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.

Theory on residual hauntings

Many of the paranormal experts seem to thing residual haunting are like VCR tapes. They are energy memories that play out over and over again. For example, if someone sees an apparition that walks through a wall, the experts label that as a residual haunting because at some point in history there was most likely a door or a portal of some kind where people used to walk through.

I have a problem with this explanation. What causes these "memories" to trigger? Where is the memory even stored? Where does the energy needed to manifest such phenomena come from? It seems too random and I don't accept the "it just happens" answers.

In July 2009, my oldest daughter Sarah saw an apparition. It was a farmer that was walking up our hill, next to the driveway. She watched him until he basically walked into a large bush and disappeared. The fact that he did not try to avoid the bush means he would be classified as residual activity.

This got me thinking long and hard about residual hauntings. Here is my theory: residual hauntings are memories of events that the spririt is remembering at that moment. Have you ever day dreamed or remembered something that happened in your past? I believe spirits still have this ability, and remember things that happened in their past life.

And the moment they remember it, the memory actually takes physical form, playing out in the exact spot that the actual event occured in the past. Imagine if you could store your memories, then play them like a hologram any time you wanted. I think spirits have this ability.