A flurry of activity after a long hiatus

The past week has had a lot of stuff happening. It started early in the week of the girls complaining that they are seeing lots of shadows out of the corner of their eyes. They've been used to this stuff for so long now it no longer scares them - it just bothers them. So when they see this stuff they report it to me. I've not seen any shadows though.

Sarah has seen the girl outside, peeking at her from the porch as she is swinging on the swing.

Then three nights ago, it was late and Holly and I were retired to our bedroom for the night. The girls had watched just finished watching a movie in one of their bedrooms and were getting ready for bed, going in and out of various bedrooms and the bathroom. At one point, there was silence in the hall outside Holly and my bedroom - all the girls must have been in their own rooms.

There was a knock on the door - three distinct raps.

"Yes?" I asked, thinking it was one of the girls.

No reply.

"Yes??" I asked again, a little annoyed now.

No answer.

I realized that it wasn't the girls that had knocked, but something else. Holly was already asleep so didn't hear it.

The next night (two nights ago), the knock happened again. This time, Holly was a awake and asked the same question I did the previous night. "Yes?" thinking it was one of the girls knocking.

I told her don't bother, no one was there.

This got her a little upset. "This stuff is not supposed to be happening any more." She was referring to the fact that the house had been blessed. I didn't know what to tell her.

And finally, this morning something new happened. Ok, some background: we have a chihuahua, who, we discovered, likes to howl if prodded. So on many occasion one of us will hold him, and howl into the air. It only takes a few tries of this to get him to start howling. It's very cute. Shelby does it the most often - to the point where I have to say, "Ok, enough!"

This morning, I was downstairs in the basement, looking something up on the computer. Holly was upstairs in the kitchen.

I heard someone howl - a child. It came from above my head in the living room where the dogs were. It was a howl in the exact same way that Shelby howls to get Ignacio (the chihuahua) to howl.

I heard Holly say, "What was that?" from above. I went upstairs and told her that I heard it too. I asked where the girls were, and she said that all the girls were on the top floor in their bedrooms.

So we sort of looked at each other and realized that it had to be the child, girl spirit that we see most often. We had just heard her howl at 'Nacio, playing with him and trying to get him to start howling.

*That* is weird.

Just got touched

I'm doing the dishes in the kitchen, and I feel someone touch my left shoulder blade, almost as if picking off a piece of lint from my shirt. I fully expected Sarah, my oldest, to be behind me, even felt her presence behind me, but when I turned around there was no one in the kitchen with me.

Shelby is getting touched by a ghost

The first time she reported this to me, I dismissed it. But tonight Shelby came down and brought to my attention a new form of activity.

Shelby is being touched.

The first time was on Dec 26, 2009. She had a friend over, and while they were in the dark, talking to each other before going to sleep, Shelby felt something touching her forearm softly. The touch "walked" up her arm before stopping.

It weirded her out, but I dismissed because it could have been several things. A hair, whatever.

But tonight, as I was inventorying some board games I received today, she came downstairs and told me more touching just occurred. She was painting in the kitchen, which is right above my head, and felt something softly grab the back of her shirt, and pull. it only lasted a few seconds. Sophia was the only other person with her in the room, and Shelby verified that Sophia was next to her and not behind her.

I asked Shelby to demonostrate to me what it felt like, and she pulled on my shirt softly. It almost tickled.

"Are you sure that you felt a pulling?" I asked her.

She was sure.

The little girl lets the cat out

Each one of my daughters has a cat. And each one of those cats live full time in their respective owner's bedrooms. When you have 3 dogs and 3 cats, and the two species don't really mix, you have to draw political lines. Therefore, the cats live upstairs and the dogs downstairs.

Last Friday [12/4/2009], my wife went into Shelby's room, a location that has hosted some activity in the past, to give Shelby's cat Smokey, some water. She did that task without incident and when she finished, Holly remembers closing the door.

Now closing the door is essential with cats in these rooms because if you don't close the door, the cats venture out of their rooms and wander downstairs and by crossing the set political line, become fair game for the dogs, causing all sorts of ruckus and chaos. (Why Holly was watering the cat and not Shelby is a cause for further discussion that is beyond the scope of this blog.)

About fifteen minutes later, Holly and the girls were downstairs talking about their day,. The dogs started running over to the stair landing and barking. This caused everyone in the room to look over at the stair landing to see Smokey peeking his head through the rails and looking at everyone in the room.

Shelby also saw something else: she saw a little girl also looking through the rails at everyone in the room. Shelby saw that the girl has long brown hair and a pale face, but little else since Shelby was looking at her across the room and through a set of bannister rails. And then she was gone.

