Lights Out

 

Over time, our ghosts have done some ultra freaky things. Things that make your jaw drop or send a shiver down your spine when you read about them. You probably know this, having read the blog faithfully. But our ghosts also do your typical paranormal activity, too. They have been known to knock on walls and doors, walk up and down the stairs and materialize right before your very eyes. You know---“the usual”. And let’s not forget about the lights. They love those, too.

So let me ask you this…Have you ever been sitting in your house—or any house for that matter—and a light just turns off or on by itself without any human intervention?

I am not referring to any type of electrical fault like a bad switch, loose wiring/connections, voltage fluctuations, power surges, overloaded circuits, failing fixtures or bad bulbs. If these were to blame, your light would have an issue pretty much ALL THE TIME until you had it repaired. Remember this part as you read on.

I am referring to incidents where none of the above was to blame and your light turned off when it was on or turned on when it was off and you know for a fact no one had touched the switch.

There have been several incidents involving lights that happened in our house over the years, of which no explanation could be found. I have written about them before on the blog but they were included in posts about other paranormal events, so today I thought I would round them all up together. I will attempt to keep the re-telling on the short side (yes, ME--known for making a short story long) since they are detailed elsewhere on the blog.

First incident: My mom and I used to talk about everything under the sun, including our earliest childhood memories. One of her first memories is of being a very small child, around the age of two or three, in her playpen in the kitchen of our house. (I STILL have that playpen—it came with the house. You haven’t seen creepy until you’ve seen a 1930’s homemade wooden playpen.) She vividly recalled being terrified at seeing a large ball of light come out of the dining room and into the kitchen. I know what you’re thinking—how does anyone remember something from when they were two or three years old? It happens. I fell down a flight of stairs at 9 months old and I still remember bits and pieces of that tumble.

The ball of light my mother described was quite a strange thing for a child to see, but freaky enough that she retained the memory and never forgot it. In later years, she asked her mother about it. No one else had seen the ball of light on that day. Although this has nothing to do with lights turning on and off by themselves, it is an unexplained event in this house and the source and identification of that light remains unknown.

Second incident: It was 1981. My father died unexpectedly and about a week later my mother saw the light in the kitchen come on after everyone had gone to bed. She was in her bedroom, which was not far from the kitchen and could clearly see it. It stayed on for a few moments, then went out again. She knew for a fact no one was in the kitchen. She had her mechanically-inclined brother check out the light switch, wiring and fixture. He found nothing wrong with any of it but replaced the switch for peace of mind. I believe it happened 2 more times after the first night, which just so happened to be the evening she had lit a candle at church in his memory. She was convinced it was my father playing with the light switch to let her know he was still around.

Messing around with lights is a very common activity in the paranormal world. Experts think it’s because ghosts and spirits find it relatively easy to manipulate electromagnetic energy because they are made of energy themselves. Therefore, turning on a radio, tv or a light is easy for them to accomplish. They don’t necessarily have to physically move the position of the light switch to turn a light on or off.

Further proof of this is the light in my upstairs hallway. There is an on/off switch at the top of the stairs and also at the bottom. Recently, within the last few months, on a few occasions, I had purposely turned this light on with the downstairs switch, confirmed it had indeed come on, went  into the kitchen and when I had come back moments later, the light I had just turned on was now off. The first time, I assumed I had just thought I turned the light on when maybe I actually didn’t. The second and third times this happened, I began to think a ghost was to blame. I mentioned these incidents to my son, who lived here for some years with his grandmother and he reported the same thing happened to him on many occasions with that same light. There is nothing at all wrong with the light switch or wiring.

Second question: have you ever witnessed (aside from a horror movie) the extremely fast flickering of a light that had no known cause? This is a classic horror movie effect, the intention of which is to make you feel something supernatural is causing it, distorting your vision of the scene and making you feel very uneasy. You just know something terrifying is about to happen. It’s super effective. This exact thing happened in my very own kitchen two  years ago to 2 lights at the same time, witnessed by me and my son. Watching it unfold, you would have thought you were smackdab in the middle of a John Carpenter movie. But nope, it was just my kitchen which happens to be in my pretty haunted house.

I had written about it on this blog at that time. Here is the post in case you missed it:

LINK

 Nothing was wrong with either light fixture, the bulbs or wiring. It has not done it again since that day and had not done it before. We just shrugged it off as another encounter with one of the entities.

 Other than lightbulbs being paranormally manipulated, other unexplained lights have been seen on our property. We refer to this freaky encounter as The Phantom Car. 

