You Only THINK You're Alone

Since our last post was in November of 2018 (an extra creepy, very intriguing encounter with the afterlife:         The Reappearance ), I thought I would write a short piece about the only paranormal thing that has been ongoing for the last few months. I can only report on the weird stuff that happens when it happens, obviously, and as you know, entities don’t make themselves blatantly known every single day. Therefore, posts appearing here may be erratic, and we ask for your patience in this regard.

(While waiting for new posts, you can always check out our Newsletters on the side menu---great reading in there!)

Anyway, I can tell you about something new that my mother has been experiencing lately.

It seemed kind of minor at first. Although no source for the activity can be determined, it is happening almost daily, which makes me wonder about it even more.

As I am sure you know by now, when I visit the house or talk to my mother on the phone, I always ask, “Any ghosts around lately?” (I know, I know---I’m like a kid in a candy store).

So a couple of months ago when I asked her this, she said, “Well yes, I have been hearing something, over and over and over again.”

She proceeded to tell me that almost every time (for months now) when she goes to bed and is about to read her book, there is a noise right above her head. Not in the ceiling, but at the head of her bed, NEXT to her head. There is a small sliding wooden door in her headboard (you know the type; they slide open with enough room in them to store books, etc). And this door slides open and shut, which she can clearly hear, as she is lying in very close proximity to it. 

There is no mistaking this noise; she knows what that little sliding door sounds like. There is also no way it could slide open and shut by itself. She hears it at night when she is reading or sometimes in the day if she feels like a nap and hasn’t drifted off yet.

It startled her quite a bit, to the point where she told “whoever” to knock it off. Then she didn’t hear it for a couple of days but it started again not long after that.

We know it is not a dream. She is fully awake when she hears it. She can’t SEE it happening as she is elderly and can’t whip her head around quick enough, since it is above her.

The only thing that could slide a small door open and shut in this manner would be hands.

But whose hands?

There is no one else in the room.

Or is there?

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The Reappearance

As I’ve mentioned before numerous times throughout this blog, the spirits at our haunted homestead are generally pretty friendly. By that, I don’t mean that they sit down for a coffee and ask how your day is going but over the years, their activity has been basically harmless. The only semi-angry event I witnessed in that house was when a shelf full of glass vases was quite forcefully unhooked from the wall it was attached to and sent hurtling to the floor. Other than that, as you know (if you’ve read about these paranormal events) they are active a lot but mean no harm. A favorite thing for them to do is to take certain objects in the house and eventually return them (usually) in unusual places.

Throughout previous posts on this blog, you will find various events of this nature. A few objects that mysteriously disappeared that immediately come to mind are a broom, glasses, a video game, a phone, scissors and a pair of shoes. The items in question were returned at some point, but always in a different place in the house. These are NOT incidents of someone laying an object down and forgetting where they put it. But if you read the blog posts, you know that already.

Anyway, today a long-missing item was returned from “wherever” in a most unusual way.

As previously mentioned, my adult son lives at the house with his grandmother. She is elderly and cannot manoeuver the stairs anymore. (You’ll see why this is important).

In 2016, my son, Scott owned a nice pair of red Puma sneakers. They were his favorite and he wore them every day. One weekend, he had been out somewhere, came home, removed his sneakers by the front door as he always does and went to bed. When he awoke, the sneakers were missing. He searched high and low and inquired with his grandmother but the sneakers were gone. 

(This was mentioned in a previous post HERE )

Looking for a logical explanation, she and several others who have been told about the mysterious disappearance, asked if he left them at whoever’s house he was visiting at. The answer was a definite “no”. No one leaves their footwear at someone’s house and drives home in their bare/sock feet. Plus, he distinctly remembers leaving them near the front door as he has been doing for years.

So how do shoes disappear?

You are probably thinking someone else could have moved them OR he left them somewhere else in the house.

The only other person there is his grandmother. She has no interest in his sneakers. The house was searched to no avail. No one else had been in the house.

Maybe the question is: how do shoes in a proven-to-be-haunted house disappear?

For the next two years he and I and his grandmother periodically wondered where in the heck the red sneakers could have gotten to. Naturally, we half-jokingly blamed “Willie”, a child ghost, known to sometimes be around, and we entertained the thought that someone was possibly running around in the afterlife with these cool red sneakers on.

I hoped that someday the sneakers would just magically reappear but Scott figured that was not going to happen. Other footwear took their place and life (sometimes hauntingly) went on.

Today, Scott called me to tell me that something super-bizarre had occurred. Knowing all the crazy stuff that has been happening at the house lately, I had a feeling the topic was going to be paranormal.

Which of course, it was.