No one besides Shelby saw the girl.

White Vortexes

I just took Bobby, our runt Jack Russel Terrier, out to his runner. To get there I go down the steps of our porch, hang a left, then walk across some stone steps I laid on the grass until I get to the cable which is is runner. If you take a look at the image of my house, you can see it's on the hill. So while I am going out to the runner, the hill drops away on my right.

While I was carrying him, the peripheral vision of my right eye was completely obscured by a white opaque... thing. It was like a small cloud came hovering by the corner of my eye. I quickly turned my head to the right, and it disappeared. I was reminded of pictures I had seen of vortexes, and this looked exactly like one.

I quickly turned my head back to make sure I was not going to step off the stones, and then the white vortex appeared again in the same place, obscuring the peripheral vision of my right eye. And then it was gone.

I finished hooking Bobby up to his runner, and went back into the house, pondering how strange this experience was. I've never seen anything like that before, and it hasn't happened since.

Thuds, footsteps, Bite'n me arse! Toes have been nibbled on...

I work from home all day in the basement of the house. Yesterday I had the house to myself as the kids started school, and Holly had to go to the airport.

Several times during the day, I heard footsteps walking around upstairs on the main floor. Also, a very loud thud occurred from somewhere on the third floor. I ignored them for the most part and just continued my work. Sometimes I hear a box behind me slide a bit across the floor, and that really gets my hackles up. But I just pretend I don't hear it. The last thing I want is for whatever or whomever to realize that "Hey, if I do this, I'll get his attention. So let me do more of this!"

Also, I have some old computer equipment laying on the floor next to me. During the day, little ticks and knocks come from the pile, like a mouse is in them.

Also, last night something was stinging my ass, all night! Well, it was more of a pinching sensation. Either way, this happened at least five times over the course of the night. Each time, I would put my hand on the area, and feel around for an insect, and come up with nothing.

Around 3:30 I got sick of trying to sleep through it, and just lay there listening to the various knocks, bangs, and thuds, until the alarm went off.

This morning I asked Holly to check my bum for bite marks. If there was indeed an insect biting me, I would have thought there would be welts of some sort. But there was nothing. No bite marks. No welts.

Holly forgot to mention to me that a few months ago she was woken up to the sensation of someone biting her toe. I told her it could have been a dream. Her reply was that she could still feel the pressure after she woke up, and it didn't stop until she moved her foot.

I haven't forgotten the recordings still to review and post here. I've just taken a break from them for the summer. I can feel the urge to start back up, so more material will be posted here soon.

I learned last week that EVPs are technically not the term I should be using for my recordings. EVPs are voice signatures on a recording that were not previously heard with the naked ear at the time of the recording. The bangs and footsteps that I've been recording therefore, can't be classified as EVPs, and I'm not awake during the night to verify if a voice I have captured was heard by a human. So I'll just call them "Night Recordings" from here on out.

The bed moves and wakes me up three times last night

Last night I felt the bed shake about three times, each in separate incidents. However, shaking is not the best verb to describe the movement.

It's like laying on your back, with your knee up. As you fall asleep, your knee will start to fall. You'll feel it falling and jerk the knee back up to the vertical position. This action creates a lateral movement of the bed, and that's what I felt.

Each time I felt it, I checked if Holly was the cause. Nope, she was on her stomach. No way to cause the movement. So other than someone (or something) standing at the side of the bed, giving it a little shove, I have no explanation as to it's cause.

I catch a glimpse of the little girl

Last night, Holly and I had went to bed, and I was watching TV until I fell asleep (this is a better alternative than laying in bed in the dark and listening to the sound of something walking around in your room and making noises).

The TV is located to the right of the master bathroom doorway. The bathroom was dark, and the lights were off in my room, so the entire room was lit only by the light of the TV.

I was watching TV, and caught movement in the bathroom doorway with my peripheral vision. By the time I looked over at the doorway it was gone, but I'm almost positive what I caught in my peripheral vision was the shape of a little girl, stepping into the doorway quickly to see if I was still awake, then quickly stepping backwards into the darkness of the bathroom.

Holly tells me of an encounter

Late last year I built Holly a large 2-person swing. It's playground height, so you can get some serious air on it. Sometimes Holly and I sit on the swing and share a beer. We pour it in wine glasses because I think you get more bouquet from the beer that way than drinking it from a long neck bottle.

Anyway, tonight's selection was Sam Adams Cherry Wheat. Yum. The smell of cherries is almost overwhelming from this brew, and it is indeed delicious.