Three separate times, the phantom car was outside our house. 

How do we know this? Because when it happened at night (it also occurred in the daytime), it shone it’s headlights in through the windows. Plus you could hear it. 

How do we know it simply wasn’t a real car? Read the blog posts (links below) where it is all explained. It is also probable there was a 4^th time involving this that my brother and I encountered together when we were quite young. There is a short list of paranormal encounters at my house that actually sort of alarmed me to any extent. This is one of them, due to its multiple “appearances” and plain ole creepiness.

They have been written about on the blog previously:

LINK 1

LINK 2

LINK 3

LINK 4

 

I started writing this post one late afternoon before supper. I then went to eat and while sitting at my kitchen table, facing the pantry, the light in there blinked out for a micro second and then came back on. I have sat there countless times, often with that light on, and the light has never gone out. Pretty big coincidence that it happened on the day when I was talking about and writing about lights going out for no reason.

Before moving back to the homestead 2 years ago, I lived in another non-haunted house for about 20 years and a couple of other places before that. The number of incidents of lights turning on or off on their own or flickering at horror-movie speed in those other locations was zero. Not once was there an occurrence of anything like this happening. Yet in my haunted house, it has happened a lot.

It’s not rocket science. It’s just some ghosts. They are able to turn a light off, so they do. They can also, speak, make noise, touch you, move things around and take your belongings. Basically, they are roommates who don’t pay for anything or do any chores. But hey, they were here first so I guess that’s fair.

The Curious Incident of the Rushing Air

Over the past month or two, it has been fairly quiet here on the paranormal front. Not a whole lot has transpired. However, there was one incident I wanted to mention. It is not enough for a whole blog post on its own, so I will just include it here.

I was nearing the completion of a renovation of our downstairs hallway and applying a primer basecoat to the walls. It was a fairly hot July day and very still outside with no wind. I had a fan on nearby but it was not aimed directly at me. Suddenly, I heard a bang from the direction of the dining room, which I had clear sight of from where I was working. The cat, incidentally, was nowhere around. I stopped what I was doing to have a good look in the direction the noise had come from to see if something had fallen over somewhere. Everything was where it was supposed to be and I could not see the source of the noise I had heard. While I was standing there looking at my dining room, I felt a fast rush of air come right over me and sort of through me. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have no other accurate way to describe it. I also know it sounds like a cheesy haunted house movie scene, but again, it is what actually happened. I stood there, paintbrush in hand, thinking, “Woah..what the hell was that?” I have never felt anything like it before. The only source of anything closely resembling a wind was the fan I had on nearby. It was on a low speed but could not have been the source of what I felt. What I felt was very sudden, very fast moving and felt like it moved over and through me. I did not perceive that it had any particular temperature to it (you know, like on Ghost Hunters when they encounter a freezing cold spot or burst of air) and it did not do anything to me, like cause an electrical sensation or send a shiver through me. It was over in a few seconds.

As previously mentioned on other posts, sometimes jokingly or not jokingly I will say out loud to my mom (who passed away two years ago) something like, “Okay mom, only a months’ worth/weeks’ worth/ a day’s worth of work left and this hallway will be done. I sure hope you like it!”  I had said this very thing about an hour before I heard the mysterious bang and felt the rush of air. So maybe it was her, letting me know her opinion of the work being done. Maybe it wasn’t her. I don’t know. There have been many different ghosts here and they come and go whenever they want. I can’t say for sure 100% it was anything paranormal but I’ve experienced enough in my lifetime to tell you it was abnormal and not wind from outside or from the fan. There are no other plausible explanations.

Update on the missing coffee cup and hairdressing bag

Back on March 8/25, I reported in another post that these items mysteriously vanished into thin air. As of this writing on August 4/25, the cup and bag ( and its contents) are still missing.

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The Top 10 Paranormal Activities at the Haunted Homestead

 

Most people like quick reads; anything over 5 minutes, you don’t have time for. I get that. You’re busy. We’re all busy. Or it’s just too many paragraphs to get to the point of what happened. I get that, too. It’s 2023--we want everything fast with the least amount of effort invested. What’s the quickest way to get to the information you want to read? That’s our goal. I think it’s everyone’s goal. It’s definitely mine for some things, and is the main reason I have zero patience now when looking at a recipe online and I have to read through the history of how cocoa was discovered and its timeline of usage over a few centuries. All of this makes this paragraph oxymoronic, doesn’t it?

