THE SMOKING GHOST

 

The last ghostly activity I wrote about was on my Facebook page on March 25^th, at which time I had heard a thumping noise on my desk and immediately afterward, some thumb tacks materialized out of thin air and landed on the desk. It was a brief write-up, as it was a fairly quick incident. I was home alone at the time and have no other explanation for it. It sounds crazy but that’s what happened. What other conclusion can one draw when this type of thing happens in a pretty haunted house?

That morning, I had invited them to do something and/or show themselves as they had been too quiet for my liking lately. They are often compliant—they stop making noise when I ask them to—so on March 25 I guess they heard my invitation and voila—noise and mysterious thumb tacks.

I find this type of ghostly incident especially intriguing because it’s interactive in the present time and not something residual. It is proof of a ghost’s existence; that a ghost can think and understand, exude a level of intelligence and act on it by manipulating and moving things, and making sound. The thumping noise on the desk (which sounded exactly like someone slapping their hand down on it) followed by 2 tacks dropping on the desk was a real in-the-moment event. Whichever entity is responsible for it, wanted to make contact. With me. It wanted me to know it was in the room at that exact moment.

Many of the haunted events in my house over the years fall into this category. They are not a case of a wayward spirit passing through oblivious to any living person in the house (although that has happened plenty of times, too). Those occurrences are like a replaying of a past event and the ghost in question does not interact with anyone.

April is shaping up to be pretty active ghost-wise, if the following incidents are any indication.

On April 1, I was in our bedroom upstairs straightening up. I had left a few things downstairs on the dining room table I wanted to put away. I heard footsteps come up about the first 6 stairs, clear as a bell, and called out to Shaun (who I assumed was now coming upstairs) to grab my things from the dining room and bring them up. The footsteps stopped. He didn’t answer me which was quite unusual. So I called his name again. No reply. No footsteps. My bedroom door is positioned so that you can look right down onto the staircase so I stepped out into the hall to look. Shaun was not there and at that point I could hear him moving some dishes around downstairs in the kitchen.

I went downstairs at that point to grab the forgotten items I meant to take up in the first place and asked Shaun if he had just been coming up the stairs. He assured me he had not left the kitchen.

Don’t blame Winston the cat, either. He is pretty light on his feet and although you can hear him on the stairs, he sounds absolutely nothing like an adult.

The following two days, April 2 & 3, I had been getting a few strong whiffs of cigarette smoke throughout the house, mostly in the living room, our bedroom and a little bit in the dining room.

It was not present all the time; just now and then for a few minutes. The longest I smelled it was April 3 late at night when I was in bed reading. It lasted the better part of an hour. It was strong enough that it prompted me to buy an extra can of Febreze to have on hand. Neither of us smoke. You also cannot blame Winston for this one. He quit smoking ten years ago.

‘Ahhhh but you have woodstoves, hence a smoke smell’---that’s what you’re thinking now. Ahhh but we don’t. We removed them and now have two pellet stoves. They have pretty much no smell other than the smell of the pellets themselves which is very mild and unnoticeable most of the time and smell nothing like smoke.

Odd unaccounted-for odors go hand in hand with a haunted house and is as widely reported as kitchen cupboard doors being flung open all on their own. This is not the first time unusual or sudden smells have just come out of nowhere in our house. It has been happening off and on for many years. Here are just a few examples:

~My mother thoroughly cleaned her china cabinet every Spring. Every single time she did it, she could smell her mother’s perfume, who was long dead.

~My mother and I once smelled a horribly musty odor simultaneously in the living room one evening for about 15 minutes.

~Following one Ouija board session years ago, the scent of roses filled the room.

 The evening of April 4 was also not without incident. Shaun had gone to bed and Winston and I were in the living room watching tv. Our bedroom is directly overhead of the living room. Midway through the evening, I heard several quite heavy footsteps upstairs coming directly from the bedroom. It lasted maybe about 20 seconds; someone was clearly walking around with really heavy steps. I just assumed Shaun was getting up. I didn’t even think to blame a ghost as Shaun was actually in the room the footsteps were coming from. The steps stopped at that point. There were no more from the bedroom, hallway or coming down the stairs. Again I assumed Shaun had gotten out of bed for some reason, then went back to bed. About an hour later, he did get up and come downstairs and after telling him what I had heard, he assured me he absolutely had not gotten out of bed for any reason and walked around, as he was dead asleep—no pun intended. I pointed out he likely slept while some entity was in the bedroom walking around. Oh well, this probably happens more times that we realize.

Fast forward to April 13^th. I was working from home with the bedroom/office door about ¾ closed. The house was quiet and I was deep in thought over a work file, when I clearly heard light tapping on the door. Picture someone knocking, but with only their fingertip---that type of sound. I said, “Winston?”, although that was a dumb thought as he doesn’t have fingertips and also doesn’t knock, or tap. The tapping stopped. The door didn’t open. No cat appeared. So I walked over and opened the door to see what exactly was tapping on the door.

Couldn’t see anything.

Considering all the previous and recent activity, I call ‘ghost’ on that one.

If there are only two people and a cat in a house and none of them tapped on the door, what other conclusion is there?

I still regret not grabbing my phone and taking some pictures of the area because lots of times spirits appear in pictures when they aren’t visible to the naked eye.

I watch Paranormal Survivor a lot (which I wholeheartedly recommend by the way) and I am always amazed that the victims don’t have pictures of the completely obscure and terrifying crap that happens to them. Everyone is glued to their phone practically 24/7 these days but Satan has blood dripping down your walls and you didn’t take a pic? But now I get it…sometimes, you just don’t think, Hey, I better try to get a picture. You just don’t for various reasons. I would assume it’s mainly because people are just too freaked out in the moment to think straight and aren’t thinking about obtaining evidence, unfortunately.

So it seems that presently I have a smoking ghost walking around in my house who was trying to get my attention by dropping thumbtacks on my desk and tapping at my office door. Or it’s 4 different ghosts. Who knows? They can make their presence known all they want (after all, they lived here first) because it’s too damn quiet without them.

Update on investigation: If you’ve been reading the blog, you know that last fall we had a team of professional investigators come over so they could check out an authentically haunted house. They have miles of footage to pore over but have  given me a sneak peek into some of it in which voices, shadows and weird knocks have been captured by them. Of course, when I receive all of the evidence, there will be an entire blog post devoted solely to the investigation results and you can see (and hear) for yourself the proof of life after death.

As we just had the 114th anniversary of the tragic sinking of the Titanic, here is a previously written post about ..you guessed it: the Titanic ghosts:

SLIPPING BELOW THE SURFACE: REAL GHOSTS OF THE TITANIC