. I was beginning to not like being in the home alone all that much. Having grandmother in town really helped a lot. Knowing that I could jump in the car and go into town to someone who loved me was a great comfort. She had been a very important part of my life and I was very grateful that she was there for me.

Many times when arriving home, I knew exactly what I was going to look forward to. I often wondered what it was like for other kids to get home to find their mother waiting for them or knowing that their home was their safe haven. Most of my friends lived in town and were surrounded by family and friends. It was the kind of town where doors remained unlocked and everyone kept an eye on each other. When I returned home, especially when school had started, I usually knew what would be waiting for me, not the embrace of my mother, not the warm welcome of a neighbor who had known me since my parents brought me home from the hospital, but the feeling of walking into a home that was watching my every move.

There was something in the house that just seemed to wait for me to get home. I would drive home from school and pull off of the main road heading South out of town. As I would approach the home, I always hoped that just once, the house wouldn’t start to creep me out as I neared it, but it usually did just that. I will never forget the first time the house was watching for me.

I had just entered the driveway and was approaching the home. The house was very tall, it was a proud looking home and actually looked to be warm and inviting to most. My parents had decorated the windows with wood shutters on the inside with curtains above to let sun in. As I was getting ready to park my car, I looked over to see the curtains in my room open up as if someone were looking out and then close again. I watched to see if it happened again and it didn’t. I thought perhaps someone was in the house, so I walked around and checked the doors, they were all locked. I checked all the windows, they were all closed and none had been broken.

I called to my dog and he came up on the porch. He was a good dog and very protective of us. My father had bought the dog for me the first year we lived there. He was a black Labrador Retriever, his name was Louie. Growing up an only child, Louie took the place of a brother and friend. He would search the fields with me when I would go out for walks and just listen to my problems. He would always look for something to attack when told to kill, so I unlocked the door to the home, held it open and yelled, kill.

Louie went running into the home and I followed. We both went running upstairs to my room, there was nothing there. We checked every room of the house, but nothing. My dog hated being in the house, he never liked it. He would always cower when we would try to get him to come in, so he spent his entire life outside the home. After searching the home, I let him back outside where he was more comfortable. I stayed home until my parents came home, but left the door open and stayed downstairs just in case.

The curtains playing peekaboo became a very common event. Many times over the remaining years of living there, I would come home to find the curtains open up and close again as I pulled into the driveway. I don’t think she was trying to scare me, she was just making sure I was home and had been keeping an eye on the place. I really do think she and others kept an eye on the place while we were gone. There were times when there were rashes of burglaries of farm homes in the area and our home was never touched. I guess having a haunted house had it benefits, but the negatives often outweighed the positives. At least I knew I could always turn around and go to the safe haven of my grandmother’s if need be.

What is it boy?

It was a cold winter’s evening and the home had been active. Mom had been waking up at 3:33 and the smell of cigars had been coming and going. I was home alone and I heard Louie outside barking. He wasn’t the type to bark at nothing, so I looked outside my bedroom window to see what was the matter. He was out by the road, near the mailbox barking. I watched as he barked, there was nothing there. He then started to circle and slowly walk up the driveway towards the home. He continued to bark and slowly walking towards the home, he kept going in circles as if circling someone walked up the driveway. I ran downstairs and by this time, he was approaching the walk way up to the house. All the hair on his back was standing up on end at this point and he was starting to bark louder.

I continued to watch him, he was clearly getting more scared and the pitch of his barks told the story. He kept circling for a moment at the end of the walkway. I stood staring out the door with Louie circling and barking twenty five feet away. Suddenly, he started a deep throat growl which told me something was really wrong, he only had done that the few times he felt cornered. I watched as he slowly started approaching the door, circling and growling as he neared. I wasn’t sure what to do, I saw absolutely nothing. He was about fifteen feet from the porch when it looked as though he was dodging something and acted as though he were about to attack. I continued to watch. He grew closer and closer to the porch. His circling stopped and he started to walk backwards towards the porch, tail straight in the air, all the hair on his back raised and all teeth showing.

There were three steps to the porch. When he hit the first step, he turned and ran onto the porch. It looked as though he was going to put on his last stand. He was growling and barking and looking straight ahead, down the walkway. His head started to rise, whatever he was barking at was apparently coming up the steps to the porch. Suddenly without notice, he spun around and was looking directly at me as I was looking out the door. At that moment, all went ice cold and a breeze hit me. The moment I got cold, Louie stopped barking and stood there looking at me. His hair started to lower on his back and he started to wag his tail. What ever it was that he saw had worked it’s way into the home and was now inside with me.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew there was something good in the home and now there was something bad in the home as well. I decided the best thing to do would be to have Louie come in the house and see if he continued to see anything. I brought him inside, which he hated anyway. He sniffed around for a few minutes and nothing, no barks, no hair standing up on his back, nothing. I let him outside and figured what ever had entered, must have decided to either keep going or was no threat at the moment. I locked up and went into town to my grandmother’s until my parents got home, just to be on the safe side.

My safe haven is gone.

Christmas was fast approaching. My father was a Christmas light fanatic, he would cover the house from top to bottom with Christmas lights, we had Santa and his reindeer on the roof and snowmen keeping watch on the lawn. The towns people, who had once thought us to worship the devil because of our red doors, now included our home as the final stop of the Christmas tour of homes, calling it the Christmas House.

I was looking forward to the holidays, spending time with family and having the home look so cheery and well lit. I always looked forward to this time of year, the home was actually fun to come home to in the evenings. Christmas day finally arrived and all went well, we had family over and had a nice holiday celebration. The house didn’t give us any trouble and all seemed well. The day after Christmas I was sent into town to pick up something from my grandmother’s. When I arrived, she said she wasn’t feeling well and I listened but didn’t pay her the attention I should have. I was fifteen years old and wasn’t all that concerned, you never think about much past ten minutes into the future when fifteen. She gave me what I had been sent to get and I turned to leave. I was out the door when I looked back and she told me she loved me through the glass of the storm door. I was in a hurry and being a stupid kid, I just nodded back to her and hurried away. I got home and told my mother that grandmother wasn’t feeling well, she called her and they had a nice long talk.

The next day, my mother said that she had tried to get in touch with my grandmother several times during the day and was not able to. I told her I would go into town and see where she was. I arrived at her home and her car was still there covered with snow. I knocked but no answer. The window shades were all pulled and there were no footsteps coming or going from the home. I went to her landlord’s house and asked if I may use the spare key to the home and they quickly retrieved it for me. I knew from the look on their face what I already knew. I unlocked the door and called for my grandmother, no answer. I walked to her room and there she was. She looked like she was sleeping, peaceful and calm. I called to her but nothing. I sat on the bed with her, she was my favorite person in the world other than my parents and I had walked away from her not more than 24 hours earlier without telling her I loved her in return. As I sat there feeling like a complete jerk, I heard a car pull up and it was my parents. My father had arrived home from work shortly after I had left and decided they better get into town. My mother didn’t want to come with me when I had left, it was her mother and I think she knew what was to be expected.

We had her buried in the town’s small cemetery a couple days later, she had claimed she really liked the cemetery and it made it easy for us to go and visit her. The cemetery had always been a relaxing place for me to visit and now I had actually had someone there to sit with.

I learned something important the day my grandmother passed away, never leave the ones you love without telling them how you feel because you never know if it is going to be the last time you speak to them. It has been said that they know how you feel without needing to be told, but you carry the guilt with you the rest of your life and from what I have seen in later years, many still carry that guilt after they pass as well. With the passing of my grandmother, I had lost someone I loved very much, someone I considered a very close friend and also knew that from that day on, my safe haven was gone forever.

Keep knocking but you’re already in.

The home being built in the 1880's originally had no bathroom. At some point in the home’s past, the parlor had been divided so that a bathroom could be constructed. In those days, a parlor was the area of the home that usually housed the best furniture and where the entertaining was done, it was a place of pride for many home owners. This former parlor and bathroom were located under my bedroom.

On many occasions it would sound as if construction were taking place downstairs. The wall of the bathroom would pound and pound as if someone were beating on the wall. We knew it wasn’t the plumbing, my father had replaced all the plumbing in the home and made sure there was no possible way for the pipes to rattle, besides this was no rattle. Many times, the wall would pound so hard it would make my bedroom floor shake. I would run downstairs to see what was going on and just as I got to the bottom of the stairs it would quit, the bathroom was just off to the side of the bottom of the stairs.

I had always thought that the spirit wasn’t happy about their wonderful parlor being broken up to become a bathroom. The pounding sounded as if someone was trying to knock the wall down and I had felt the spirit was indeed trying to do just that. It wasn’t long after the pounding started that the bathroom became active as well.

Just a minute and I’ll be out..

It was nearing time for school, so I decided to jump in the shower and get ready to start my day. Just earlier, the bathroom walls had been pounding, but as soon as I had entered the room they had quit. I waited a few minutes to see if they would start back up, they didn’t so I continued on with my plans for a shower. After taking my shower I stood drying off and suddenly started to hear something. I had felt an eery chill earlier and thought nothing of it, it was winter after all. I stood motionless for a moment and then heard the noise again.

It started out quiet and then grew distinct. There was a child crying, as the sound became more clear, so did it’s location of origin. The crying was coming from right next to me. I stood there looking down to my side, seeing nothing but hearing what sounded like a small child scared or lost. I didn’t know what to do, this had never happened. At first I tried to rationalize it by thinking maybe there was a puppy outside or something, but this was not the sound of a puppy and it wasn’t coming from outside. I stood there and waited for the crying to stop, it continued for at least one minute. As soon as the crying stopped, I quickly got dressed while still wet and hurried off to school.

The crying continued on and off for years, always in the bathroom. My mother started hearing it as well, never anywhere else other than the bathroom. I never saw the spirit of a small child in the home nor knew of the death of one. The house seemed to hold many secrets and it was slow to reveal them. Always something new and usually always disturbing seemed to be the plan of the house and it followed it’s plan well.

Are you digging it?

The town had a weekly paper that came out every Thursday and was priced at twenty five cents. The paper included information about town events, crime reports and what would be happening that week. One part of the paper we always enjoyed reading was the historical section. Weekly, they would mention things that had happened around the area, ten years ago, twenty five years ago, fifty years ago and one hundred years ago. We always enjoyed reading that section of the paper, usually it was just light hearted little things, such as Mrs. Smith had company all the way from Salina for tea and cakes.

One particular week in 1986, the historical section caught my eye more than usual, it contained the name Blankenship. The Blankenship’s had been the last family to actually live in the home, they lived there for nearly seventy years. The article said that twenty five years earlier, bones had been discovered on the Blankenship farm. A team from our local university had been sent out to excavate after it had been determined the bones were part of a Native American settlement.

A creek ran through our property, it drained down into the Ninnescah river which was about a mile away. Apparently while plowing the field near the creek, Mr. Blankenship noticed something. He went to investigate and found he had uncovered human remains. After contacting the authorities, it was determined that the site was not a crime scene, but a burial ground and campsite of Native Americans. A team from the local university came to the property and did a dig. They took bones and many artifacts from the field, leaving nothing behind. This was one of the few times such things had been found in that part of the county. The area mentioned where the site was found, it was less than three hundred feet from the house. With all that had been going on, in and around the home, the last thing we really wanted to hear was that the house sat on an old Indian burial ground. It added one more element to the homes past, there was still much more we didn’t know.

Not tonight, I have a headache.

I had been dating a nice girl from town for a little over four months. She was a nice girl and her family had many ties to others in the area. While dating, I kept a picture of her in my room. She would come out to the home and we would watch movies or have dinner, nothing much of importance would ever come of it. She was a nice girl and she really liked me, but I started to see someone else.

The girl I started seeing next was, shall we say, more adventurous than the first. She was not tied to the town in any way and was slightly on the wild side. As with the first girl, I kept pictures of her in my room as well, one on my dresser and one on the wall. Things seemed to be going well until we became sexually active, something the first girl and I never did.

The first time we had sex was in the house, in the room directly under mine. It wasn’t long after that, that whenever she would come over to my home, she would have terrible headaches and become sick to her stomach. At first I thought she just was using this as some excuse, but she actually became sick and would start to throw up. As soon as we would leave the home, she would start to feel better and things would return to normal.

I also started to notice on the nights she came over, there was more activity in my bedroom, problem was it was after she had already left. The foot steps around my room became more like stomping and the chair would not just swing, but really rock trying to fight the chain that I had attached. Things had been fine before with the first girl and even with this girl, up to the time we started to have sex in the house.

There was a point I thought maybe my mother didn’t like the girl I was seeing. On the evenings my girlfriend and I would fool around in the home, I would go to my room for bed and her pictures would be on the floor. The one on the dresser and the one on the wall would often be on the other side of the room. This happened nearly every time and finally one was tossed with such force it broke the frame. I finally asked my mother why she had been throwing the pictures in my room around, she denied ever doing such a thing and I believed her, I had no reason not to. The proof came one evening when the girl and I were home alone, my parents were out of town. That night, she became violently ill so I took her home. When pulling into the driveway, my bedroom curtains flew open and then shut again.