My point is, you might want to know about the paranormal activity in my house but don’t want to read an entire blog post, or an entire blog for that matter.

So without further ado, here is a summary of my top favorite moments, since the house was built in 1871. The accounts are real, witnessed by either myself or other family members.  They are seemingly far-fetched but they actually happened exactly as described, which is what makes them intriguing.

 

(To narrow it down to be a favorite, I chose the ones that have the greatest impact such as making your jaw drop or giving you a good old fashioned case of the heebie-jeebies.) I’ve tried to keep them concise. If you want to read them in their entirety (which is highly encouraged), they are all on this blog. There is a search box for keywords to the right.

 

1.     Phantom Car

Experienced by myself and 3 other family members on separate occasions, the phantom car is an incident which has involved the unmistakable sound of a car pulling into the gravel driveway, the sound of car doors closing (and voices following the car doors closing during one of the incidents.) It has also appeared at night in the yard, during which time only the headlights were seen shining in through the windows of the house. It is never a real car. It is not tangible. It is not visible and mostly auditory.

 

2.     Do they Wear Shoes in the Afterlife?

A fairly new pair of red Puma sneakers disappeared from the house while the only two occupants slept in their beds. A search turned up nothing. Many months later, the missing Pumas were discovered in the far end of the walk-in attic in a box. No one knows how they got there. Oh yeah, and they were quite mangled, coming apart at the seams in some places. And they were covered in dirt. The dirt was even inside the shoes. Where were they all those months? What happened to them? Who (or what?) had them? How’d they mysteriously end up in such a weird place in the house? They are still here in the box. 

 

3.     Footprints in the Living Room

Carpet was removed to expose the original hardwood floors. On this one particular day, the floors were swept and left that way until the next work day. The next morning, my son and his girlfriend discovered clear, child-sized footprints across the floor boards. No children lived in or visited the house during this renovation. The footprints looked wet, but weren’t. They were just “there”. Pictures are on the blog.

 

4.     The Night Willie Appeared

Willie was a little boy who lived here and died here in the 1800’s. We used to joke that maybe he was one of our ghosts, based on mischievous activity over the years. One night when I was asleep in bed, my door creaked open. For some reason it woke me up (I guess because when your door creaks open in the middle of the night in a known-to-be-haunted house, you tend to wake right up) and I saw a young boy standing in the doorway. Yes, I was 100% awake. No, it wasn’t my child. Full story is on the blog.

 

 5.     An Actual Ghost Walk 

Around the same time Willie made an appearance, I was in my bedroom one night at my desk. My son, who was about 5 at the time, was asleep in his bed. No one else was in the upstairs of the house. The sound of someone pacing started right outside my bedroom door…back and forth from one end of the hallway to the other. Trust me, if someone is walking on that old creaky floor, you know it. This went on for a good twenty minutes, at which time I bravely opened my bedroom door and stepped out into the hall. Full story is--you guessed it-- on the blog.

  

6.     The Green Mile Books

A relative loaned my mother the series of Stephen King’s The Green Mile books (6 in total). When she was done reading them, she put a large elastic band around them to keep them together and shelved them until she could return them to the owner. Imagine her surprise to discover them one afternoon on the middle of the dining room floor, no longer held together with the elastic band. They were spread out in sequence, book 1 to 6 in perfect formation on the floor. 

 

 7.     The Night Light

When my son was five, we lived here for awhile. You don’t put your kid to sleep in a haunted bedroom every night without a nightlight in there. The one I used went into the wall plug quite snugly and you had to pull pretty hard if you wanted to remove it. Every night for two weeks the nightlight would be sitting on top of his dresser when I would check on him before going to bed myself. 

  

8.     I’m Not Saying It Was Aliens But…

Ghosts in your house are one thing but I get a lot of raised eyebrows whenever I mention about the “man” that came to the door one day looking for a lift to the gas station. Full story is on the blog. 

 

9.     Horror Movie Lights

This happened recently so if you read my latest blog post, you may remember it. My son and I, who were talking about ghosts and hauntings in my kitchen, simultaneously witnessed two lights flickering at lightning speed, horror-movie style.

 

(A 10^th to round things out nicely):

10. The Hoofprint

Some years ago in my bedroom, I awoke one morning to find the perfect imprint of a hoof-shape burned into the carpet. Nothing hot had been dropped on the floor. It had not been there when I went to bed. Approximately six other people  checked it out. No one had an explanation of what could have caused it. Even stranger, the following day it began to fade. Within several days it was gone completely.

