There have been several significant incidents at my mother’s house recently. I say “significant” because there are always the usual bumps and bangs and creakings throughout the night which have become so mainstream they are hardly worth mentioning anymore. However, on two recent visits there, there was some definite activity, with several witnesses.
The first was on Easter Sunday ( 2011).
The relatives were starting to trickle in around lunchtime. To make a long story short, there had been a container of butter sitting on the kitchen table because people were eating mom’s homemade rolls.
Eventually, my mother got up from the table to start to cook something when she said, ”Where is that butter container?” She had looked around the kitchen, on the table, in the fridge, but it was nowhere to be found. I started looking around for it, thinking someone had placed it elsewhere, but couldn’t find it, either. I looked again in the fridge. No butter. I closed the fridge door, jokingly said, “Okay, Willie. We know you took the butter. Put it back now.”
I opened the fridge one more time and there it was….right in the front. (Creepy reminder: Willie is one of the ghosts in the house, a child who died there in the 1800’s.)
The rest of the afternoon went by without incident….until dinner time.
There were about 12 of us there for dinner. Seated at the head of the table was my mother. I sat to her right. To my right was my teenage niece, Emma.
It was near the end of the meal; some people had already left the table. The rest of us lingered, deciding if we had room for dessert or not. We were all gabbing away, as the Conrads tend to do, when out of the blue I felt someone touch my right leg near my thigh. It felt like someone pressing their finger into my leg and moving it along my leg for about 5 seconds. Immediately, I thought, “What is that? The cat, maybe??” But then I realized it could never be the cat: he hates everyone, would never rub up against anyone, plus it didn’t even feel like a cat. It felt like fingers. And the cat could never reach that high up. I looked down while it was happening but could not see anything.
While I was having this conversation in my head with myself, Emma said,” What is touching my chair?! It feels like something is by my chair, trying to move it!” She was indicating the space between us. I looked trying to see something…anything…that would account for this but still couldn’t actually see anything.
This seemed like the appropriate time to let her and everyone else at the table know what I had just felt. While everyone is staring at us both trying to process what we had both just said, my mother said, “Doesn’t surprise me. The other night I was lying in bed, not yet asleep when I felt something that felt like a hand touching my shoulder for a few minutes.” (Creepy reminder: she lives alone.)
At this point, my nephew’s girlfriend came into the dining room from the living room where she had been sitting for awhile. She took a seat at the table and said, “I am not sitting in there by myself anymore. There is something scratching and tapping at the wall.”
We talked about it for a few minutes, told her it was probably Willie or someone else from the great beyond. Later, when I was getting ready to leave and go home, my nephew said he had also been sitting in there (after his girlfriend had been in there alone) and had also heard scratching and tapping on the walls. He had not known his girlfriend had heard the same thing when she was in there by herself.
The other incident happened on May 8 ( 2011). We visited my mother—it was Mother’s Day, after all.
I asked her if anything unusual had been happening. She said lately she had been hearing voices ( not Alzheimer’s-related voices—she is in perfect mental health). She said mostly it sounds like one or two women talking, but she can’t be sure. It tends to sound far away, but is definitely within ear shot.
My son, Scott and I decided to check out the haunted spare bedroom. If you are familiar with my tales of this house, you know that there tends to be a lot of activity in this mostly-unused bedroom. Previous problems include the bed being messed up and indentations in the bed after it has been perfectly made up. The mattress has been switched but that did not solve the problem as the skeptics were all so sure that it would.
Anyway, Scott and I went in quietly. Nothing was out of place in the room except the bed covers. Now bear in mind my mother is of the old school for proper bed making…hospital corners, everything smoothed, de-wrinkled, creaseless. She would never have it any other way.
That day, the bed blankets were NOT creaseless, or smooth. Scott and I were shocked at what we saw. The top white bedspread was turned down a bit at the very top. There was an impression in the pillow and the blankets on the far side of the bed (nearest the wall), and a yellow blanket folded and laying over the foot of the bed was also disheveled. My mother wouldn’t leave a bed in this condition if her life depended on it. It looked like someone had slept in it and got up and kind of put it back together, but certainly not to my mother’s standards.
(Creepy reminder: she lives there alone and no overnight guests had slept in that room for a long, long time. It had been so long, my mother couldn’t even remember the last time someone slept there.)
Scott and I took some pictures of the condition of the bed and then decided to re-make the bed as my mother would, with plans to recheck it before we left there that day. When I pulled back the top blanket, I nearly dropped dead at what I saw. The bed sheet was totally crumpled and off to the far side of the bed. It was deeply wrinkled from having been in this position for some time.
There were also further impressions in the top fitted sheet, indicating an adult person had indeed been sleeping there. We took pictures of this also, and called for my mother to come check out this situation. She was aghast when she saw it and reassured us there was no way on earth she would have left the bed like this the last time she made it.
Here are the pics we took that day.
Shortly afterwards, I posted my 'messed-up-haunted-bed' photos to a social networking site. A friend messaged me soon after asking about the pics I had taken "of the girl ghost and boy ghost". I had no idea what she was talking about as the only pics I had taken and posted were of a messed up bed.
After a few phone calls back and forth, she assured me on her Blackberry she can clearly see several ghosts in the "bed" pictures. She showed them to some of her friends who viewed the pics on laptops and they can also easily see these ghosts. I did everything I could with my pics on my computer, short of standing on my head, and sadly, cannot see the ghosts....but I would sure love to!
I gently explained this to my mother (so as not to frighten her too much). She was as flabbergasted as I was to know ghosts had been captured in the pics. It is one thing to see something like a messed up bed, or doors opening, or even feeling someone touch you when no one is there, but it is quite another to have them show up in photographs. That is actual solid proof. Well, it would be if everyone could see it.
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