The Bedroom

The following post has been kindly written by a guest blogger who wishes to remain anonymous. His experience took place not far from my childhood home.

My birth home is located in a port town on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. To be fair, in my sixty plus years, it has never been known publicly as a hot spot for paranormal activity. In fact the only paranormal activity I know of is personal and centered in a downstairs bedroom of my childhood home.

The original house was built in the early 1900’s. A concrete well cover bears the date 1921. An extension was added following World War two. This allowed two extra bedrooms including the one in question. One might jump to the conclusion that a grave may have been disturbed as family plots on private property were common in those days. This not the case here as there is only about eighteen inches of gravel on top of cliff rock where the foundation is.

In the winter of 1963, I was a boy of seven years. I lived in the upstairs apartment with my parents and brothers. It was a typical family scenario of the day with my hard working Dad providing for a growing family with a stay at home Mom. We were typical boys going to school and doing what young boys do best. Mayhem often reined but there were also strict rules because my Father’s mother lived downstairs. That winter something was to happen that followed me and others for years to come.

“Nanny” was a respected school teacher and icon of our local church. A very capable woman in so many ways. Just before my father was born, she lost her husband to a visiting ship borne outbreak of influenza. She found herself working and raising three children by herself in the early 1930’s. She was a very proud woman and refused any welfare or hand-outs. She did everything she could to provide. This included all of the physical labour on the property she herself grew up on. A large tract of land that had two large gardens, an orchard, a very long driveway and lawn. Boy was there lawn. I can attest as I spent many hours behind a power mower cutting it, she used a push reel mower.

She was a well-built woman, not that tall but stocky with a full figure and muscles that belied a lifetime of hard work. As kids we use to get her to make a muscle with her biceps because hers were bigger than Dad’s. Built on top of her physical strength was a pillar of faith. A devote Christian woman that believed as strong as any person I have ever known.

She sang in the choir, taught Sunday school and served on the church council. She was a person not to be challenged on her faith and not much else either. She was very no nonsense but at the same time had a very nurturing and caring side as well. She made sure we always had a wealth of books and activities to keep us occupied. All of our bikes and tricycles were given to us by her as Christmas presents as Dad just didn’t have the money. She also schooled us on her faith at every opportunity.

I paint this picture of my grandmother to help understand what happen that winter and for years to come. I think of that one particular day often. It has affected me greatly in my life’s course. I gave up believing in religion because of it. Instead I started believing in something else. The true core of what makes us humans and individuals.

Early in 1962, Nanny started having health problems. She was stubborn and delayed seeking help as one often does. She was diagnosed with bowel cancer and was then on a voyage to the end of her life. Back then the course was much the same as today. Surgery, chemo, radiation. She ran the whole gambit. I can remember her and my mother joking about her coal black wig they gave her when her hair fell out. She never complained and always declared she was in God’s hands.

Before the Christmas of ’62, her cancer was back and taking a huge toll. Still she dragged herself through all of her usual seasonal traditions. Once it was over she went back into hospital. She was not there long and returned to her home to die. Her bedroom was to be her last place on earth. It was not long after that we were forbidden to even go downstairs to visit her.

Her once robust frame was reduced to a shrunken shadow of the woman she used to be. My Father use to lament about how she was nothing but skin and bones when she passed. This always puzzled me as that young boy because it was not the same woman I saw the day before she died. In fact I still question to this day what it was I did see.

It was a typical winter’s day when we got home for school for dinner. Dad was not home yet and Mom was getting dinner on the table and acting as referee to my two younger brothers who were fighting. It had been months since we saw Nanny. I looked at my other brother and he looked at me. Next thing we were sneaking downstairs and entering her bedroom.

We crawled on our hands and knees. I stopped at the foot of the bed keeping my head down. My brother when right up beside her and started to speak. “Gee you look good Nanny. Are you getting better?” he said. I looked up not quite prepared for what met my eyes.

For there was my grandmother, propped up on pillows with her still well-muscled arms by her side. Her full face and hair were glorious with what seemed a glowing aura around her. I could not remember seeing her looking any better as was immediately puzzled as to why we were not allowed to see her. She was smiling and very much at peace.

She reached over and took my brother’s hand. She replied “I will be much better very soon. Now you better go before you get into trouble.” My brother and I snuck back upstairs unnoticed and never spoke of what we did for fear of punishment. The next day, as I came home for dinner, I met my visibly shaken Uncle on the back steps. “She’s gone.” was all he said as he swept by me.