                                                                                                

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The Phantom Car Rides Again

The Phantom Car Rides…Again! 

Last month I was there visiting and was going to stay for a few days. A hurricane was bearing down on Nova Scotia so I decided to stick around. If the power goes out, and weather is wild, it seems like a perfectly good time to get the Ouija board out, if you ask me, but that is a different story for a different day. (insert evil laugh here).

It was late afternoon and I was expecting my son and his girlfriend to arrive home from work at any time. Their dog was there with me and my mother was having a nap. All was peaceful and quiet and I thought I’d brew up a pot of coffee. It was a warm day and the window screen in the door was up.

Just as I was sticking the pot under the coffee maker, I clearly heard a car drive in the driveway. The dog whined a little as she heard it, too and I assumed my son and his girlfriend had arrived. I thought it was odd I hadn’t heard his car before he actually pulled into the driveway, as he has a type of muffler that makes the car sound slightly louder than normal and you can hear him before you see him.

I looked out and there was no one in the driveway.

I marched right out into the middle of the driveway, looking up towards the neighbor’s place, as he also uses the driveway but there was no vehicle or sign of anyone having just driven past.

All was quiet again. My son and his girlfriend arrived home about a half hour later.

You can imagine my excitement at possibly having encountered the phantom car once again.

I kick myself now for not grabbing my phone and snapping a few pictures of the driveway at the time of the sound. You never know when the unexplained is going to show up in your photos.

Here are links to our other phantom car experiences: 

Phantom Car 1

Phantom Car 2

Phantom Car 3

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It's Baaaack!! Phantom Car, Take Three!!!

Update on phantom car sighting

Last week one day, my mother was sitting in the kitchen in her wonderfully-haunted house. Her grandson was not home and it was a few hours before he was due to arrive. This incident happened in broad daylight, incidentally.

Something caught her eye through the kitchen window. She looked in that direction from where she was sitting and saw a dark colored vehicle. Due to the color and location it was in (the exact spot her grandson always parks in), she naturally assumed he had come home early. The dog heard the car and started to wag her tail in anticipation of seeing him.

But no one came to the door. Looking further into the yard and driveway, my mother could see there actually was no car anywhere.

That’s twice now in three months.

If this is your first time reading about the mysterious, creepy car, you might want to read a bit of the backstory on this subject:

The Phantom Car

The Phantom Car Strikes Again

If you are an avid follower of The Phantom Car Experience, I don’t know what to say about this. Again.

Maybe it’s there ALL the time but people are only seeing or hearing it now and then.

Like certain spirits, could it be stuck in a time loop, driving in the driveway time and time again?

I have hypothesized a theory (for lack of any other explanation) that because there is SO much weirdness (a couple of UFO sightings, ghosts/spirits materializing in the front yard plain as day, The Man in a Human Suit, and the multitude of creepy phantom car sightings) happening around the front of the house, that perhaps there is some sort of “portal” or “void” right around there that is allowing all the strangeness in.

Am I comfortable with this hypothesis? Not at all. It’s utterly ridiculous. However, lots of ridiculous stuff happens to people all over the world. It should at least be considered when trying to figure out the source of the car.

So for now, I leave you once again to mull this over. Frankly, I am glad it is happening. 

The more times it is experienced, the more evidence there is.

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The Phantom Car Strikes Again

One night not long ago in the little community that this house stands in, there was another possible experience involving the phantom car. If you have not read about the phantom car occurrences at this residence, then by all means visit this link and catch up. 

The Phantom Car (<--link))

My mother was home alone. Her grandson had told her he would not be home until the next day, as he was away for the night. She locked the house up and went to bed near midnight.

Her bedroom is on the downstairs level and due to multiple layers of paint over the years, the old creaky bedroom door does not close all the way. She had just turned out the light and reports she was definitely not asleep yet, when she could see car headlights shining into the house through the dining room windows. 

The only time this happens is when her grandson comes home late at night, as he parks very close to the front step. He is the only person who parks that close to the house. Other family members and visitors always park in other sections of the driveway. He is also the only person who would ever arrive there at that time of night.

She assumed he changed his mind about spending the night elsewhere and had come home. She realized he might not be able to get in the house, as she has several very good locks that are secured from the inside. She thought about this, thinking he might ring the doorbell when he realized he was locked out. But that didn’t happen.

What did happen was while the car headlights were shining in through the window to the dining room, she heard movement out in the kitchen. She called out her grandson’s name, but there was no answer. Shortly after that, she could see a faint light moving around the dining room. She called out again, “Is anyone there?” No answer. 