I stormed inside the house, I was mad. I yelled up to the room that I wouldn’t be sleeping in there that night, I would sleep down on the couch. The next day I went up to my room, the pictures were indeed on the floor, as they often were when the girl would come over. I now knew I had some serious problems on my hands. I wasn’t sure exactly what to think, there was no way a spirit could be in love with me, could there? I didn’t know and there aren’t too many people you can talk to about such things, so I just started to keep the girl away from my home. I later found out the girl was not faithful in our relationship during that time. Now, was the spirit in my room jealous of the girl all this time or had she been trying to warn me? I have always thought the latter. The spirit always seemed kind and helpful, I could never imagine her becoming jealous or violent to someone I cared about. Only time would tell how the spirit felt about me being with other women.

It’s for you.


Over the years, many of my friends had heard stories about the house. In high school, teachers would hear stories about my home from other kids and on slow days, would ask me to tell stories about events that had happened at my home. One teacher had grown up in the area and always had heard the house was haunted, she always liked the stories, she passed the home daily and often thought she had seen things over the years.

When friends would come out to the house, most did so with apprehension, one did not. He had gone into Wichita with me and we stopped by my house to drop some things off. He was walking up the walk with me and started to go on about the house. He asked if it was really haunted or if all the stories were just a joke. I told him no, the stories were indeed true, there were a lot of unexplained events that had happened at the home.

We get inside and once again, he starts to make fun of me, saying that I must be crazy and there are no such things as ghosts. We go into the living room and for the first time ever, I yell out to the house, “Show Him”. I had never before asked the house to prove itself, but for some reason his attitude just brought it out in me and I think the house as well.

I told him to stay in the living room, while I ran upstairs to drop my stuff off that I had purchased. I took off running and thought I had ran through a cold spot as I was heading upstairs but didn’t think much about it. When I got to my room, I started putting my things away and the phone downstairs started to ring. Normally I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but I had never heard this ring before. I stopped what I was doing and again, I heard the ringing. The only phone we had in the house was in the kitchen. It was one of those new cordless phones that became popular in the 1980's, it was all electronic and didn’t actually have bells for a ringer, yet what I heard were bells.

My friend downstairs suddenly yells, “Do you want me to answer that?”. For a split second I about yelled yes, but then I stopped just as the words were about to leave my mouth. He then yelled, “How do you answer this thing?”. I yelled back, “What is ringing?”. He replied, “This old phone in the dining room”. I screamed back, “Don’t touch it!”. I flew out of my room and down the stairs. Just as I got downstairs and was almost into the dining room, it finished it’s ring, you could still hear it in the bells. He looked at me and said, “You just missed your call”. I looked at him and said, “No, you did”.

My parents were avid antique collectors. They had picked up the phone a year or two earlier, it was one of the old wooden crank wall phones that you pick up the ear piece to listen and talk into the microphone that reaches out towards you. I walked him over to it and asked, “Now this is the phone that was ringing, right?”. He said yes and asked me how it worked. I told him it didn’t. He started to look at me like I was pulling his leg and asked again how the phone worked. I stood there and explained that the phone was an antique, there were no wires going to the phone, there was no dial, no nothing. I told him in order to answer the phone, the ear piece would have to be picked up. I then looked at him and told him to pick it up, he wouldn’t. I then reminded him that no more than five minutes earlier, he had stated there were no such things as ghosts, so why be afraid of a phone? Again, I told him to pick up the ear piece, he wouldn’t. I walked up to the phone, picked up the earpiece and listened, I then said hello.

Nothing, there was nothing. I told him it was for him, he slowly walked up and took the ear piece and put it to his ear. He looked at me like I had told him to put a loaded gun to his head. He listened for a moment and then said, there is no one there. I then reminded him the phone had never worked nor been hooked up since we owned it, it couldn’t have worked even if we had tried. He put the ear piece back and said he would go wait out in the car while I finished putting things away. He went outside and I went through the house turning off lights and then headed towards the door to leave. I felt as though someone were standing behind me, I turned around. Seeing nothing, I smiled and said thank you to the house and we left. My friend never questioned my home again and on a side note, rarely came over again after dark.

Strange Company.

My parents had my aunt and her date over for dinner. We knew nothing of the guy, just that my aunt had been seeing him for sometime. They arrived and the man seemed nice, he was well dressed and drove an expensive car, a very professional looking person. After dinner we all sat down to visit.

The man look at us all and then started to look around at the home. He suddenly said, “Do you mind if I ask a strange question?”. We said no and he then asked if the house was haunted. We told him yes and asked why he had asked. He started to explain his past, he had used to be a priest and had left the church years ago. He went on about how he always had the ability to sense things and said he felt a lot of energy in the home. We all knew the house was active, but never had discussed very much with this particular aunt. He went on to say that he felt that what ever was in the home was evil and it should really be addressed. He told us that we should really consider having the home exorcised. His said that his teachings taught him that when evil spirits are in home, they will try to control. They will manipulate those living around them and try to create the surroundings that they desire. What he said next didn’t settle well, he said that if the evil spirits cannot control an individual, they will try to destroy the individual.

My mother and I had noticed a change in my father since we moved to the home. He was always a nice and hard working man, his character had changed drastically since moving there. He would stay to himself out in the barn and he and I would fight over the smallest of things. We had a great relationship before moving to the home, but as time went by, we slowly started to quit speaking. I always helped him on the house, something he really seemed to have a passion for, but if the house wasn’t what we had in common, there was little else. His relationship with my mother had followed the same path and we had talked in the past about how strange he was slowly becoming. All of this began to make sense. He always claimed never to see or hear anything in the home, even when lights would be flying outside the windows. Mom and I always wondered how he could have missed all the events that had happened and with this one person coming to our home, we knew we had our answer. The evil in the home appeared to be gaining control of my father.

The conversation with my aunt’s date was very informative and very disturbing. We learned much that night about the power of evil, but failed to take the man’s advice about getting the home exorcised. Hindsight being twenty/twenty, perhaps we should have followed up on what the man had recommended, but at the time we were afraid it would just anger the house and it’s spirits even more.

Have a bad dream?


My father was sent out of state for a month on business. Mom and I were home alone for the first time. I wasn’t sure how things were going to go, but I figured it would be a nice break not having my father around to argue with. Things went smoothly at first, but after the first week, the house apparently had some plans.

One night, my mother was in bed and just about to fall asleep. She said she felt something grab her leg and crawl into bed. She was at the point where you are almost sleeping but not quite. She thought nothing of it. When I was little, I often had bad dreams. When I would have such a dream, I would go to my parents room, go over to my mother’s side of the bed and climb up, using her leg to grab hold of. In her sleepy daze, she just figured it was me having a bad dream like I did when I was little.

After feeling what she thought was me getting into bed, she said she started to feel as though she were being kicked on. She then started to wake up and was thinking to herself that I hadn’t crawled into their bed in years and started to get scared. She was facing away from the other side of the bed and again felt as though someone were in bed with her. She then asked out loud, “You have a bad dream?”, thinking perhaps it was me, but there was no answer. She jumped out of bed and turned on the light, there was no one there. She then ran over to my room and I was sound a sleep in my bed. She went back to her room and got back into bed. Shortly after, she started to notice lights moving down the hall. The lights came into her room and then went behind her door. I had these lights in my room many times but this was the first for her. She watched as the lights bounced around behind her door and then they vanished.

After that night, she never again felt as though someone entered her bed. She would have other experiences as time went on, usually much different than mine. For what ever reason, the house seemed to like to torment her.

The Lights and A Breather.

It seemed the lights were protectors. When bad things would happen, the lights were usually quick to follow. At first I was nervous of the lights throughout the home and on the property, but over time I found them to be reassuring. Many times they seemed to be on patrol, walking the halls, floating around the yard and sitting in tree tops. The times that things felt bad, the lights would many times appear and the negative feeling would soon go away.

I had never experienced these floating lights before moving into the home. I had a history as a young child of seeing things, including mangled bodies and people that no one else saw, but nothing like the floating lights. I was happy that others had witnessed the lights, the “spook lights”, as they were called by the locals. I was never positive who or what the lights were. I always assumed that the girl in my room was one of the lights. The time she appeared and left, she left my room in the form of white light out the window. What troubled me was that there was often more than one light and they would many times separate and go different directions. This meant there was more than one good spirit, yet I only could pinpoint one that I was fairly sure at this time was good.

The other thing that always bothered me up to this point, was that I never saw anything in the home except the one time I saw the girl. I had felt things in the home since day one, but nothing popped out at me all that often. Growing up as a child, I was used to seeing things at times and I just wasn’t seeing much in the home. I would smell and feel the presence of someone near me, but usually saw nothing. Back then and being young, I think I tried not to see things more than I tried to see things. Most of the things I had seen while growing up had scared me, so I often wished that what I was seeing would just go away. Now that I am older, I have learned to have more control over what I can and cannot see, but even now if I can’t see what is contacting me, I get frightened. From my personal experience, the things that can’t be seen are those that have great power.

It is hard to try to explain what and how I see. I think many children can see what adults cannot. Ever notice some children have imaginary friends and can go into great detail about their friend? Many write this off as an over active imagination. I believe that while this may be the case with some, that many imaginary friends are actually as real to the child as you and I. Children are open, they don’t place many of the restrictions of what should be able to happen on themselves. Many seem to pick up on energy and even spirits around them. I know that a fair number of the invisible childhood friends that many kids have are actually right there with them, as I have seen them as well, even before they start to describe them. The next time you see a child playing with someone you can’t see, go ask them about their friend. Don’t be surprised if they do into great detail.

I myself never had an imaginary friend. I had seen plenty of spirits growing up but never cared to play with them. Seeing heads with no bodies and bloody scenes wasn’t exactly something I wanted to sit down with and play. I think many kids are lucky to draw good to them, I just wasn’t that lucky as a child. As I got older, I fought hard not to see things. While many kids seemed to naturally outgrow this ability, mine never went away. I was always able, just not very willing. By the time we had moved to the farm house, I was more than happy not to see anything, but once we entered the home, I knew there was plenty there. Living in the farm home taught me quite a bit on how to deal with spirits, it also taught me I didn’t know the first thing either and at the time, I didn’t want to learn all that much. I just wished I had a quiet home and life like all the other kids, but that just wasn’t in the cards.

I often get asked if the spirits talk to me. Yes they do, but usually not in the actual sense. It is as if I can read their mind. Many times their mouth does not move, yet I know exactly what they are thinking. It is a hard thing to explain but imagine walking up to someone and you suddenly know what is on their mind. It is like telepathy I guess, they have the ability to talk without speaking. The alarming thing that they can do that has started to happen over the last couple of years is the ability to transfer images. An example occurred just last Christmas. My wife and I went into a very old part of town to look at Christmas lights when something caught me eye. There was the spirit of a woman on the side of the street sitting in a buggy. I stopped the car and acted as if I had stopped to look at the lights, but really I stopped to watch the spirit. She turned to me and suddenly, it was if I was back in the neighborhood at the turn of the 20th century. This was new, I had never experienced anything quite like this. It was like watching a movie of things long past, I think I was seeing things from her eyes. I was so shaken by the visions, that I snapped back off and quickly left the area. This has been happening more and more over the last year. I am not quite sure why, but I have been experiencing many new things over the last year or two.

As I have been writing these stories, I often feel as though someone is guiding what I write. I often feel a draft and cold as I write, many times checking to see if the air conditioning is on or a fan is blowing. It is about the time I notice this, things will go back to calm. I think I am beginning to figure out why I am writing this and it is for a good purpose, but only time will tell.




On With The Show.

One day while working in the yard, a car pulled into the driveway. An old couple was driving the car and my dog Louie kept them trapped in their car until I was able to walk up to them. They were members of the Blankenship family. They had stopped by to see the house, they were now living out of state. The woman lived in the home as a child and really seemed to appreciate all the work we had done to the home.

She noticed how protective my dog was of the home. She told me the story about the dog her father had. It seems that when her father died, his dog didn’t want to leave his side. Every day, the dog would go over to the cemetery, which was a mile away and sleep on his grave. The dog did this daily and family members would have to go to the cemetery to go get the dog. They said it surprised them because they had never taken the dog to the cemetery, yet he figured out not only where it was, but knew the right place to find his owner.

Eventually the dog started to become quite possessive of the area and was running off people that were there to pay respects to nearby graves. The cemetery told them the dog was no longer allowed to stay there. They told us they took him home and chained him up, only to have the dog always get free and go back to the cemetery. They eventually were able to secure the dog well enough that he was not able to get free, the dog quit eating and drinking and died. Never knew if the story was real or not, but later a different family member would tell us the exact same story, so we figured there must be some validity to it. The cemetery was less than a mile from the home, so perhaps the dog picked up the scent of his owner or maybe there was something else going on all together.

Trouble In The Yard.

One of things I had to do as part of my chores was to mow the lawn. The house sat on nearly 4 acres t
hat had to be mowed once a week.. For the most part, it was relaxing, if not boring. My father had purchased a large garden tractor when we moved to the country, so I was able to mow the lawn in less than 3 hours.

