When things got really weird

Up until I was about 10 years old, my experiences were blown off by everyone so I also made light of it as well. No one ever asked any further details about things I described, so I had no reason to think it was not normal or needed further explaining. I was told that I was “dreaming” or that it was my “imagination“. I accepted that, as far as I can remember. It wasn’t until I was 10 or so that I started to realize what was happening and became quite lonely about it.

When I was 10, we moved into a new and bigger house, as now I had a set of twin sisters to make room for. First and foremost, though, I want to make sure it is understood that I harbor no resentment for my ability being swept under the rug because, after all, my family just had the surprise of not one, but two new babies, a new house, and my mother battling the same cancer (for years on and off) that her sister had died of many years before. With all of that going on, I feel I was left to fend for myself simply because I was able to do so. And I certainly did not want to add any stress to an already stressful situation. Plus, no one else, to my knowledge, in my family had this ability so they just were unable to understand. Today things are much different. I now know of at least one family member (on my biological father’s side) who has this ability and my immediate family is much more supportive.

What changed when I was 10 was that the house we moved into was the first “haunted” house I’ve occupied. At first, it wasn’t so obvious.

The first experience I remember having was when I was home sick from school one day. I was laying in my mother’s bed watching television when I heard the sound of something large and heavy tumbling down the enclosed, unused set of back stairs that went from the laundry room upstairs to the back yard. I called my mother at work, which happened to be the county police department, to tell her what I heard. Before I knew it, half the county law enforcement, lead by the coroner much to my amusement, was there to check out the house. No one could find any explanation for the sound. I remember my mom saying I overreacted and it must have been a small animal like a squirrel that managed to get in the back stairwell. I know it was not a small animal. It was a very loud sound that only a very heavy object could make. This dismissal was the beginning of a long road of experiences being treated as though I was lying or dramatizing to get attention. After all, the new babies were getting all the attention, right? Mom was sick and unable to focus on me, you know, fighting for her life and all. Why wouldn’t I make things up? Seems logical. The truth is that I didn’t and don’t make these things up.

Before I had an actual sighting of the presence, weird little things would happen. For example:

My mom bought me a new pair of jazz shoes for dance class. Before I even had a chance to wear them, one went missing. I was grounded for a excessively long time over that (as they were quite expensive, how could I be so ungrateful and careless?). I remember one day my mom getting into the attic, probably for holiday decorations since that’s the only reason the attic door was ever opened. There in the attic, she found my missing brand new jazz shoe. She asked why it was up there? Seriously? Why would I do that?

One summer, probably during high school sometime, I woke up alone as my parents had left for work and my sisters swept off to day care. Normal day. I picked up the phone in my bedroom to call a friend, after all, I was a teenage girl, it’s what we do. I talked, most likely about nothing for quite some time, and then went to call my mother at work as she required me to do at least once a day to check in. When I picked up the phone, there was no dial tone. I thought I just hadn’t hung up the phone for long enough and tried again. After several attempts, I was frustrated and went downstairs to find another phone as mine must have broken somehow in the last 20 seconds. When I got to the phone downstairs, I found the receiver off of the hook and thrown across a chair in a room where no one had been. In fact, no one was in the house at all. Had it been like that when I woke up, I would have been unable to call out to my friend that morning, right? So I hung it up and called my mom. I told her what happened, not because I was really frightened, but because it was just weird. Of course, here again was the SWAT team and every available officer in the city and county checking out every room in the house to find the intruder. There was no intruder. Not a findable one anyway.

I could tell these little anecdotes all day, but I’ll limit it to just one more.

I was making my lunch for school one morning after everyone else had already set out for their day. I set my empty lunchbox on the counter and wiped out the previous days mess. The first thing I went for was grapes from the fridge on the other side of the kitchen. As I pulled them out, I dropped one back into the drawer. Now, my step father was/is a little, OK, a lot, obsessive about things being as they should be and a grape rotting in the bottom of the fridge would just not do! So to avoid that hassle, I immediately began searching for the lost grape. I struggled to find it. I even pulled the drawer completely out of the fridge to find it. I never found the thing in there and I figured if I looked that hard and couldn’t find it, he wouldn’t either, so I decided to move forward with the lunch preparation in an effort to be on time for school. When I walked back across the kitchen to my freshly wiped clean lunch box, there in the dead center of the open box was a single grape. My heart jumped a little and I’m pretty sure I bought my lunch that day.

Shortly after the noises and strange events started occurring, I began to see her. She was a girl about 12 years old wearing a green dress. I would wake up at night to find her staring at me from the foot of my bed. Oddly enough, I was not scared of her. I just remember pulling the covers up over my head and silently hoping she would never talk to me (and she never did). I wasn’t afraid to see her, but hearing her terrified me. At the time, I had no explanation for that reasoning. People ask me a lot how she looked. See through? Glowing? Misty? Let’s just say I never looked at her long enough to get details, but she was just a solid as you or me and even though we were in a dark room, she appeared as though she was in the light, but not in a glowing sort of way. Just in the light. As time has gone on, they don’t all look the same to me. Sometimes they are so clear that I have a hard time distinguishing them from living people and sometimes they are just shadows or even just impressions in my mind.

I recall the day my sightings were validated so clearly. I was still in bed on an average morning when I heard my parents whispering at the front door as my stepdad was leaving for work. What teenager wouldn’t go to eavesdrop on parents whispering? If they cared enough to whisper, it must be something good, right? Well, I snuck to the landing of the main staircase and listened in to my stepfather telling my mother of a woman he saw that morning in a green dress. I could not contain my excitement. I stood up and yelled, “You saw her! You finally saw here! I told you!” From that point forward, I was taken slightly more seriously, but still not understood.

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