So we were sitting there, relaxing on the swing, and I was taking sips of my delicious ale, and Holly said, "Something happened last week that I've been putting off telling you."

Great.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I walked into the downstairs bathroom and flicked the light on. A female voice yelled 'Hey!' like I interrupted her. She didn't sound happy."

Ok, so my wife interrupted a ghost while it was relieving itself? Do ghosts think they still go to the bathroom?

"What did you do?" I asked Holly.

"I calmly told the voice that this was my bathroom and I'll use it whenever I want."

Good for you Holly. Good for you.

And while I made the tone of this post light, there was a reason why she waited over a week to tell me what happened. It really spooked her.

The sheet is pulled from my face

Last night I woke up around 4am and found myself unable to go back to sleep. It was taking me a while to get back to sleep because I would hear little noises and that would get my adrenaline going, causing the opposite effect of what I wanted to do - go back to sleep!

I remember I had the sheet pulled up to my mouth, just under my nose. At some point I was just dozing off when I felt the sheet pulled quickly from my face. It was enough to startle me back awake. But I kept my eyes closed and waited to see what else would happen.

Nothing else happened and I finally fell back asleep.

Shelby awakens to find a little girl standing over her bed

There hasn't been a lot of time to go over EVP recordings this month - the new job is really keeping me busy.

But this morning two things happened. I was working at my computer before anyone woke and just happened to look over at Holly sleeping. Movement at the side of the bed near the floor caught my eye. A section of the comforter was touching the floor and was flapping quickly, as if there was air blowing from underneath. I had to look at this for a few seconds because I wasn’t sure if there was a concrete reason why it was doing this. Then I realized that there was no way it could be doing it, as no heater registers were near that part of the bed. Then it stopped a few seconds later.

About thirty minutes later I woke up Shelby and Sophia for school. Shelby still sleeps with Sophia, and refuses to sleep in her own room after the incident in her room last month.

Shelby told me that she woke up during the night to see a girl approximately their age standing over their bed. I asked her if it was Sophia, and she said no, because she had immediately looked at Sophia next to her in bed and saw that Sophia was asleep, When she looked back to where the girl was, she was gone. Shelby described the girl as “looking like Sophie” but with much longer hair. She could not see her face “it was all like a shadow” but could see the outline of her hair.

This confirms our idea that one of the spirits here is a little girl.

I feel pulling at the covers

Holly and I had went to bed pretty late last night and we were watching TV in bed. Holly was already asleep and I finally turned things off to try and go to bed. As soon as I got comfortable I started feeling the comforter slowly being pulled off the end of the bed.

I simply lie there, wondering if what I was feeling was just my imagination. I was trying to convince myself that Holly’s description of the events a few days before had contaminated my imagination. I could have been creating this feeling.

But I could not shake the physical sensation that the covers were slowly, VERY slowly, being pulled off us.

Eventually, I feel asleep and did not wake again until morning.

Holly feels pulling at the covers

Last night, Holly and I had just went to bed and the light was still on in our room. I had forgotten something downstairs and left our bedroom to go downstairs. While I was out of the room Holly claims something was slowly pulling the top comforter off of her.

She claimed she gripped the comforter, thinking that it was gravity pulling it down, but could feel the pressure of something still pulling, trying to slowly pull the blanket off of her. Once I entered the room again, the pulling stopped.

She is amazingly calm about this whole thing. She's gone through this before - the house she grew up in was haunted as well, so these things "don't freak her out" she claims.

They freak me the fuck out, that's for sure.

"Something just crawled into my bed!"

Something walked into Shelby’s room last night, right after I put her down for bed. I said prayers with her, tucked her in, gave her a smooth, and said good night. I walked out of her room, got myself ready for bed, and started to look for something to read. I think 10 minutes tops had elapsed when she came into the room, really upset and scared.

"Something just crawled into my bed!"

She said she was lying in her top bunk when something knocked once on her door. Then she heard footsteps on the carpet coming into her room, and stopping at her bed. Then it climbed into the bottom bunk. She felt the bed shake and heard it creak. I guess that was enough for her at that point. I commend her for even getting out of bed and running through the her room to my bedroom. I can imagine how terrified she must have been.

This is not the the first time a spirit in this house made themselves known to my kids, but this is definitely the first time a ghost has upset one of them.

Not cool. It's time to do something about this.

No way that was a cat

We always let Bobby (our Jack Russell Terrier) outside one last time for the night. This is between 8:30pm and 9:30pm.