While it was indeed a boring task, there was one area of the yard that was never boring, it was located out in front of the home near two large Cedar trees. When I would get near that area, I would always get the chills and feel as though I were being watched intensely. I was used to the feeling of being watched at the home, but this was different. It was like a crazy energy. Many times it felt as though things were jumping all over and the energy would one minute be in front of me, then behind me and then up the tree. I never understood why that certain area was like that. I once dug in the area, thinking perhaps there was something buried there, I never did find anything in the spot.

Once again, a Blankenship family member would have a story that perhaps explained the strange feelings. We were talking about things and they happened to look over at the area I didn’t like and mentioned that was the area they kept their aunt. My father asked what they meant by that. They explained that this was in the 1930's and there wasn’t the treatment for the mentally ill as there is now. During the day, there wasn’t anyone to keep an eye on their aunt, so they made a holding area in the front yard where it was shady and cool, for their aunt to stay while everyone was busy. Turns out she had Alzheimers and if left alone, she would tear up the house and many times run away. They built an area in the front yard to lock her up so that she could get fresh air and be contained without getting away or hurting the house when everyone was away. They mentioned she lived there until her death, something tells me they found her dead in the yard, we didn’t have the heart to ask if that was where she passed away or if it was in the home.

This explained the strange feelings I was getting in the yard and perhaps the beating on the bathroom wall. From that point on, I still felt uncomfortable in that place in the yard, but at least I knew why there was so much crazy energy in that location. It was nice to have perhaps one answer to the home’s mysteries. Looking back, I wish we would have asked many more questions of the people that would often stop by our home. Never thought the questions would stay with me for years.

A Trip At The Cemetery.

Late In 1986, I had a cousin that killed herself. She was a very nice person, but got caught up in drugs early in life and never could shake the habit. She ended up shooting herself right before her 30th birthday. It was decided that she would be buried in the local cemetery. There was to be only grave side services, no formal funeral.

When we arrived at the cemetery, something didn’t feel right the minute I got out of the car. I had been to the cemetery many times, I often went there to enjoy some quiet and to visit my grandmother’s grave. My cousin was to be laid to rest very near my grandmother. As I stood waiting for the service to begin, I kept thinking I heard some one from the other end of the cemetery. The area we were in was the new part, the area where you find the headstones that are very small and often are just flat. The area I kept hearing something was over in the old area.

The town had first been settled in 1871 and the cemetery had been there for nearly as long and there were many old and interesting markers. I had always liked to look at the old head stones, but never really paid much attention as to who they belonged to. As the service started, I again thought I heard something. I looked at my family and no one else appeared to hear anything other than the voice of the minister. A little later into the service, not only did I hear something, but something caught me eye as well.

I was standing with my parents when I thought I saw someone peer out from behind one of the old headstones. I stared in that direction for a few minutes, saw nothing and then focused back on the service. Not much later, I again heard something and again thought I saw someone peeking from behind the same old headstone. I asked my mother if she saw anything over in the old area and she told me she had seen no one. I stood there listening to the service when I suddenly felt as though I was now being stared at. This time I didn’t want to look over at the old area, but I knew I must. I looked over at the area and there was indeed someone there. It appeared to be a shadow of a figure. The distance wasn’t that great and I knew I should be able to make out who I was seeing from such a short distance, yet it was like a blur. The person stood there watching me. I turned to my mother again to look over at the area, but when we turned, it was gone.

I had no idea what was going on, I had always felt the cemetery to be a place to relax, it had always been a peaceful place to go. I now just stood there and stared at the headstone. It was over six feet tall and had what appeared to be an urn on top with a building shielding the urn. It was all carved of stone and appeared to be very old. As I stared at the headstone, the figure suddenly walked out from behind it. I stood there looking at it and it at me. I didn’t even try to get the attention of my mother this time, I just focused on what had been trying to get my attention all this time. I could clearly see the headstone, but still couldn’t make out who I was seeing. It looked as though a person wearing a black cloak. I stood and watched as the figure again went behind the headstone. By this time, I was scared and curious. I didn’t know who or what I was looking at but I knew I had to investigate as soon as the service was over.

I remember the service ending and my family all gathering together before leaving for my home to have dinner. I told my parents there was something I needed to check out before we left and I would catch up with them in a moment. I went walking over to the headstone. I walked slowly, I wanted so badly to see what I had been looking at, but at the same time I was so fearful of what I may find. I can still picture in my mind what I saw when I got to the headstone, the word “JAMES”. I stood there for a moment and all went cold. I couldn’t move, it felt as ice had covered me head to toe. I couldn’t hear my family, I couldn’t think of anything, all I could do was stare at the headstone and read the name. Suddenly life around started again and I yelled out to my parents to come over, I had something to show them.

There it was, the headstone of Ephraim and Margaret James, the man who had built the home. The man I knew nothing about, other than he was the man who decided to settle the area and build the home we now lived in. My parents came quickly, they could tell by my voice I was upset. I remember as my mother walked up and saw the name, she stood there silent. My parents both looked looked at the headstone and then looked at me. Mother asked me if this is where I had seen someone earlier, I told her yes.

We then studied what little info it had to offer. The info wasn’t much, but what it did say has had me wondering what happened since the day I saw it. Ephriam James was born in 1839 and died 1884 at the age of 45, just two years after completion of the home. Margaret was only 35 when Ephraim died and she lived until 1924. There were names of children also on the large monument, but it appeared none had been buried there. I am not sure who it was that I was seeing, but they wanted me to know about the marker. Before leaving, I placed a penny in the urn and would do so every time I returned to the cemetery from that point on. I finally had some info about the builder of the home and not much else. We had never known how long the family lived, and now we knew that Ephraim lived just long enough to see his home built.

I Turned That Off?



It was getting to be late fall 1986. I was still dating the girl that had been angering the spirit in my room. One evening upon arriving home from taking my girlfriend home, I went to my room to find the normal routine, her photos were on the floor. As I picked them up, I was pretty disgusted about the entire thing. I was tired of living in a haunted house, I was tired of the way my father was acting and I was just tired of not being normal and I needed to vent. I remember saying out loud, “Why can’t you just leave me alone.”

I went downstairs and to get something to eat and when I came back to my room, my ceiling fan was turning. I didn’t remember turning it on, but the blades were turning. I reached over to the switch and turned the fan off. I laid down in my bed and went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and the fan was back on. I got up and turned it back off. I knew that no one had been turning the fan on, my room mate had learned a new trick. After turning the fan off, I looked around the room for a moment and said, “Neat Trick” and then walked off. I was starting to get more vocal with the spirit since the night I saw her. I had figured if she was going to show herself to me, the least I could do was acknowledge her presence.

The Beginning of The End.

The ceiling fan trick in my room was interesting to say the least. Knowing that the spirit had been turning it on and off was both frightening and inspiring. If the spirit could do things like that, what couldn’t she do?

One night I was in bed and I heard my room mate enter the room. I heard her sit down in the chair which I still kept chained. I got out of bed and walked over to the chair and unchained it and went back to my bed. I watched the chair slowly turn towards my bed and start to swing slowly. I had really about had it at this point. After years of dealing with someone I couldn’t really see and watching things around me get worse at home, I just wanted things to get out in the open. I started to talk to the swinging chair. I remember saying to her, “Why are you here and what do you want from me?” There was no answer, as I expected. I laid down with my eyes closed and said, “If you are listening, do something.” I heard a squeak. I opened my eyes to see the fan blades turning very slowly on the ceiling fan. I looked over at the switch and the fan was off. As I watched, the fan slowly stopped turning and slowly starting turning the other way. I watched for a short time and then said, “Now make it stop.” The fan instantly stopped turning.

I just laid there, I didn’t know what to do. In the back of my mind I never thought anything like this was ever possible. I had been in this room with the spirit for years and knew she was capable of things, but never for a million years would have thought I would ever be able to ask her to do something. Over the next couple of months, the fan trick became a game. I would go to bed and wait for her to arrive. We would make the ceiling fan turn back and forth, I told no one. My father was someone else by now and my mother was hating the home more and more and her health was starting to become an issue. I knew what was happening was wrong, but I just couldn’t stop. Seeing something move like that is addictive, once the fear subsides, you really get curious as to what the spirit is really capable of. I would always thank her for making the fan move. I had figured that it must take some kind of energy out of her to do such a thing, or she would most likely be moving things all the time. We never communicated in any vocal conversation, always just by me saying things and her responding with movement.

Our games continued for quite sometime. Over time she would prove to be quite powerful and mischievous. She would turn the channels to my radio alarm clock to a different station during the night so I would wake up to a station on the other end up the dial. She would also play with the volume on the television, turning it up high or very low while watching. It was strange, nothing of real importance, just little goofy things to let you know she was there. Besides being my protector, I don’t really know what her purpose was in being in the home or why she was there. She really did seem to be a very nice spirit and I guess you could say we had developed a very strange friendship of sorts, but all good things must come to an end.

The End of The Room.



Things had been going as usual in my room. During this time, I quit dating the girl that the spirit had not approved of. I remember when I took the photos down, it seemed as though the activity in the room started to really pick up. I wasn’t sure why, I knew she didn’t like the girl and figured once I had stopped seeing the girl and had taken down the pictures perhaps things would die down. Not only did they not die down, they picked up and got very uncomfortable.

I had often wondered what all a spirit sees. Do they stick around during private times such as when taking a shower, getting dressed or making love? I had figured that the spirit in my room had indeed watched me while making love to my girlfriend, from the way she would carry on in my room. I always tried to tell myself that for the most part, the spirit would allow me a certain amount of privacy in my own home. I was wrong.

One morning after taking a shower, I felt the cold that I sometimes felt in there, but it felt different. The spirit of the small child would often makes it’s presence known in the bathroom, but this was different. It felt as though something was breathing on my neck, not just standing beside me as the spirit of the child would often do. I didn’t like this feeling, so I quickly got dried off and went up to my room. I was picking out some clothes to wear when I thought I felt something touch me. I stood there for a minute thinking to myself, I must be imagining things. As I was about to put on some underwear, I felt what seemed to be a very cold hand touching the small of my back. I jumped. I had often wondered if the spirit had any feelings towards me and I was sure she was making her feelings known at that moment.

I quickly put on my clothes and ran downstairs. I wasn’t sure what to do. It was one thing to keep an eye on me and watch over me. It was strange enough to play move the ceiling fan games, but to actually touch me while I was undressed? That was not only crossing the line, but I felt that was leading to something that was wrong on many different levels. I was only sixteen years old and sure, strange scenarios of sex had crossed my hormone controlled mind, but nothing of that caliber. Thinking back, there had been times that I had awaken in the morning with all of my bedding on the floor, but I had always convinced myself that I had kicked them off in my sleep.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I knew that I really wasn’t comfortable sleeping in my room anymore. That evening, I went up to my room and decided that for once, I would just talk to her and hoped that she would listen and understand. I waited until I heard her enter the room and I began to talk. I told her that I no longer felt as though I could sleep in the room after that and there was no way that anything could ever happen like that. I told her I appreciated all she had done for me but there must be limits to what we could share. I then said that I would no longer be sleeping in the room.

In the evenings, it always felt as though she returned to the room, never being in another part of the house much past sunset for very long. I don’t know why, but for some reason, that is where she had to spend the better part of the nights. So with that bit of hopeful knowledge, I made the decision to never again sleep in my room and I never did.

Life Downstairs.



I decided that the first room I would try to sleep in was the tv room. It had been my grandmother’s room and had been turned into a tv room after she moved out. I didn’t move my actual belongings downstairs, I just slept on the couch. Things went smoothly for a couple of months. I didn’t have any real problems, would occasionally hear noise up in my room, but no visitors that I knew of. Things started to change towards the middle of 1987.

I would usually go to sleep around 10:30 p.m.. After a couple of months of sleeping in the tv room, I started to wake up at the same time every night. Not the 3:33 as my mother had, but 11:34 p.m.. This went on for weeks, every night I would wake up at 11:34 and many times during the day, I would happen to look over at the clock at that time as well. I didn’t really like always waking up at the same time every night, but it never really bothered my until one evening. That night, as usual, I woke up at the same time. I looked over at the clock and it said, “hell”. I sat there for minute trying to focus on what the clock said, it was upside down. Being upside down, the numbers now read as letters and was spelling the word, hell. I had been waking up at this time for weeks and as long as it was not at 3:33, I had never worried. Now that I saw the time displayed in this new way, I was very concerned. I had never thought I was actually in danger of any real evil in the house, the spirit in my room had always protected me, but I had left the room and something told me the power she held in the room did not carry on within the entire house.

I continued to sleep in the room until one night when I saw something that ran me out of there for good. This was the same room my grandmother, aunt and cousin had all had troubles with in the past and I knew there was a chance that something could happen. I had been keeping the tv on in the room to help me sleep and it really didn’t seem to help all that much. I would wake up most every night at 11:34 and then had trouble falling back to sleep. On one particular night, I woke up to some strange noises, kind of like a deep raspy voice. When I opened my eyes, there was a black hand over my face. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but after blinking a couple of times, I could easily make out that there was black hand directly over my face and I again heard something said in a deep voice but couldn’t make it out. I jump up and went right through the hand. I turned around to see nothing. I grabbed my bedding off of the sofa and headed for the formal living room after that night.