Early this afternoon, he had gone into the large walk-in attic. He was rearranging some of the items currently being stored there when a large shoe box at the far end of the room caught his eye. At some point, he had purchased boots and this was the box they came in. He hadn’t seen this particular box in awhile, which was why it had caught his eye today. So he picked it up and noticed it had some weight to it. Puzzled, he opened the box and well, I guess I don’t really have to tell you what was inside, now do I?

Flabbergasted, he lifted his now-wrecked red Puma sneakers from the box. The last time he wore them, they were in pristine condition. Not anymore. As the picture below shows, a good portion of one side of them is torn apart. 

Creeped out yet?

Maybe this next part will send shivers down your spine: While he was telling me all of this on the phone, he said, “Ummm Mom? Someone has been wearing these. There is GROUND inside the shoes.”

I am just going to end this here as nothing more really needs to be said.

Someone took the shoes. Someone did God-knows-what with them for the last TWO years. And someone put them back upstairs very recently in the attic, in a shoebox and left them in a place where Scott would see them.

Scott’s girlfriend had no knowledge of the missing sneakers. His grandmother cannot climb stairs even if she wanted to play a ridiculous insane joke like hide shoes for two years and then ta-da, here they are.

These are the facts.

This is what happened to everyday, normal, sane, sober individuals, who just happen to live in a not-so-average house.

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Ghost Footprints: Photographic Evidence

Recently, I was fortunate enough to capture a couple of  Ghost Faces (link)  in pictures.  I say “fortunate” because it is an almost-impossible feat.  Most ghost photos are either staged, mistaken identity or wishful thinking that can’t be proven. Luckily, the ones I took have been scrutinized by photograph enthusiasts and paranormal experts. Ninety nine percent concluded that they are pretty much the real deal.

Since that, more substantial, tangible evidence has emerged in the living room of our old house. At first, when I was informed of what happened, I hesitated to even write about it, simply for the fact that it’s hard to believe. But then I considered the fact that unless you know the house and my family, you may not put too much stock in what has transpired there. And until you see it for yourself, it may not make sense to you logically. Since this blog is about the paranormal events of the house and the property on which it sits, it would almost be a disservice to not report the latest.

I can only tell you these things do happen. Draw your own conclusions and opinions, as I have often instructed before.

Trust me when I say that when you grow up in a haunted house, you get used to the activity pretty quickly. It’s just a part of everyday life after a while. There were lots of sentences like, “My (fill in the blank) is missing and it was right here 5 seconds ago.”, “There’s a lot of banging on the walls in that empty bedroom.”, “Did anyone else hear someone walking around in the hallway last night after we all went to bed?” “Did you just see what I saw standing in the pantry?”

It becomes the new norm. Our norm anyway and I can say with confidence based on worldwide reports that we were never the only ones forced to live with ghosts. But, thankfully, they were (and continue to be) always harmless so while it is unusual living conditions, there was not much to be done about it and  life just went on anyway. Of course, considering the many generations and known apparitions in the house, my mother never wanted them shooed away. Frankly, neither did I as I got older. The paranormal became fascinating on many levels to me. As a kid, I would have loved for them all to have gone away and stop scaring the bejesus out of me. I would have loved to have gone to bed at night not scared.

Just once. 

But it never happened. 

As an adult, I welcome any new activity. It is exciting, mysterious, and offers a glimpse into a world of which we know pretty much nothing about.

The activity is not based on just one person’s account of what happened. There have been many witnesses over the years to things that have happened. The point of this post or the blog is not to  convince   anyone of the validity by pointing and saying, “Look! We have a real haunted house here!” It is more like, “Come in for a cup of coffee or dinner. Oh by the way, you might see a ghost. You might not. But they are likely hanging around.” Believe it. Don’t believe it. That is entirely up to you. Some of it goes outside the normal realm of what you consider an average haunting; much of it does not.

Having said all that, sometimes something happens in that house that even by my standards I have a hard time wrapping my brain around, which is hard to do when you have photographic evidence and real, honest, trustworthy, no-nonsense people telling you that “this is what just happened.”

So for several weeks now, my son has been renovating various sections of the house, concentrating mainly on the living room floor. He removed the old carpeting to expose the beautiful, wider floor boards which are original, put down around 1871. Yesterday when he went in to do some more work, he found footprints on the wooden floor boards. There were several obvious (barefoot), child-size footprints on the wood floor. They look wet, but he assures me they absolutely are not. They did not wipe off; they are just there. The floor was mopped later on and the prints remained.

  A few interesting facts about this:

1)      The prints were NOT there the day before.

2)      They go across the floor into the wall at a particular spot that many years ago, there was a door there leading into a bedroom on the other side of the wall. The door was taken out and made into a solid wall at some point.