The story does not end there.

Fast forward to 1975. I had just met a girl from out of town and we started dating. On the day I took her to my home for the first time, I naturally showed her around the place. My Grandmother’s bedroom had been transformed into a music studio complete with instruments stands, amps, speakers, and the whole nine yards. She took one step across the threshold and immediately jumped back with a startled cry.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “I can’t go in there, somebody died in that room”. She was much shaken and required consoling. All the time she was in that house after that, she never went into that room again. In our years together after that she showed other signs of heightened sensitivity but that’s another story. We went our separate ways years later.
Again going forward to 2007, my present wife stayed at what was now my Father’s home. My Grandmother’s room had been switched back into a bedroom and it was the first time for her to sleep there. She described to me being awaken in the middle of the night by someone in the room. In the light from the street light outside she could see a woman standing at the foot of her bed looking at her with a peaceful smile on her face. She described the woman to me. It matched exactly my Grandmother. I had never told her of my Nan or what happened in that room……………..

As I said earlier, I have no faith in religion. What I do believe is that there is a life force in us that makes us the individuals we all are. Set free by death, it reveals itself from time to time. Is there a God? Do we have souls? After I saw my Nan laying there on the bed, I grew older constantly questioning my “faith”.

There were other things that happened to me. I seemed to be receptive to certain happenings which were at first troubling and strange. Today, much older and wiser, I look at this objectively and accept that there must be something other than out physical bodies that make us who we are and probably will be after we die.

                                     

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Launch of the Newsletter

The first official newsletter for N.S.P.E. was launched on October 1, 2017. Many of you, my eager readers, received it and so far the feedback has been encouraging.

Why make a newsletter, you ask?

In that first edition, I answered that question.

The blog itself was created out of a need to record events, happenings and unusual activity in an old creaky house that is just shy of 150 years and luckily, has stayed in my family for all of those years. I would never want the memories to be gone and forgotten. Therefore, this blog you are reading was born. Plus, it opens the door for intriguing discussions on various paranormal topics. We all want the answers to what goes bump in the night.

So then it occurred to me that an informative, yet succinct newsletter with a creepy topic sent out to subscribers would also be a great way to introduce things that may be of paranormal interest, but aren't covered in-depth on the blog.

 So the first edition was born.

I aim to keep the newsletter fairly simple, yet interesting and hopefully encourage people to think just a little bit more about an unusual topic they otherwise wouldn't read about every day.

Naturally, you go to your favorite news websites for daily updates and to Facebook for social online interaction. I want the Nova Scotia Paranormal Events blog to be the place you go for all that is weird and unexplained or you just feel like you want a good case of the "heebie-jeebies".

We have changed our distribution of the newsletter as of December 2017. 

Currently, and going forward, the newsletters will be posted to:

The Nova Scotia Paranormal Events Newsletter Blog. <--link

Please join us there regularly to keep up with informative, paranormal subjects!

When Your Grandmother Comes to Visit

Most people like when their grandparents visit them. Who doesn’t love hugs and homemade cookies from their “Nannies”? The problem begins when the visiting grandparents should NOT be there….because they died many, many years ago.

The house described in this blog is where my mother and son now live. My mother was born there. My grandmother, Elizabeth (“Lizzie” as she was known by), was also born there. And so on, back to about the 1870’s. She died in 1981 at the age of 91. However, I am not sure she got the memo about how you shouldn’t hang around your former residence after you pass away. There have been plenty of signs over the years that she is still there.

Firstly, people have seen her. My son was upstairs in a bedroom using a computer when he was about fifteen. Suddenly, he could sense someone peeking in the partially open door from the hallway. When he looked, he saw an old lady standing there, sort of glaring at him. He was stunned and looked back at the computer and then back to the doorway but she was still there. She stood there for several minutes.

Scott looked away from her again and when he looked back she was gone. He had seen enough pictures of her over the years to recognize her. Gathering all his courage, he bolted from the room and flew down the stairs, waking his grandmother with the story of what had just happened.

We suspect this is not the first time Scott’s great-grandmother has visited him from the great beyond. When he was younger and we lived there for a while, he clearly remembers on several occasions, someone creeping into his room after I had tucked him into bed for the night. This “person” would usually sit down on his bed and lay their hand on his back for a few minutes. He was terrified so he never took his face out of his pillow to see what was there but it wasn’t me or his grandmother and we were the only other ones in the house. We cannot ascertain for sure that it was his great-grandmother but it certainly could have been, given her history.