We Are Family.

There was only one house close to ours, it was about a mile away and stood up on a hill that overlooked our home. My uncle had recently married and had a son. He had been living out in rural Kansas and decided he wanted to live closer to family. He ended up moving into the home up on the hill. It was nice to have family close by again, a place to visit when things were acting up.

It wasn’t long before we were getting calls from my uncle and his new wife. Every so often, they would call to tell us there was someone out by the barn with a flashlight, or there was someone out in the front yard with a flashlight. I would always tell him I had just been out there, they were just seeing me. I knew what he was seeing but never wanted to bring it up. We hadn’t told everyone about the home’s little tricks and we weren’t sure what my uncle would think. He finally learned the truth when one evening he called and said there was a light out in the field. I told him I would check it out. As I was about to hang up, I heard yelling on the phone, “Don’t go out there! Don’t go out there!”. I asked him what was wrong and he said the light suddenly took off into the air and flew up and around the house. I started laughing and told him I would be up to his home in a few minutes. My uncle had always been more of a brother to me, we were not all that far off in age and I knew it was time for him to know the truth about the home. I went to his house and told him everything that had been going on. I explained that it was good to keep an eye on the house, but every time he called about flashlights, they were really what the locals had been calling spook lights, and we had been dealing with them for years.

He seemed to believe everything I had told him and would continue to call when ever he saw something at our home. We had always had people honk at our home in the past. We never knew quite what to think about it, but many times people would drive past our home and honk. By the time I would make it to the window, they would be long gone. Many times I thought they had been to our home and I missed them knocking, never understood what to make of it.

One evening I heard a honk and looked out to see my uncle drive up towards his house. I went up see him later that evening and he asked what I had been doing. I told him I had been in the house doing some homework. He then asked why I was out in the front yard running around and why I didn’t wave when he honked. I told him I hadn’t been out in the yard. He then said he saw someone out in the front yard by the Cedar trees running around and thought it was me. This was the same area I always had the crazy energy. Apparently, the entire time people had been honking, they had been honking at the spirit of the woman that had been kept out in the front yard with Alzheimers. I started to laugh and told him the story about the woman in the yard. He said it all happened so fast that he couldn’t tell exactly who it was, he just knew I was home and figured it was me. It sure was odd to know that people were driving past my house and honking at one of the spirits, I just hoped she never did anything too crazy when people drove by.



Sickness and In Health

My father was not himself any more. When he would get home, he would often go straight out into the barn and build things, nothing of real importance, many times just things from scrap he would bring home from work. He was always a funny and outgoing person, but over the last couple of years, he had lost his sense of humor and was nothing but angry and self absorbed. He and I had a great relationship before we moved to the home, but now we sometimes went days without speaking much more than a few words. Things between he and my mother weren’t much better. It was though he really didn’t care if he saw us or not.

My father had always sworn there was nothing in the home. When ever my mother and I would be talking about things that happened, he would always laugh at us and tell us we were just imagining things. When the lights would fly around the house, he would just write it off as headlights or reflections. He never appeared to really show much fear towards the home except for one night. One evening, my mother and I went into Wichita to do some shopping. It was very late when we arrived home and all the lights were on in the house. My father was the type that would go around the house and turn lights off just behind you to save energy. Anyway, all the lights were on and when we unlocked the door, my father was a sleep on the couch with his pistol by his side. Mother woke him up and he quickly tried to hide the gun. She asked him what was the matter and he said he thought he heard a coyote.

My father never went after coyotes with a pistol, he never slept on the couch in the living room and he absolutely never left all the lights on in the home. He never did admit to seeing anything when left alone in the house for the evening, but mother and I were sure that something had indeed scared my father so bad he had to keep the lights on and slept with his gun.

It wasn’t long before this had happened that my mother really couldn’t handle the changes in my father and they decided to separate. Odd thing was, neither would move out. They broke the home in half, father stayed in one half and mother the other. They would never enter the kitchen when the other was in there. This lasted for nearly 2 months and shortly after walking into the home and finding father with the house lit up and sleeping with a gun, he actually started to change enough that he and mother decided to stay together.

My father seemed to be controlled more and more by the home as time went on. He never wanted to leave the home, never wanted to go on vacations and never even wanted to just take small trips into town. His focus was always on the home. Many of the changes of the outside of the home were his doing and we later found out, were often changes that made it resemble what it looked like shortly after it’s construction. He was always determined to belittle anyone that spoke of the home being haunted and even though we knew he had seen things just as we had, he always dismissed it.

My mother had started to bring up the idea of selling the home. She would get upset about all that was going on, the changes in my father, me not sleeping in my room and her deteriorating health. She had been getting sick often. They ran test after test on her and never could figure out what was wrong. She was waking up at 3:33 often, throwing up all the time, getting dizzy and would go days at a time without being able to eat. She felt as though she were being watched and wanted nothing more than to sell the home and get out. She was determined that if we were able to get away from the home, things would return to normal.

My father would have nothing of it. He loved that house more than life itself at that point and wasn’t going any where. I wasn’t too crazy about the idea myself. It was my Senior year in high school and I didn’t want to move away from all my friends. It seems the more mother pushed to move, the more sick she would become. She started running fevers and getting really bad night sweats. As time went on, things just continued to go downhill for her. Looking back, she now admits that she was more than prepared to die and that she felt it was the spirits in the home that were doing the killing. She rarely let the house control her actions as father seemed to do.

I was always caught in the middle. I wanted to stay as my father did, for much different reasons, but I wanted the best for my mother. By this time, I knew there was both good and evil in the home, and it was becoming all too clear that my father had lost control to the evil and mother was being destroyed for not following their plans. It is my belief they wanted us to stay, they knew that my father would pretty much do anything they wanted and my mother was not the controlling factor of the relationship. They also seemed to figure out how to influence her health. She had always been a very healthy and strong woman and with no medical explanation, she appeared to slowly dying, and she knew it.

The house was interesting to say the least. I myself had been locking myself in my active room until I just couldn’t take it anymore and started sleeping downstairs. It seemed even the good spirits had a certain amount of control over rational decision making processes. When confronted with spirits, most would likely flee the situation, not lock themselves in with it. Looking back it does seem odd to do such things, but at the time it felt normal, even like the right thing to do. I never thought about how strange living in the house was until years after moving out and seeing how it was to live in a quiet home. But that wasn’t to happen for a couple of more years.

Life Downstairs Part II.




After leaving the tv room, I headed for the formal living room. This room was located under my parent’s bedroom. The bad thing about this room, was that it was the room that was open to the staircase and also looked up to my bedroom. I thought that if I was to stay in sight of my old room, perhaps the spirit in my room would be able to protect me during the night.

In the mornings, I had been going into my bedroom to get clothes for that day. While in there, I would often speak to the spirit, telling her I appreciated her caring for me, but that I really didn’t feel comfortable being touched. I was never completely sure what her intentions were by touching me, but it just didn’t feel right. I really wanted her to know that I didn’t hate her, I just felt it was better if I stayed out of the room for a while so that maybe things could go back to more like they had been in the past. It was all just very odd. I couldn’t see her, but I really felt as though she was listening.


The first week or so didn’t go too bad in the formal living room. I wasn’t waking up at 11:34 and was able to get a good nights sleep. As time progressed, so did activity. The small child in the bathroom apparently also liked to spend time in the room. I would often wake up in the night to the sound of crying. The crying would always be about three feet off the ground, so the child must have been around three or four years of age. I would often try to talk to the child, telling it that I didn’t know what was wrong, but it really needed to go towards the light. Now, I have no idea if the child actually saw a light or not, but it sounded like the right thing to say. The crying never did go away, it would happen every so often and always come from right next to the sofa. Since it didn’t seem to go towards the light, I often would just tell it that everything was going to be ok and try not to cry. Many times the crying would indeed stop. It was always such an eery cry, always sounded as if it was coming from a child in a cave. It had an echo quality to it and sounded near, yet like it was far away. I had hoped that the spirit in my room would take care of the child, yet I never sensed the two of them together.

As time went on, the spirit in my bedroom would often become active. I would see lights flying around my bedroom at night, just as I had when I had the bedroom across from it. I would often go up and check things out and say a word or two to her, but I still didn’t sleep in the room. I often felt her watching me from my bedroom, it wasn’t all that bad of a feeling. I still kept hoping that as long as she could see me, I would be safe. I knew that things were strained, but I still would smell her perfume in the mornings, so I knew she was still keeping an eye on me. I ended up sleeping in the formal living room for quite some time. I think it helped the spirit in my bedroom and I to kind of patch things up but still gave me the distance I think we needed.

The Fields Are Alive, With The Sound Of Screaming.



The home had a very deep ditch in front along the road. The ditch was fifteen feet deep in parts and the sides were nearly straight up and down. At one end of the ditch, where the road curved, there was what remained of a Model T Ford. We never knew if it was an old wreck or if it was placed there at some point to stop erosion, but it made for good proof of how deep the ditch really was. You couldn’t see any part of the car unless you looked down in the ditch.

We always knew that one day someone would end up in that ditch. There was a sharp curve and many times people would fly down that dirt road, it was only a matter of time. The time finally came, one fall evening. My parents were out of town and I was home alone for the weekend. The home had been acting up a little. Earlier in the evening, I had noticed a couple of the balls of light floating out and around the home. I had actually grown comfortable with the white lights, by this time I thought of them as my protectors. I was sitting in the house watching television with most of the windows open, it was a cool and foggy evening. I had thought that I heard something, sounded like glass breaking. I looked out the front window and heard nothing, but again noticed a couple of floating white lights come from out by the barn to the road. They floated about four to six feet off the ground and both followed the same path.

It was always kind of strange to sit and watch something like that. I didn’t really know what they were, but I knew that in the past they had been around when I needed help, so I never tried to do anything to discourage them from coming around. Also, when the girl in my room ran off after seeing her, she had flown out the window in the form of a ball of light, so I assumed they must indeed by spirits.

The balls of lights seemed to vanish when they got near the ditch and I went back to watching television. Shortly after, I thought I heard screaming coming from the field. I quickly turned off the television and went running to the open window. The night was dark and foggy, I couldn’t see much at all. I started to listen and I could hear what sounded like people running through the field and yelling, “Keep running, their coming.” Well that didn’t settle well, so I called my uncle on the hill and told him to keep on the lookout, there was someone running out in the field and yelling. As I was on the phone with my uncle, another ball of light went flying from over the house and out into the field, I now knew what who ever was in the field was running from. I told my uncle, who couldn’t see a thing from the fog, that some people must be out in the field and the lights are chasing them for some reason. He told me I could come up there if I wanted, but I told him I would just stay put and see what happened.

After hanging up the phone, I heard yelling again, “What are they?”, then another voice, “I don’t know, but run”. A few minutes went by and the sound of the running faded away, as did any sign of the lights. I closed the windows and sat in the house alone. I figured I had better say something, so I told the house I don’t know what was going on, but if it was protecting me, I appreciated it.

Later than night, I woke up to flashing lights bouncing around inside the house. This time, it was something I recognized. There was a sheriff’s car and tow truck out in front of my home. I went outside to see what had happened. There was a truck in the ditch, couldn’t see it at all until I walked right up to the edge. Turns out that two guys from town had been drunk and causing trouble. They were chased out of town by police and had managed to lose the police, but managed to find my ditch. The sheriff said they were in custody. He said they told him they were really messed up, starting telling me their story. They claimed they had lost control of the truck after trying to dodge someone standing in the road and ended up in my ditch. They told him they tried to come to my house for help, but were chased away by strange lights that kept swooping down at them. The guys told him they took off running though the field and the lights followed them, so they just kept running until they got to the next house and called for help.

The sheriff was laughing the entire time he was telling me the story, thinking it was the most absurd thing he had ever heard. I stood there laughing myself, if the guys weren’t on drugs, I am sure the sheriff thought they were after telling him that story. Sure I knew it was true, but there was no way I was going to tell him otherwise. I watched as they winched the truck out of the ditch and hauled it away. A very exciting ending to a boring evening. I turned to go back to the house just in time to see the drapes in my room close. I went into the house and looked up at my room. I yelled up, “Thank you” and went and sat down on the couch and tried to relax enough to fall asleep.



What Was That?

Activity in the formal living had continued to increase the longer I slept in the room. It started out great, but the cries were more frequent and the basement decided it wanted to become active as well. Under the staircase, was the stairwell to the basement. During the night, I would often hear what sounded to be a heavy set person wearing boots walking up the basement stairs. They would creak under the weight and often happen around the same time of night. I would get up and walk over to the door of the basement and listen, trying to listen for voices or other noises. I would always just hear the steps but once I did get quite a scare. I was sleeping and woke up at the old usual time of 11:34. I hadn’t been waking up at that time in that room, so that alone had me upset.