Then as quickly as it all began, the lights and noises were gone.

She got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen, put on the light and looked around. She checked all of the door locks and realized nothing had been touched. She looked out the kitchen door window but there was no car.

She called it a night and went back to bed.

In the morning, she checked everything again but is absolutely positive no real human had been around. She mentioned to me that she thought it was the phantom car. 

The whole situation leaves a lot of questions:

1. An intruder would most likely never drive right up to the front doorstep. There is only one person who ever does that and he was not home.

2. An intruder would most likely not shine their car headlights directly into the house like that. You would think they would slink around trying to gain entry inconspicuously.

3. An intruder did not gain entry into the house as all doors and windows were still secured thereafter.

4. Nothing was out of place, upset or missing.

5. So who or what was in the kitchen and then the dining room?

6. And who is driving that phantom car around?

While my mother and I were discussing this incident, it reminded me of something similar that happened in that house to me and my brother.

We were pretty young but old enough to be left home alone, so I may have been around 11 and my brother was maybe 13. Our parents had gone out for the evening and we were home by ourselves. I remember it was dark and we saw a car drive in the driveway. I became slightly alarmed because no adults were there but figured it was someone to visit our mom and dad and they would leave again once they were told they weren’t home.

Back then, my father used to drive his car towards the back door sometimes and over time the long driveway kind of became naturally longer due to him doing this. On this particular night, the car in question drove around by the back doorstep instead of parking out front like the rest of the world would do. Then the headlights went out. With a bit of trepidation, we waited for someone to knock (I assumed it would be on the back door, which also no one ever did) as that was where the car was parked.

The knock never came. 

We weren’t quite sure what to do at this point. Who drives up to the back of someone’s house and then never gets out of the car?? The thought of how weirdly unusual this was started to really freak us out so one of us (probably me but I can’t say for sure as it was a long time ago) decided to call a friend of the family. I don’t know if we expected him to come over. He lived about fifteen minutes away but at least we were in contact with an adult who might know what to do. I don’t remember much about the phone call other than describing what was happening. And I don’t really recall how it ended—if we finally saw the car drive away or our parents came home and it just wasn’t there anymore.

I know we were extremely glad when our parents finally returned. We told them what happened but they had no explanation other than to assume someone had come to visit our father, sat there for awhile, assumed he wasn’t home and then left. But I don’t think people really do that. No one ever mentioned to our parents that they came by and sat in their car for awhile one night.

I thought about this incident once in awhile growing up but shrugged it off as just “one of those things”.

Up until this point, I always thought it was a real person doing something really weird. But when my mother told me her recent tale of the phantom car showing up in the night, she said, “I think that’s what happened to you and your brother all those years ago.”

It surely is a possibility. I had never thought of it in that context before until she said it.

The phantom car strikes again!

And again.

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Phantom Cars

How would you like to be sitting inside a perfectly good house, hear a car drive up outside, doors shutting, people talking and when you look out, there isn't anyone there?

It's a little disturbing.

This has happened at my mother's house several times, and there has usually been more than one witness. No alcohol or drugs were involved so you can cross that explanation off your list.

One of my brothers heard this while staying at the house alone a few years ago. Three times he heard the car, the doors, the people.....three times he looked outside and nothing was there. I will leave out the part where he became so frightened he got in his own car and left....but too bad I can't mention that because it emphasizes how unnerving the incident was. We are talking about a man who doesn't believe in a whole lot of paranormal stuff---unless he experiences it for himself.

Myself and my ex-husband were in the bathroom of that house together one day. No one else was home at the time. The bathroom window faces the driveway and when you take into account the lack of insulation and original 1800-era windows, it is safe to say you can clearly hear anything that is going on outside.

So we were in the bathroom getting ready to go out somewhere when we heard a car drive up. I became immediately annoyed because I didn't want visitors---we were trying to go someplace.
I looked out the bathroom window but couldn't see a car. We could hear it..the tires crunching on the ground. Then we could hear doors closing and people talking. We proceeded into the kitchen and out onto the doorstep but no one was there....no people...no car.

My son and I also heard it about 2 years ago. We were upstairs in the house cleaning out the large walk-in attic when we heard a car drive up. I was buried under boxes so I asked Scott to go to the window to see who had driven up. He claimed it was no one. I didn't believe him so I managed to crawl out and look for myself. Again, no one was there.

Want to read about other phantom modes of transportation?

Phantom Trains and Haunted Railroads

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