3)      No one in the house has a foot that size; nor did the three people (all adults) currently in the house go into the room during the time period mentioned.

           

The pictures speak for themselves. My son and the others were shocked and astounded that these footprints somehow materialized on the floor overnight. When my son told me about this and sent me the pictures he took, I was amazed.

The footprints could belong to “Willie”, a child who died there at the age of 5, in approx. 1873 from measles. We believe his spirit has made his presence known over the years, most notably when I slept there one night and he came in my bedroom in the middle of the night. He was one of the children of the man who built this house in 1871. The house has remained in our family since then.

The ghost faces in the pictures I took also occurred when the home renovations were happening. Are the deceased curious as to what is happening to their “home”? Are they unhappy that things are changing, or just keeping an eye on how things are going? Or is the materialization of the spirit faces and footprints not at all related to any reno work, and would have occurred anyway? It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.

Both happened and there is photographic evidence.

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Ghost Faces

I don’t think it’s all that difficult to actually “see” a ghost. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have claimed to. I don’t think it’s a case of whether or not you are “open” to it happening. It’s like seeing a blue jay or a shooting star. They are around and if you get to see one for yourself, then good for you.

Of course, a ghost or spirit can be around a certain location and make noise and move objects and that sort of thing without ever materializing; so they aren’t always visible, to the human eye anyway.

And when they are visible, most people (myself included) will tell you that they look just like you and me, not all wispy and ethereal like in the movies. Of course there are different entities so sometimes they can look like dark shadows without any discernable features. But that’s not what I am getting at so I digress.

To actually capture a ghost/spirit on camera is a near impossible feat. There are tons of pictures circulating the internet and in published books which claim to be ghost photography. But most turn out to be inconclusive or doctored pictures, or something else entirely that the photographer thought was a ghost but isn’t really.

I’ll be the first to admit our eyes can play tricks on us. I once mistakenly thought a road sign in the dark was a man standing on the shoulder of the road. Once I got quite close, I could clearly see said sign was in fact just that. Although that incident was not photograph-related, it demonstrates how one thing can be mistaken for something else, especially under varied lighting conditions (ie: dark, foggy, camera settings, etc)

All this being said, you could take a thousand pictures in a known-to-be-haunted location and examine them to death (pun intended) and never come up with anything unusual.

And that is exactly what I did.

And then one day, when scrutinizing the latest batch of pics, you see something weird.

And that is exactly what happened.

To re-cap, this blog is about the regularly-haunted house in the country that my mother owns. You are probably all very familiar with it. If not, please have a look around and become acquainted.

A lot of the time, when I am there, I take random pictures in the HOPE that someday something unusual and unexplained will present itself. Like I said, you could take pictures for years and come up empty handed continually. (Incidentally, I have captured a few anomalies over the years but nothing perhaps as solid as the following.)

Within recent weeks, I took some outdoor shots of the property this house stands on, with my trusty Nikon. (mainly of windows because let’s face it, what ghost wouldn’t want to look out at the countryside on a beautiful summer day?)

Upon scrutinizing them later on the computer, one picture of the dining room window caught my eye. A face was looking out the window. I went to the next picture and it got even weirder. Two faces were there and one of them was clearly my father-----who died in 1981.

The face in the first picture looks to be of a young girl, smiling, with long hair. Her features are still clearly visible in the second picture, right below my father’s face, and she looks more like my grandmother in this picture. 

 

For comparison, this is my father and grandmother.

I have shown the pictures to several people. All but one agrees the man’s face is my father, and that there is at least one other face (a girl or woman) and perhaps as many as three faces in total. 

There was only one person in the house that day: my mother, who was nowhere near the dining room. Nor do any of these faces belong to her.

I have clearly stated ghosts are extremely hard to photograph. But that doesn’t mean it CAN’T be done. Did I get lucky and capture something in my shots? Seems like it.

You can blow them up and add filters all day, but you have to remember the images will not act like they would if humans were in the pictures because the people in these pics are not exactly made of skin and bones. They have intangible qualities to their make-up and that must be taken into consideration when analyzing the photos.

I am perfectly fine with people being skeptical. And so, for comparison purposes, I took more pictures of the same window yesterday, at the same time of day, same weather outside, with the same camera, and nothing changed inside the house. I examined the pictures on the computer later and there are no anomalies at all.

To me, if the faces were fuzzy, hard to see or basically just unclear, I would not share them so readily. But they aren’t any of those things. They are right there, basically just smiling for the camera.

Side note: It should also be noted that I heard unexplained noises from the dining room earlier that afternoon. The dog was startled by them and left the dining room. Not sure what the source of that noise was (they are frequently heard and unexplained) but it could be related to what was captured in the photos.

Conclude what you will and decide for yourself.

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