As I sat there, I started to hear the steps coming up the basement stairs. I jumped off the sofa and as I did, I noticed white lights this time, stirring in my room. I wasn’t sure what to think of it, but I went over to the basement door to have a listen. As I stood there listening to the steps, they were coming from the bottom and heading up towards me. I never heard them going down, just always coming up. Just as the last step reached the top of the basement landing, I knew that what ever it was, was just on the other side of the door. I had enough of this and I planned on flinging the door open to see if I could see what it was that had been walking up the stairs. Just as I was about to reach to unlock the basement door, I heard a rattle. I looked down to see the knob moving, what ever was behind the door had a similar plan.

Just as the knob started to turn, I heard the chair in my room start to go crazy. I ran back to look up at my room and as I stood there looking up, a rush of ice cold air went flying by me and headed for the basement door. Just as the breeze hit me, the knob on the door stopped turning and all got quiet. Again, it appeared that the spirit in my room was on top of things. I went and sat back down on the sofa and turned on the television. Not long after, I heard what sounded like things getting knocked off a shelf down in the basement. I didn’t bother to go look. If the spirit in my room was taking care of things, I felt as though this was not my fight. It bothered me that something was trying to get out of the basement. The basement was full of negative energy and always had been. It was where the original family lived for years before building the house. Not sure what all happened down there, but we kept the basement door locked and rarely went down there after dark.

Something I have never understood is why sometimes spirits move things as we, the living, would. It took the time to move the door knob. Why? Was the spirit in the basement just going for effect? The spirit in my room just flew right through the basement door, didn’t even make a sound. Looking back, it does seem that when things would move, for the most part, it was a display of power for the spirits. The spirit in my room liked to play, but the spirits that visited the rest of the home seemed to only move items to cause terror. I guess they know that to get attention, they have to do things that we can pick up on. The turning of a knob, the ringing of a phone or even just the placement of items moving. All little things, unless they happen out of context of daily life.

Unwelcome Company.



It was getting to the point where I just wasn’t getting much sleep anymore. I was waking up at 11:34 most of the time, more and more noises would come from the basement during the night and I has just about had enough. One evening a friend of mine had come over and stayed for dinner. During dinner we were talking about the house and how I hadn’t been getting any rest. My mother came up with the idea that my friend spend the night and see if that would help me to get any sleep. The idea sounded stupid to me, I was a senior in high school and having a friend spend the night to keep me company just seemed childish. My friend had never had an encounter with the home and quickly agreed that he would spend the night to see if it helped me get any sleep. I never thought he really believed my stories of the home, but he was too good of a friend to make fun of me or call out for proof like my other friend had. He was one of the only friends I had that I would consider very religious. Most of the guys I ran with didn’t attend church all that much, but this one went every Sunday. I figured maybe having him around that night may indeed be of some help.

That night my mother made him a place to sleep on the floor near the sofa I had been sleeping on. We watched television for a bit and then went to sleep. I hadn’t been to sleep very long when he woke me up. He said he heard some noises coming from the basement. I told him that yes, the basement makes strange noises and to try to ignore them and go back to sleep. I didn’t tell him that the noises were anything to worry about, just told him that indeed, the basement does make noises.

I had fallen back to sleep when he woke me up again. This time he was clearly getting concerned. He said he woke up and saw a red light flying down the hall with two white lights chasing it. I indeed had seen plenty of white lights out there, but the red one was news to me. I asked him exactly what had happened. He said that something woke him up and when he opened his eyes, a red light came from the front door area, followed by two white lights. The lights flew very fast along the staircase and the red light turned at the basement door and the white lights followed it in. I told him that was the kind of thing I see quite a bit. I told him the red light was new, but I had a feeling that it was something bad and the white lights were taking care of it.

We talked for a bit more and before going back to sleep, he moved his bedding over very close to the sofa I was sleeping on. I could tell he was getting nervous, but there just wasn’t much I could do about it. Having company did seem to be working, I was falling to sleep quickly, but never for very long. Shortly after falling to sleep again, I was being shaken. I jumped up and my friend was on the floor crying. Now, I had never seen this guy cry. He was a tough guy who never took any backtalk from anyone, yet here he was on the floor crying and very upset. I quickly turned on the light and could tell by the look on his face he had seen something and then I started to notice markings on his face.

I asked him what the hell happened. He told me someone woke him up, sounded like a very deep voice. My father has a very deep voice and at first he thought it was him standing over by the staircase. He sat up and the man walked over and then my friend realized it wasn’t my father. He said the man was all black, had on a long black coat and black hat. He couldn’t make out the face and as soon as he realized he didn’t know who the man was, he started to get up and when he did, the man flew towards him and slapped him on the face. Just after that happened, white lights came flying from upstairs and chased the man out the window.

I sat there listening to my friend, tears were running down his face and on his cheek was the clear marking of a hand. I didn’t know what to think. I had been touched by the girl in my room and had a black hand over my face in the tv room, but nothing like this had ever happened to any of us. My parents heard all the commotion and came downstairs. He told them what had happened and said he couldn’t stay in the house any longer. He told me he was sorry and I told him it was ok, I understood. It was around two o’clock in the morning when he left to go back home. My parents told me I could come up and try sleeping in their room, but I declined. They went back up to their room and all was quiet for about fifteen minutes and then the phone rang. I quickly answered it and it was my friend. He was talking a million words a minute and completely scared out of his mind. He said as he was pulling away, it looked as though he was being followed out of our driveway by a horse and buggy and then suddenly white lights came flying out of the house and started to chase. He said the minute he hit the two lane blacktop into town, he went as fast as he could and tried to lose them. He said he kept looking in his mirror and they were with him until just as he entered town and then they vanished.

I apologized for all that happened. I stayed on the phone with him for a while to try to calm him down and he asked me how I was ever able to get any sleep at all living in the house. I told him, in a sick way, you just kind of get used to the unexpected. It was a very long time before he ever returned to my home and it was just for very short visits during the day. It was strange how things were all kind of happening with greater frequency and intensity. The guys that ended up in my ditch had claimed to be dodging someone in the road when they lost control and now my friend said a horse and buggy followed him to town. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but it was clear that something negative was gaining strength at the home and battle lines were forming.


Help From Beyond?



Many strange things happened in the house over the years, but one that I found personally odd, was the fixing of items. On many occasions, things would get fixed without anyone in the home touching them. On at least ten occasions, pieces of clothing would some how mend themselves. Shirts with missing buttons, a tear in a pair of jeans and even a stain that would never wash out, suddenly fixed.

It would catch you off guard when it happened. I had a favorite shirt that I always wore that I ended up tearing a hole in. I had placed the shirt in the closet and figured I would end up wearing it for a work shirt. Well, one day I did in fact decide to wear it for working in and the tear was gone. I asked my mother if she had fixed it and she had not. This sort of simple thing happened on many different occasions. There was no reason for it and it never made much sense. Shirts could even be missing a button and somehow, the shirt would end up fixed with the correct matching button. You could never tell the item had been fixed, it just looked like it had never been damaged.

I picked up an ability while living in the home or perhaps it evolved. Shortly after we first moved into the home, my father had an electric drill that wouldn’t work. He was very upset that it quit and for some reason, I told him to hand it to me and maybe I can fix it. He handed it to me and it suddenly started to work. We both thought it to be odd, but he was happy for a few moments that his drill worked and I went on about my business. Later that day, he told my mother what had happened and she jokingly told me to go fix the clock in the upstairs landing. The clock hadn’t worked for years, so I went upstairs and touched the clock, to my shock and actually my horror, when I gave the pendulum a swing, the clock suddenly started to chime. From downstairs, I heard my mother shout, “What is that?”. “I think I just fixed the clock”, I yelled back. She came running up the stairs to see what I had done, all I had done was touch it.

This sort of thing happened many times over the years that we lived there. Something would quit working and my parents would bring it to me to hold. Most of the time, it would start working again. Even after moving out of the home, I still can do it frequently, but not with the same success rate as I did when living in the home. It is strange, I can usually tell when something is going to work or not the second I touch it, something just kind of tells me it is or isn’t.

Not sure what about the house caused items to fix themselves or allowed me to pick up on this strange little trick. I don’t complain about it though, it has been very handy over the years.

Someone’s At The Door.

Early in 1988, something happened to my mother that made us really wonder, I think my father as well, what the home was capable of. My mother had been doing laundry and cleaning house when she thought she had heard some noises. She wasn’t sure what they were, but she thought she had heard my father’s voice. She went looking and calling out, but no one was there. She had taken a basket of laundry upstairs and just turned to go back down the stairs. She was leaving the room at the top of the staircase when she suddenly was struck in the head and everything started to go dark.

She reached for the banister and grabbed hold to keep from falling down the stairs. She finally was able to get downstairs and then outside where my father and I were. She had a huge bump on the back of her head and was still very unstable. We asked her what happened and she said something hit her in the back of the head with a door and tried to knock her down the stairs.

Dad and I went into the house and up the stairs, only to find the door had been shut. We opened it and found no one inside. All the windows had been shut and no outside doors had been open, there was no breeze coming through the home that could have caught the door. My father took a large crock and placed it next to the open door so that it could not happen again.

This was not good. My mother’s health had been getting worse over the last year or so, my father had been distancing himself more and more from us and now something had slapped my friend and hit my mother in the head with a door. Things were getting worse and I knew the end wasn’t in sight. The one positive sign was that my father did seem to be taking precautions. He never really said he thought the door hitting mother was intentional, but when he placed the heavy old antique crock against it, I knew he must be thinking it could happen again.

Standing Guard.



Not long after mother was hit in the head with a door, something started to guard the area where it happened. The bathroom to the home was at the bottom of the stairs. People started saying that they thought they saw someone standing at the top of the staircase as they would enter or leave the restroom. The place that people were seeing the figure was where mother had been, when she was hit. Everyone described the figure the same way, an outline all in white.

I too started to see the figure and indeed, it was a figure glowing white. It wasn’t the girl from my room but something else. This figure had no detail, just the outline. It was there often and company as well as family would see it. I never liked looking up at it, for some reason it always made me very uncomfortable. I was used to the female spirit in my room, but for some reason, this spirit seemed to want it’s privacy. I never tried talking to it, but I am sure it was there to protect against what had happened to my mother.

A Strange Affirmation

After a while, you begin to think perhaps you are going crazy, as well as those around you. The whole idea of seeing spirits seems so far fetched, it is nice to hear from others that you respect, that also claim to have seen something.

When I was around ten years old, I would often be taken to my grandparent’s home on the weekends, this was a year or so before we moved into the farm house. My parents would take me over there and my cousin would also be taken there, so that we could have the weekend to play. We stayed in the guest room, each having our own twin bed to sleep on. My grandparents were very firm, yet nice people. One night, I woke up to see what looked like my grandfather. He would peek into the door and then fall back again. We played this peek-a-boo game for a while, until suddenly he jumped out into the darkness of the hall. He was wearing red flannel pajamas and started to do this funny dance. He was jumping all around and I really couldn’t see his face, but occasionally I would see him smile at me as he danced around.

I sat up in bed and watched for a good 5 minutes, I laughed and laughed but my cousin never did wake up. I sat there and watched him do his silly dance until finally, he waved goodbye and headed down the hall. I quickly laid back down and fell to sleep. I told my parents about my grandfather dancing and they started laughing and said he must have had too much to drink that night.

Fast forward to 1988. We went to a birthday party on my father’s side of the family and haunted houses somehow came up in the conversation. We started to tell them about the things that had been happening to us. We never brought things like that up around father’s side, my father never really liked to admit the house acted up and many of the family on that side didn’t believe in such things. When we were done, a couple of family members laughed and started going on about how there were no such things as ghosts, and then my grandmother spoke. She said, “Our house is haunted too”. This made everyone get quiet and then my aunt asked her to explain. My grandmother started to tell the story about how in the late of night, she often would see a man in red flannel pajamas dancing around out in the hallway. She would always wake up my grandfather and the man would always vanish.

The minute my grandmother said this, my parents both turned to me. They had both remembered my story about the man in the pajamas from seven years earlier. They had me tell her about my run in with the man and she said that is exactly what would happen with her as well. Their home was only three years old when they purchased it and they purchased it from the man who had built it. There was no explanation of who the spirit was, yet he would occasionally make an appearance in the home.

It was nice to know that someone that always seemed so rational as my grandmother, had seen a ghost that I had seen as well. There were times when I really wondered if I was just going crazy or imagining things, and it was a well timed affirmation that was very much needed.

A Friend Comes To Stay.



It was nearing the end of my Senior year in high school. My best friend came from an abusive household, so he came to live with us. He had always believed what I said about the house being haunted, just never had any experiences of his own.

By the time he had come to live with us, I had moved on to my third and final downstairs room, the family room. It was located where the original kitchen used to be and was just off the tv room. Ever since the night my other friend was run out of the home, I just hadn’t been comfortable in the formal living room any longer.

Things were going well in the family room, I had been sleeping in there for a month of so when my friend moved in. I asked him what room he would like to stay in and he picked the tv room. I told him nothing about the hand over my face or what others had experienced in that room. He slept in there for about a week before things started to act up for him. I woke up one morning and like my other friend, this friend had ended up on the floor right next to the sofa I was sleeping on.