After that, I'm usually the one that goes out to get him well, because there are things out there, and I don't want my wife or my girls going out there at night.

So sometime in March, I went out to go get him from outside on his runner. I called him, picked him up, and proceeded to carry him in. We have a porch in the front of the house (look at the picture) and there are about 3 steps you have to ascend. Flanking the steps on the left is Holly's garden. As I was carrying Bobby and going up these steps, from somewhere in that garden came a loud and long meow.

This was no little kitten meow. This was a tomcat growl - long, low and pissed off. And it was so close it made me jump and made the hairs on my neck stick straight out.

Now, the thing that really wigged me out was that Bobby is a Jack Russel Terrier. So anything that moves is prey. If there really was a cat there, he would have heard that threatening mewl. If he did hear that cat, or even sensed that cat was anywhere in his vicinity, he would have been gone ballistic, twisting like crazy to get out of my arms and yelping in uncontained rage and frustration.

So I'm not sure there was really a cat there. Based on other EVP evidence that I have yet to post, I think this cat encounter was paranormal.

"Melanie?"

Out of nowhere, that's what Holly heard one morning while in our bedroom. A voice, from somewhere off to her left in the same room, calling someone named Melanie.


Was it a mother calling a daughter? Would there even be a daughter to answer her? Even if there is a remote possibility that, as ghosts, a mother and daughter could be sharing the same plane of existence is mind boggling to me.

Could Melanie be the name of the woman who hung herself at the top of Hawks Hill?

Holly gets greeted in the middle of the night

Holly woke up a few months ago in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. When she crawled back into bed, something whispered, “Hi” right in her face. She never woke me up, just laid there, terrified until she finally fell back asleep.

Needless to say, I was a bit upset that she didn't wake me up! I don't want her laying there, afraid. Better just to go downstairs, make some coffee or tea and play a game or watch some TV.

Holly hears a sigh from behind her

Around January 2008, Holly heard a sigh.

I was leaving for work very early in the morning those days, so I could get home at a decent hour and still have a "life" outside of work.

I had already left for work that morning and it was still dark outside. Usually after I left for work Holly would go downstairs and watch some TV until it was time to get the girls up for school. One morning she was on the couch sje heard a sigh from behind her. The couch was pushed away from the wall, allowing a passageway behind it to the stairway and this passageway is where the sigh came from. The girls were not up yet and it was not the dogs. It was a human-sounding sigh.

She wasn't sure what to make of it but she described it as a sigh of boredom. Several minutes later she heard the sigh again. This time Jack, who was sleeping at the foot of the staircase landing, growled and started walking around the area behind Holly from where the sigh came from. He did this for several minutes, looking for the source of the strange voice.

Holly gets scratched

In November of 2006 a mysterious scratch appeared on Holly's back. She first noticed this in the shower, but she's not sure if she actually got scratched in the shower, or if it happened earlier that day and the water hitting it made it sting.

The scratch really looks like two claws to me.

This happened again a few months later, though I failed to get a picture of the second scratch.

I have no other proof that these scratches were caused by something paranormal, but based on other things going on in this house, I can't rule it out.

Neither Holly or anyone else in the house has displayed these types been scratches since these two events occurred.

The scars from these scratches are still visible.

The Shadow Person strolls by

I think the first "encounter" that happened in our house after we moved in happened to Shelby and Sophia. But they never even told us about it until a few months ago! I'm guessing it happened some time in 2005. Shelby would have been 7, and Sophia, 6.

At that time on the weekends, Holly and I used to sleep in an extra hour or two in the morning. Shelby was an early riser then, and would wake up about 6am to 7am. She'd wake Sophia up and they would play on the 2nd floor landing just outside our bedroom door. I'd tell them to close my door because they would break out the Littlest Pet Shop and play for a few hours until Holly and I woke up.

As it was told to me by the both of them, one weekend morning a shadow person walked through my bedroom door out onto the 2nd floor landing. It stepped over their toys and passed by them within in inches. It then walked into what was then my office, right across the landing.

They recall craning their necks to look up at the figure as it walked by them. They described it as tall, all black, and with a featureless face.

What freaks me out is how close it was to them.

"Weren't you scared?" I asked them. They both told me no, they weren't.

To be honest I'm not certain why they weren't scared, or why they didn't run immediately into my room after it happened. And I'm not sure why it took them almost a year to tell me. It's possible that because it was morning, i.e daytime, that the environment was not as threatening compared to if it happened during the night.

So the big question is: who is the shadow? Is it a civil war soldier?