He said that during the night, he woke up to the low voice that others had described and saw a black figure in the corner of the room before it vanished. I told him that he had seen what many others had and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was getting near the end of the school year and he would be leaving for college to play football, so I told him he could stay at our home if he was comfortable with it or he could find somewhere else to live and I wouldn’t be insulted. He ended up staying in the home with us until he left for college, but every night he slept on the floor beside my sofa.

A New Wakeup Call.

I had been sleeping in the family room for nearly two months when I started waking up again at the same time every night. This time it wasn’t 11:34, now it was 11:35. I wasn’t sure what to think about this, I was happy that the 11:34 had ended but what did the 11:35 represent?

I sat on the couch one evening and started to think. With my alarm clock upside down, 11:34 spelled the word “hell”. I decided I would stay up that evening and see what 11:35 spelled out. That night, my friend and I waited for the time to finally arrive and it did. We turned the clock upside and it said, “sell”. We both looked at each other and both said “sell” at the same time.

It was clear to me that something was trying to get a message across to me, and was using a strange method to do so. Something was telling me it was time to sell the home.

The next day I told my mother about how I was waking up at 11:35 and what it said when turned upside down on the clock. She knew I had been waking up at 11:34 before and now 11:35, but she hadn’t thought to see if it had spelled anything out either. She had been waking up at 3:33 more and more since the door struck her, she so knew what it was like to wake up at the same time every night for no reason.


A Sign.

I was a few weeks from graduating from high school and was returning home from town. I had some friends with me, we were going to stop in at the home to get a few things and then go catch a movie. As I was nearing home, one of my friends noticed something in my yard. As we got closer to the house, I noticed it was well. It was a sign.

Not only was it a sign, it was a sign that all could see, it was a For Sale sign. I was taken by total surprise, my parents had said nothing about this to me. I went on in to the home but my parents were gone. There was a contract and some other paperwork on the dining room table, but no explanation.

I went ahead and went out with my friends and by the time I returned home, it was late and my parents were both sleeping. I was going to wake up early enough to talk to them before they left for work, but didn’t catch them and had to wait when they got home after work.

I asked them when they had made the decision. They said that it wasn’t too long after I started waking up at 11:35. Father had started to grow concerned about the home when mother was hit in the head by the door. For the first time in a very long time, my father didn’t seem to be controlled by the home. They figured they would put the home on the market without telling me for one specific reason, they didn’t want the house to know. They both thought that if I knew that the house was going to be sold, that the house would really start to act up, specifically, the girl in my room. They had decided I would only find out about their plans if they actually put the house on the market. That way, if they decided not to sell, the home perhaps would never know of the plans.

I had never known why my mother or I woke up at certain times or who was making us do so and neither did my parents. I knew it was most likely not the girl in my room, because of the references to hell, but they did not want to take any chances. It was odd knowing that we may be moving in the future, but there was still plenty of life left in the old home.




The Spirits React.

The house had been on the market for a couple of months and so far there had been no serious buyers. My father had listed the home with the small town realtor for 90 days, which was a mistake because the small town realtor didn’t advertise in the bigger markets. It was the beginning of the third month and my friend was moving out to start football training at the college he was attending, leaving me back home alone for the most part. It seemed that when the house was put on the market, it did just as my parents had thought it would, it became even more active.

The part about the home becoming active that I didn’t like, was the fact the woman in my room seemed to really be taking this hard. The first interaction she and I had after the home had been on the market, happened one weekend while my parents were away on a getaway. I was sitting in the formal living room, watching the television when things started to happen. I heard the chain on the chair in my room start to rattle loudly, I looked up to see what appeared to be her standing in the doorway of my bedroom then she quickly vanished.

About the time this happened, my aunt from up on the hill called me. She said there were a lot of lights around the home that evening and called to make sure everything was ok. I told her the house was acting up, but I was going to ride it out and see what happened. As I was on the phone with her, it sounded like someone picked up one of the other phones and was listening. I quickly said, get off the phone and it did indeed sound as if someone hung up a phone. As we were talking, I was watching some decorative grass that was in a basket in the room. The grass slowly started to sway back and forth and I mentioned to my aunt what the grass was doing. The grass stopped and a moment later, I heard footsteps upstairs. It sounded like someone was slowly stomping around up there. As this was going on, I was talking to my aunt and telling her everything that was happening as it happened.

While I was telling her this, she was looking out her window and down towards my house. She said lights were coming in and out of the upstairs window, they would swoop down towards the formal living room window I was in and then back up. I figured the woman in my room was just playing games with me, but things started to pick up.

The stomping upstairs, which was a slow paced stomp, started to increase in frequency. I heard them stomp around the staircase and in and out of my parent’s room which was above me. The stomping kept getting louder and louder, faster and faster. I was getting mad, not scared but mad that the woman would act this way towards me. I yelled out for her to stop.

Shortly after yelling, the stomping did stop and I thought that was the end of it. I was about to hang up the phone with my aunt when the grass started to sway again. I sat and watched it and told my aunt. She said that maybe I should tell her that things would be ok and not to get upset. I looked over at the moving grass and repeated that things would be ok and not to get upset. No sooner had the words left my lips, when the grass suddenly bent at a ninety degree angle and a couple of the long stems of the grass actually broke. I heard steps fly up the stairs and suddenly it sounded as if she was running laps around the upstairs landing.

My aunt could hear the noises over the phone and by this time, was telling me to get out of there quickly. I told her I may and just then the stomping again stopped. I yelled up, “Relax, everything will work out fine.” Just then, from the South end of the house, it sounded as if she was taking off in a dead run, I heard her fly across the upstairs and then, CRASH. The upstairs North wall was hit so hard it sent an old picture that had been hanging falling to the floor. My aunt started to scream over the phone, “What was that? Are you ok?”. I told her I thought the woman in my room had just stepped outside for a breather and I thought perhaps I would come up and maybe spend the night at my uncles’s home.

As I grabbed my keys, I quickly rounded up a few things and headed out the door. As I did, I saw a white light out by the pole barn and it was heading towards me. I quickly got in my car and flew out of the driveway. As I watched, the light started to follow. I began to ask myself, “What am I doing?”. I had lived in the home for nearly nine years and had never been literally chased out of the home before. My uncles’s home was only a mile away by road, what would keep her from just following there?

I went ahead and kept driving, trying to clear my mind of what I was doing. I wasn’t sure if the spirit was able to read my thoughts, but I tried to clear my mind just in case. I flew past my uncle’s house and just kept driving. I looked back after a couple of miles and saw no more light. I drove over to the next town and called my aunt. I told her I would be coming over in a little while, I was going to see if perhaps I could sneak back over without being noticed.

About half an hour later, I did in fact go to my aunt and uncle’s with the headlights off as I neared their home. I pulled into the driveway, the entire time looking down at my house to make sure nothing was heading my way. I made it into their home, we ate some sandwiches, talked and finally I was able to get a good nights sleep.

The next day was a Sunday and I ended up going back down to my house to see what her mood was like. The energy from the previous evening was now calm and I was able to enter the home without much drama. That night, I kept the phone handy, but I ended up staying in the house all night. I heard quite a bit of noise coming from the upstairs, but I think she had accepted what was happening. She just needed to get it out of her system.


Dealing With Realtors and Spirits.



The ninety day contract with the first realtor finally ended. My father decided to list the home with one of the big real estate companies out of Wichita to get better exposure. It wasn’t long after the new sign went out, that people were coming out to look at the home.

Many people came and went, but finally a couple came to look at the house that seemed really interested. They looked at the home twice with the realtor and then asked if they could meet with my parents and ask a few questions. My parents agreed to the meeting and they came out one evening and sat down with us.

The very first thing that was asked by them was if the house was haunted. My father kind of just looked over at my mother and I and held out his hand, gesturing that we should answer. We looked at the couple and both said yes it was. They said they had felt something on both of their visits and wanted to be certain that they weren’t imagining things. We let them know that indeed, they were not imaging things, the home was very haunted.

They were excited by the news. They said that they had lived in a haunted house before and had always wanted another. I can’t really imagine wanting to look for a haunted home, but this couple had just that in mind. They never asked any other questions about the spirits, didn’t want to know if they were good or evil and didn’t ask us for any stories. They just wanted some confirmation that they home was indeed haunted.

The couple did end up buying the home. They lived there for ten years. During that time, they returned the home back to nearly the same condition it was when my parents had purchased it. They closed up all the walls that had been opened up. They shut off the upstairs completely and rarely went up there. They vinyl sided the home white and but a black shingle roof on the home. It was strange and depressing to see the home after they bought it. My parents had taken the house back to where it was when it was first built. This couple took it back to where it was when it sat empty for years.

Moving

Once the couple had decided to buy the home, it was time for my parents to find another home. There was one requirement, my parents didn’t want another home that was haunted. When they would go look at homes, they would allow me to walk around to see if I felt anything at all. Back then, I wasn’t able to see spirits as I can now, but I could easily feel them. They finally found a home they liked and it felt free of spirits, so they decided to purchase the home and the move began.

There was some worry that the spirits from the farm home would follow us to the new home. I decided that I would spend the last night in the home back in my old bedroom. Most of the items in my room had already been packed, so my room was nothing like it had been for the last 5 years or so. The only thing remaining in my bedroom were the large items, my bed, the swinging chair and my dresser.

That last night, I went up to my room and got into bed. It wasn’t long when old familiar creaking of the floorboards started to enter the room. Earlier, I had unchained the chair and had been sitting in it. I watched as the chair started to crackle and turn slowly towards my bed. This was an awkward moment. I knew this was likely to happen but I felt some things had to be said and this was the only way to do so. I sat up in bed and looked over at the chair. As it sat there swinging, I said that we would be leaving the next day. I went on to say that I had learned a lot from her and really appreciated her protecting me over the years.

I told her that I didn’t know if anyone would be sleeping in my room or not, but she should be nice and not try to scare them. I also asked that she not follow me and please keep the other spirits from doing the same. I was very worried that she would try to come with me to the new home, I wasn’t sure how far she could actually travel, but it was something that was on my mind.

As I sat there talking to the chair, it just swayed side to side the entire time. When I was done talking, I got back under the covers and waited to see how this was going to go. Very few minutes passed when the chair crackled and then silence. As I looked around, the squeak of the ceiling fan started, it turned slowly a few times and then ended. I didn’t try to play the old game, I just watched. I suddenly was overcome by the powerful sensation of sadness. I think she had connected with me. I was not all that sad during the entire conversation, but suddenly I felt as though a loved one were leaving. It was then that I learned for certain what I had always thought, she did love me. The love was not as a man loves a woman, but as family member would love one of their own. I think I had replaced the family she lost years ago and my interactions and openness brought her out of her shell and increased her powers.

I stayed in the room for about an hour or so, but the sadness was just too intense. I ended up getting out of bed and sat in the chair for a few minutes. I told her that things would be ok, the new couple seemed really nice and that I would miss her too in a strange way. I made sure to express that I hoped she didn’t try to follow us. I then went back downstairs and slept on the sofa that last night.

Father Makes A Shocking Revelation


The day we were to move was one of excitement and anticipation. I was really looking forward to getting on with life and seeing what it was like to live in a home without so much activity. We started the move early in the morning. My aunt and uncle from up on the hill had been helping us, so the move went quickly. We had been moving items all day and it was getting to be evening.

There was very little left to be moved when my father started acting out of character and said there was something he needed to say to us and also something he needed to show us. He took all of us down in the basement to the old cellar area. Down in the basement, there was an old root cellar that was original to the home. The root cellar also connected to the crawl space under the addition to the home. We never liked the root cellar, it was dirty and cold, we always kept it locked.

As we followed my father down into the basement, he started to head back to the cellar. As we were walking, he started to tell us what was happening. He said that years ago, while he was bracing up the addition, he started to do some digging down in the crawl space behind the root cellar. As he was digging, he found what appeared to be an old shirt.

It was about this time in his talk, that we ended up at the root cellar. He unlocked the cellar door, and lead us inside. He then started to crawl back up into the crawl space. He went back a little ways and started to dig in the dirt and came back with a old filthy shirt. He put the shirt down on the ground and started to once again talk.

He said that when he found the shirt, there appeared to be something in it and what he found bothered him so much that he never told any of us about it. He started to open up the shirt and inside were bones. My uncle looked down at the bones and up to my father as said that they appeared to be human bones, a femur and a couple of smaller bones. My father agreed that they did appear to be just that, but he just was not sure.

The addition had been added to the home back in the 1920's and the crawl space had been dug at that time, about three feet below the surface of the soil. My father said he had been digging down about a foot and a half down, when he found the shirt and the bones. They were very old and had been there possibly even longer than the addition had been around. My father had decided to never tell us about the bones. He knew when he found them it would upset my mother and figured it was best to not mention them. After showing us the bones, my uncle asked if my father had dug down any deeper and my father said that he hadn’t, he didn’t want to take the chance of finding more. My father picked the shirt back up and placed it in the hole where he found them and covered it up.

He crawled back out and then said he had something else to tell us. He said that for years, he had been told by the man he bought the house from, that there was rumored to be people buried in the basement under the old limestone floor. In one room of the basement, it had a limestone floor. Large two foot by two foot squares of limestone made the floor. Upon hearing this, my uncle asked if we minded if he took a look.

My uncle left for home and quickly returned with a very large pry bar and shovel. We all went into the room and my uncle started to pry up one of the very large limestone tiles. They were very tight, he finally was able to pry one up. At the moment he lifted it up, the room suddenly became cold. We all looked at each other and looked down at the area under the limestone. There was a layer of sand which the limestone had been resting on. The room seemed to be getting colder and then suddenly what sounded like footsteps could be heard by all on the basement stairs. My father quickly went around to the stairs and there was no one there.

We decided that with the sudden rush of activity, it would be best to put the limestone back into place and not dig. We placed the limestone back and as every one was leaving the basement, I turned and told the basement I was sorry about snooping around down there. We never knew for sure if anyone was buried in the basement or what exactly those bones were in the crawl space, but we figured it was best to leave them be.

Soon after that, we did some final cleaning of the home and left. I think we were all happy to be getting out of the home, but it was bitter sweet. We had lived there for nearly a decade and I had many memorable experiences in that old home. We would never again return to the home as a family, but I would indeed return to the home, eight years from the time that we moved.

They Say You Can Never Go Back Home, and Perhaps You Never Should.



After we moved from the home, I never thought about returning. It was nice to finally live somewhere that I didn’t have to think about if I was being watched or if there was something trying to get my family or myself. I saw the home during various trips to my aunt and uncle’s home up on the hill, but I just never had the notion of stepping foot in the home again.

During the years, my aunt and uncle got to be quite good friends with the new owners. They were an older couple and had very much hoped that the home was haunted. One of the very first things the couple did, was to close up the walls that my father had opened up. They then returned the home back to white and put the roof back to black, the home looked very much like it did when my parents bought it.

Over the years, my uncle would tell me that the new owners would like me to stop in sometime and talk about things that had happened in the home, a comparison of notes. I never had much interest in doing so, I didn’t want to go back into the home. This continued for quite some time until my uncle said that they were starting to have some serious problems in the home and that the owners wife was suddenly becoming very sick, much like my mother had towards the end.

It was mid September, 1997. I had been married for about a year and my life had changed very much since the last time I had stepped foot in the home. My uncle asked if I would mind if the new owners called me to discuss the house, I told him that would be fine. The new owners called my home and asked if I would be interested in coming down to visit them, talk about things that had happened in the home and perhaps have some pictures taken while I walked around the place. I didn’t really care for the idea of the pictures, seemed cheesy to me but I figured if it would make them feel better, I would agree to the pictures. Their next request was just stupid in my opinion, but I agreed to do so. They asked that this all take place on Halloween at midnight. Well good grief, how text book horror story can you get, I thought. I asked them why that date? They said they felt the home acted up more on that date than any other, something I never experienced while living there. Again, I agreed to this and made plans to arrive around ten in the evening of Halloween to discuss the home and then take pictures later that night.

Halloween soon arrived and I found myself pulling up to the old home. As I pulled into the driveway, the home looked very much like it did when my parents first bought it. The grass was unkept, the home looked sad and I wasn’t all that excited to be there. I watched the curtains in my old room to see if I would be greeted like I had many times before, but nothing moved. I got out of my car and walked through the darkness up to the front door. I knocked at the door and was met at the door by the couple. We went inside and began to talk.

They looked tired and had aged quite a bit since seeing them last, eight years prior. Her health had been deteriorating in the last year and they both felt there was something evil in the home. I asked if they went up stairs very often and they said they hadn’t been up there in months. They stayed downstairs nearly all the time, going upstairs only to check on things. I asked them if they ever saw a woman, they said no. It seems they experienced the dark figures at the frequency that I experienced the light.

They always smelled the cigar/rotten smell, always saw dark figures walking throughout the home, would see the red balls of light and heard footsteps often. I asked them if they ever spent any time in my room, they said they had not. At first it was to be a den, but after a few months of living in the home, they decided to close off the upstairs and not use it. They had been keeping my spirit friend isolated upstairs for many years and I felt it had taken quite a toll on her.

We talked for about an hour and a half when there was a knock at the door. It was a photographer friend of theirs that they had called to take pictures as I walked around the house and property. We talked for a few moments and then we decided it was time to take our little walk. They did not want to be in the pictures, didn’t want to go upstairs and didn’t want many lights on. The film the photographer was using was some sort of light or thermal sensitive film that was supposed to pick things up the eye can’t see. I thought it was all nonsense, I didn’t know anything about photography, so I had to take the guys word for it that he knew what he was talking about.

They started to turn all the lights in the home off and asked if I would start walking around the main level. I went into each room and as I would walk around, the photographer would snap photos. I wasn’t really liking this, seemed like some sort of put on, but I continued to walk around. As I walked into each room, I would stand for a bit and then go around it a few times. It was strange, but downstairs, I felt nothing. I really thought I would feel something, but I didn’t. They asked if I would like to go to the basement next or upstairs. I picked the basement, figured I would save best for last. I asked that I not have to go down in the basement with the lights all off, I never liked it down there anyway and sure as hell wasn’t going to so down there after eight years with no light at all. They gave me a small pen light and I started the trip downstairs.

I made it to the bottom of the stairs and then headed towards the room with the limestone floor. I told the guy to snap plenty of pictures in there, I was starting to get cold. As I walked, he clicked and we made our way over to the root cellar. I opened it up, they had it locked as we always did. I stepped inside and told him to take plenty of pictures of the crawl space. He did and we made our way through the basement and back up to the main level. Other than being a little cold down there, I felt very little.

It was now time to go upstairs. I chatted with the couple for a few minutes before heading up. This was the time I started to get excited. Of all the places, this is the place I didn’t want to be the most. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. I told the photographer that if anything was going to happen, it was likely to happen once we went up there and to be ready. I started my way up the stairs and they had the door to each bedroom closed.

I went to the door at the top of the stairs that had hit my mother and opened it. I walked into the room. It was pitch black except for the little pen light I had. I walked in and heard the clicking of the camera behind me. I walked around the room and then on to the next room. I went over to my parents bedroom, my first bedroom. I opened the door and went inside. I looked around the best I could and then walked around the room a bit so the man could take a few pictures. I felt nothing in there at all.

It was now time to go back to my old room. I watched it for a moment from across the hall. I expected to see a light in the transom, but I saw nothing. I expected to be greeted with a cold rush at any second. I walked over to the door and knocked, then entered. I walked into my room, it was nearly empty. I went inside my room and stood there. The man clicked away and I walked around my room and then looked out my window. I looked up at the ceiling fan and back over at the staircase. I kept waiting to take the brunt of the storm that I figured awaited me up there, but nothing. No cold rush, no fan turning, nothing coming up the stairs, not even so much as a smell of perfume. The photographer said he was out of film and would run downstairs to reload. I told it that was fine, I would be down in a minute anyway. The photographer left, and before leaving the room, I stood in the doorway and said that I hoped that she had found what ever it was that she was looking for and asked that if she was still there, to please help the new owners out by fighting off the bad things in the home. As I turned to leave the room, I heard a creak. It was a sound all too familiar. Suddenly, the hair on all my arms shot straight up and it was as cold as the dead of winter.

All along I thought that as long as that man was taking pictures it would be quiet upstairs. I just knew for some reason that in order to really get things started, I had to be alone. Sure enough, with him gone, she was coming out of hiding and wanted to be seen. I told her I had thought she was still there, just hiding. I thought I heard some floor boards creak ahead of me when walking in the room, but just wasn’t sure. I quickly told her that I knew she was lonely up there but that the new owners really needed her help. I added that this may be the last time we speak again for quite sometime, but for her to know that she is not alone and the people that live downstairs, really want to be her friend. Just then, I heard the clicking of the camera. The man had quietly came back upstairs and started taking pictures as I was talking to her. I was mad, but that is what I was there for. Suddenly, the coldness went away and the shutters rattled by my window. The photographer asked what that noise was, I told him it was her leaving. I told her goodbye and went back downstairs.

The photographer mentioned to the couple that I was upstairs talking to someone and that it was much colder up there when he returned than when he left and that the shutters suddenly started to rattle. I explained to them that the good in the house really seemed to come from a woman that was in my room. The evil in the home always seemed to come from outside and the basement. In order for them to get the good energy back up, I told them they most sleep in my room. They said they just couldn’t do that, they were not comfortable up there and it just wasn’t going to happen. I knew that unless they did, things wouldn’t get any better for them.

Next we went outside and that is where I was really was surprised by the home. As soon as we went outside, I started getting a sick feeling right away. It felt as though I was going to vomit and just felt as though something was following me. I went out by the barn and kept hearing twigs snap and cold rushes of air hitting me, there was no breeze at all that night and it was mild for that time of year. As I walked, I told the photographer to take plenty of pics, something just isn’t right out here.

We neared the home again, and I suddenly felt as though there was a hand on my shoulder. I turned and nothing was there, I started to walk faster. I heard the photographer yell out that something just tapped him on the shoulder. I saw something dark dart off towards the other corner of the home. I started running after it and was met with what I would describe as a shocking sensation when I neared the area of the dark figure. I was pretty scared at this point and then I heard what sounded like a woman scream. I went out to the cedars and there I saw what appeared to be a woman thrashing around. I had always felt the crazy energy by those trees and now I was seeing it. She was all over the place, jumping here, falling there. I told the man to take pictures in that direction and quickly went running out to the end of the driveway.

I stood for a few moments and tried to gain my composure. It was at this time the photographer yelled out, “What is that!”. A white light came flying out from my bedroom window and charged the area of the woman under the cedars. The photographer, who had been standing in the area, took off in a dead run, much like the guys who had wrecked in front of my home. The white light vanished under the cedars and all seemed calm. I walked over to the cedars and nothing, all the energy was gone.

I caught up with the photographer in the house. He was telling the couple about the things that had been happening outside. I told them I can’t promise that the protection will last long. I told them I asked the spirit in my room to help them, but without them living in the room, I just didn’t think she would be able to help them for long. I told them to occasionally speak out to her, to let her know she is not alone.

They Say You Can Never Go Back Home, and Perhaps You Never Should. Part 2



We talked for a short time more and then I made my way to the door. As I neared the door, I felt as though I had walked through a cold spot. There had been something listening to our conversation and I was pretty sure it was my old room mate. I made sure to tell the couple, one last time, that if they did not make any attempt to make contact with the girl spirit in my room, that I felt that things would continue to be bad for them. For some reason I didn’t think they were going to take my advice and looking back, I was correct.

As I was leaving the home, I found myself not really wanting to look back, I had an odd feeling, one of abandonment. As I pulled out of the driveway, I noticed what seemed to be a faint smell of perfume in my car. I stopped the car in the road out in front of the house and turned off the lights. I quietly sat there a few moments and the smell of perfume once again seemed to strengthen. I knew she was with me and that just wasn’t going to work, her coming home with me just wasn’t going to happen. I told her that she couldn’t come with me, she must stay in the home and take care of the new couple. I wanted her to know that under no circumstances, should she attempt to go home with me. I had been worried that she may try to attempt to come home with me if I went back there and it looked like I was now dealing with that fear.

I sat there for a good twenty minutes, talking to her. I never saw her, I could smell her and feel her presence. After about twenty minutes of telling her she can’t come with me and that I was now married and had a life of my own, I felt something brush the back of my neck. I turned around to see a faint light going through the yard and back into the home. She was gone. I quickly left before she changed her mind It would be many years before I was to ever feel her presence again.

A month or so later, my aunt called me to tell me about the pictures that had been taken that night. As I figured, there wasn’t much to see. In some, they said there appeared to be small white balls in the picture that they believed to be orbs, I believe what they were seeing was most likely dust. In all the years we lived in the home, not once did anything appear in a photo for all to see. In fact, most of the photos the man took were just black, nothing in them at all. I never knew what to think about the pictures, the photographer was a friend of theirs, so I didn’t say much that evening, but I just didn’t think it was going to produce what they had hoped.

The couple continued to live there another four years. During those years, the trouble with the home continued, as did the decline of the woman’s health. They ended up moving because of her health to a town with medical facilities nearby. For some reason, the woman was convinced that one of the negative spirits had went with them. It wasn’t long after they moved that she started to have trouble with her right leg. She started having infection after infection in her leg, I am not sure of the cause, wasn’t all that close to them. My aunt kept in touch with them and after the third year of moving out, her leg became so infected that they ended up amputating it. She lived for another year and then died. Until her final day, my aunt said that the woman was convinced that the negative spirit was responsible for her health failing. I can’t say for sure if it was or not, but I do know that the home had changed my family in many ways and wouldn’t be surprised if something had followed them.

For Sale.

When the couple decided to move, they contacted my aunt and uncle before putting it up for sale to see if they were interested in it. My aunt and uncle couldn’t afford the home but they contacted me to see if I would be interested in the place, the year was late 2000. I was slightly interested in the home, but not enough to purchase it. I had always liked the place, just didn’t like the energy inside. There was no way I was going to raise a family in that home, absolutely no way.

The home went on the market and after the first week or so, my wife mentioned that she would very much like to see the inside of the home. I was very apprehensive about the idea of bringing my wife into the home, but I felt that I would be able to handle anything that may arise, so I made an appointment to see the home. I took my wife to the home and showed her around. The realtor that had the home listed had no idea that I had once lived in it. It was kind of funny to listen to the realtor going on about the home being warm and charming, while knowing all that the home was capable of. I quickly gave my wife a tour of the home and left. The entire time I felt as though I shouldn’t be there, but everything was keeping it’s distance from us. I didn’t try to make contact with anything while there, I just got in and got out so my wife could see the place.

As we left, I made sure to check to see if we were being followed and were weren’t. The spirits in the home stayed in the home and I was very happy about that. While there, the house just felt different than any other time I had ever been there. Even during the worst of times, I always felt love in the house. There was always a warmth that kept me fairly calm, this time the warmth was gone. From the time I entered the home, I really just wanted out.

I am sure the warmth that I always felt came from the female spirit. With her being locked away up stairs, her strength had gone away. It took nearly two years living in the home for her to ever really make contact with me, so after a decade of being alone, I felt as though she had gone back to being part of the fixtures. The part about the home that really startled me during the tour, was that the home actually felt as though it were trying to get me to leave. Sure, the home had been more than creepy in the past, but this time it just felt down right wicked.

I told my aunt and uncle that something in the house was changing and growing. I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening down there, but I knew that negative energy had grown strong and that there was just not much good left in the home. My aunt mentioned that for the last couple of years, her dog would get very upset when going past the home in the mornings on their morning walk. I told her that for her safety, I wouldn’t walk down past the home anymore. She took my advice and started walking East instead of West in the mornings. I knew spirits had left the home in the past and followed friends and even tried to follow me on occasion, but I never would have guessed what would end up happening down there.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousands Words.


Over the next five years, my personal life would change dramatically. In 2001, my wife and I bought a home that would end up our residence until the current time and in 2002 we became parents for the first time. The home we purchase had only been on the market one day when I put a contract on it, the previous owner had died just a couple of weeks prior. The home has a good amount of energy in it, but that is a different story. The one thing that really surprised me is that soon after the birth of my son, my abilities regarding the seeing and sensing of spirits really started to get stronger.

I noticed that within several months of his birth, I was able to look at pictures and see things that weren’t there to most people. I noticed this first when I was looking online at home listings. I was looking at various homes when I saw what appeared to be a woman standing in the yard of a home with some blood on her. I called to my wife to have her look at the photo, she saw only the house. I ended up driving past the home, it was very near to me. The home had been on the market a very long time and the price was very reasonable.

When I drove past the home, I knew why it was on the market so long. In the front yard, was a woman in her forties, possible fifties. She was standing in the front yard, screaming. There was a small amount of blood on her shirt and she would scream at cars as they would pass. She didn’t scream words, actually I can’t hear her, but you can see that she is screaming at the top of her lungs. I drove around the block again and past the home, again the woman was in the yard doing her routine again. She was the same woman I had seen in the photograph. After that day, my ability to see things in photos has really starting to increase. Sometimes I can see things and in other photos, I see nothing. It seems to depend on the energy level of the spirit when the photo was taken. I have started to learn how to tune into the photos, being able to get a rough idea of what the home looked like at the time of their death and even sensing their current mood.

Another ability that seemed to increase is just in seeing spirits in person. I have been able to see things since a very small child, but I can now turn the ability on and off with great success. While I have not been comfortable with the idea of speaking to spirits yet, I have become quite good at spotting them with a fair amount of accuracy.

The increase in my abilities came at a time when very little had been happening in my new home. There had been things happening occasionally in my new home, but nothing that really alarmed me. It had been a somewhat comfortable home for the wife and I, but that all recently started to change.

In late July, early August of 2005, I was contacted by my aunt that lives up the hill form my old home. She said that recently, things had been happening to them. My uncle had walked into the bedroom and as my aunt was on the bed sleeping, a black figure was hovering above her in bed. He jumped on the bed to protect her and the black figure vanished. All sorts of “spook lights” have been spotted around the area of the old farm home as well as theirs. So many lights in fact, they locals from the small town have been going out to their road at night and taking pictures, hoping to catch some of the activity on film. They and others have seen what appear to be Civil War era soldiers walking about.

My aunt and uncle had made pretty good friends with the couple that now live in our old farm home. I have never met or talked to the couple, but they have reported some activity in the home, but never get into specifics. My aunt once attempted to tell her stories about the home, but they stopped her and told her they didn’t want to hear any stories, they feared it would bring more bad energy into the home. For some reason, the negative energy has really increased down there since the last time I was in the home in 2000. I haven’t been back in the home since and hadn’t really given the place much thought until I was told about a photo.

My aunt said there was a photo I should see. It was taken outside the front of the home on the night of a full moon. There were several photos of the home and the moon, but in one photo, the moon could not be seen, but other things could. I asked her what all was in the photo and she said I would just have to see it. I told her she could send me a copy of the photo or email me a copy, she said she would email me a copy of the photo that evening.

I had many things to do that afternoon. I was out in the back yard mowing when suddenly I heard a man’s voice say, “Get Rid Of It”. I kept riding my tractor and mowing, thinking that I must have just been imagining things. A couple of moments later, again the voice said, “Get Rid Of It”. I stopped the tractor and turned off the engine. I looked around the yard to see if someone was yelling at me, but there was no one. Suddenly, the voice again said, “Get Rid Of It” and at that moment, an image of Ephriam James’ tombstone slammed into my mind.

I had never in all the years I lived down in the farm home had heard the voice of Ephriam. I had always thought it was him that was leading me to his tombstone that day at the grave side services, but I never heard his voice. I thought for a moment, what exactly it was I was supposed to get rid of and then it hit me. I was supposed to get rid of the picture I would be receiving of the home from my aunt. I thought for a few more moments about how creepy that had just been and then started up my mower and continued mowing. I finished my yard work and went into the house to check my email, I had mail.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Part 2.



With the warning from Ephriam James still ringing fresh in my ears, I clicked on the email from my aunt. There in the corner was the attachment, asking me if I would like to view the picture or not. I hesitated at first, did I really want to see a picture of my old home? With my new and increasingly powerful abilities, what would I see? If I looked at the picture, would things ever be the same? There was only one way to find out, making sure my wife and son were not near the computer, I opened the picture file.

At first I saw very little. The picture was of my old home at night, taken from out in the road. I stared at the photo for a few moments and then slowly, it started to reveal it’s story to me. My aunt had told me there were some strange lights in the photo, nothing more. The lights were what no one could figure out. When I first looked at the photo, I saw the lights but they looked to be reflectors moving across the picture. It started to dawn on me that there was nothing with reflectors on them, it was just lights flying through the sky. Red lights flying down the driveway, like those that had been there in the past. It was the “spook lights”, trouble was there were no white lights, only the negative red.

I started to see something else in the photo, so I increased the size of it. Near the home, by my bedroom window, was the face of a woman. Her eyes were red, her skin was green. As I looked into the eyes, it came to me, I was seeing the face of the woman in my room. She had changed, she was now filled with negative energy. To the lower left side of her face, was that of a skull. The skull had a large open mouth with many sharp teeth. It appeared the skull was biting her neck. I started looking around at other parts of the photo, and saw something by the edge of the driveway. It was the outline of a dog. The dog was sitting at the edge of the driveway, looking out towards the main road coming out of town. I knew immediately what dog it was, it was the dog that would never leave the side of the former owner who had died, the same dog that had to be removed from the cemetery and died from not eating. Lastly, I caught the image of a tall man standing midway in the yard, between the home and the road. Couldn’t make out much detail on him, only that he was standing his ground.

My wife suddenly walked into the room and asked me what I was looking at. At first I didn’t want to show her, but then I asked her what she saw. The only things she saw in the photo were what the others had seen, the red lights flying down the driveway. I then pointed out the faces, the dog and the man, she saw nothing. I told her thanks for looking and asked her to leave me alone for a little while. I studied the photo for a short time more. I couldn’t help but stare at the image of the woman, being attacked and looking horrible. As I looked at her, I suddenly was overcome with chills and felt as though I was about to cry. Something was happening as I was looking at the picture, something I had been warned about. I quickly closed the picture and erased the file from my computer. I called my aunt and told her to get rid of the picture, the one she had and any files she may have of it. I also to her to tell anyone else that may have that photo to get rid of it. I didn’t tell her all the details, only that there was more to the photo than she could see and it wasn’t good.

I didn’t feel well that evening and the images I saw in the picture kept coming back to me. I wasn’t sure what to think about all of it, but I had a lot of regret about looking at that picture. Over the next couple of days, things felt off but nothing to worry all that much about. I traveled to my in-laws over the weekend and the next week is when things really started to become obvious that I had really opened up myself to something.

I was sitting at my desk, chatting with some online friends when a cup of water on my desk started to make a zapping noise. It was the kind of noise you associate with electricity, a zzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzz sound. I looked over at the cup and then I could hear the ice inside start to crack and break and then without warning, the cup jumped up about two inches off my desk and landed without spilling a drop. My son quickly turned and asked me what had happened, I had no idea. My attention was captured with the power of what ever it was that was around me, not only could I not see it, but for it to do such a trick was quite impressive. I called my wife to tell her what had just happened. As I was on the phone with her, I was telling her what had just happened and then suddenly the electrical noise again and the phone went dead. Shortly after, my wife called me back scared out of her wits that something was happening to me. I told her no, there was just something in the house that was making sure it had my attention.

This all sounds bizarre, but I wasn’t scared by this. I was more concerned for the safety of my wife and son. My wife has had little experience with the paranormal and my son had been showing signs that perhaps he was able to pick up on things as I had when young. Later that evening, I would find out exactly how much my son could pick up. We had just put our son down to sleep when I started getting the chills, something was with me. I told my wife that there was something near me and that perhaps things would act up that night. Not long after, I happened to look outside and see what appeared to be a man standing out on my deck. I watched him for a moment and he faded into the night. I switched on the back yard lights to find nothing. A few moments later, my son came running into the living room saying that the shadows in his room were moving. I asked him what shadows and he said the shadows of the man. He too was seeing and feeling things. My wife looked at me with fear in her eyes and I told her everything would be ok. Of course I had no idea, but I just wanted everyone to be calm. It had been years since dealing with this sort of stuff and I really wasn’t wanting it to all come rushing back, but it was.

Over the next several nights, I had very intense dreams. Over the years I have learned to pay attention to my dreams, especially the vivid ones. They have offered much help over the years, so I wasn’t about to start to ignore them now. The dreams were of the old home and things that were happening there. The fight between good and evil was winding down and evil was winning. The woman in my room had been left alone for such a long period of time, it appeared she had lost her strength to fight. Wasn’t sure what all of this had to do with me, but I knew there must be a reason I was being contacted.

I started to mention all of this to some people that I keep in contact with on the internet and it was mentioned that I should start to share the stories of the old home online for all of them to read. I started to write my stories and I noticed that as I would write, I would often feel as though there was something with me as I wrote. I would get cold chills, the hair on my arms would stand up and often, I would end up writing things I didn’t remember writing. I had always wondered if spirits could read what we are typing and I now knew they could. As time went on with the story, something else started to happen that really surprised me. As more stories were posted, as more people read the stories, the visions I had of the home and the feelings I got were getting more positive, it appeared that from people reading the story, it was actually giving power to the woman. I have no idea how it works, perhaps similar to the power of prayer, don’t know. Maybe all the people reading somehow send energy down there but thinking about the place or picturing it. All I know is that as more people read it, the better things seemed to get down there.

It wasn’t long before I was given a list of things to do by the nightly dreams that I had to do to make things better down there. The list includes places I am to visit down there, places I am to take pictures of and things I am supposed to research. I have yet most of the items on the list that I am supposed to do to end all of this. I have been waiting until the energy level down there is positive enough that I don’t feel that I am in any personal harm. During all of this, activity at my own home has increased greatly. On the nights that I have these “dreams”, my son usually comes into our room and says his room is acting creepy. I had worried that he would be born with my abilities and it is appearing that unfortunately he is.

One interesting thing I have learned about the home, is that there is a time frame that neither the family that built the home nor the family that lived in it for decades, lived in the county. For what appears to be twenty years, a family I don’t know anything about appears to have lived in the home, and I am thinking many questions will be answered when I find out who the family was and their history.

So there you have it in a nutshell. I have a list of things I need to do in order to help out a home I haven’t lived in, in sixteen years. My current home is now acting up. My son appears to see the same things as his dear old dad. My wife loves me and just wishes she could see or feel what we do. My aunt and uncle just wish I could make it all stop. I get contacted by people I have never met or spoken with, telling me they have read my story and have their own strange experiences, or strange experiences while reading the story. All of this because curiosity got the best of me and I looked at a picture. I never really intended to go back to the home or worry about the history of it, but now I know I must in order to get back the peace.

I don’t expect anyone reading this story to believe or understand. All I ask is that you keep an open mind to things you haven’t personally experienced. I really think there are many things in this world we just don’t understand, things we have forgotten how to understand. I thank you for following my story.


Thank you,

Rich.