Secondly, my nephew also had a sighting of my grandmother in the house. When he was about seven or eight and visiting for the weekend, he came in the kitchen one day to ask the family about the old lady he had just seen sitting on the bed in the upstairs spare room petting the cat. My mother asked him what the lady looked like and he described Lizzie perfectly. She had been dead many years at this point.

I had an aunt who visited every summer from Ontario and she reported that one night while sleeping in that spare upstairs bedroom, she awoke to find Lizzie standing right beside the bed with arms outstretched, like she was reaching towards her. Again, the woman had been long dead.

She also seemed to manifest herself in other ways. My mother often reported smelling a sweet perfume in certain areas of the house that she associated with Lizzie. And she is quite convinced that Lizzie even called her on the phone one Easter Sunday many years ago. When she answered the phone, she could hear a lot of static and a far-away woman’s voice saying “Hello? Hello?”, which she is certain was her mother.

Lizzie was an interesting old lady, to say the least. She was perpetually cranky, had her favorite relatives and shunned the rest. We moved in so my mother could look after her when I was five years old but she did not interact with us grandchildren the way most grandmothers do. I don’t remember a lot about her but I do know she was rather fussy and set in her ways. always had a crock pot of her homemade wine brewing and she wasn’t the easiest person for my family to live with.

But she loved her house and was adamant about never leaving it. And I guess she didn’t.

(This is not a true representation of my grandmother

but you get the idea)

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Who Are These Ghosts in My House and Why Do They Never Bring Us Breakfast in Bed?

If you have read any of the other blog posts here, you will recall that some of them contain the true accounts from various family members who have reported the materialization of a ghost/spirit/dead person right in front of their eyes, myself included.

After spending the last couple of days at the house, the conversation I was having with my mother turned to the afterlife activity in the house, as it almost always does. Side note: During the two days I was there, nothing out of the ordinary happened. But that is the nature of the paranormal world. They do not materialize on command or on a regular schedule. They do what they want, when they want.

It is important to note that aside from a little boy ghost and the ghost of my grandmother that have been seen over the years, most of the other apparition sightings in the house, are/were (?) people that we have no idea who they are. If they are long-gone relatives, my mother cannot figure out who they are. So yes, they seem like random people just showing up. If there is such a thing as a portal to someplace else, are random ghosts from “the other side” going through it and ending up in the house? I have no idea, it’s just a crazy theory, but I can tell you the sighting I am about to describe is also a ghost who had no ties to the house or its property or the inhabitants of the house.

This sighting occurred just two weeks ago, in July 2017. My mother was happily enjoying the afternoon sunshine in her lawn chair on the doorstep. Very suddenly, a man came walking across the lawn from the direction of the driveway towards the doorstep where she was sitting. She watched him intently and he sat down on the doorstep, VERY close to her. No words were exchanged. She could see his face but has never seen him before in her life, as I previously mentioned. She said he was wearing a Hawaiian-type shirt which was yellow and red. He also wore a ball cap and had curly grey-ish hair. He was smoking a cigarette and he smiled at her. Then in the next instant, he was gone.

If you are reading this at night, and you are alone, and you hear a door creaking when it shouldn’t be or feel like someone is watching you (they probably are), don’t say I didn’t warn you.

                               

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What's scarier than an old dark attic? A pantry, of course!

There have been a couple of sightings of apparitions and an unusual phone call to report on, in addition to the almost-daily happenings of locked doors becoming unlocked, objects disappearing and the usual bangs and knocks and unexplained noises.

I have not written about these in the last little while because they have become very mainstream within the last bunch of months and I would be writing blog entries non-stop. Trust me when I say the activity is pretty much constantly active.

Sighting # 1 of 2016: Around the first of January of this year, my son and some other family members were having a spirited conversation about my father (who has been deceased for many years). They were hanging out in the kitchen. Immediately in the pantry, directly off the kitchen, he spotted a very tall, very dark shadow. It was there for a few seconds. Then gone. No one else saw it but he definitely did.

It also entirely possible that the deceased father in question called the house on the anniversary of his death in December. My son and mother had been having a discussion about him when the phone rang but there was no response to several “Hello’s”’ This is just a theory but would not surprise anyone who has spent time in that house. There have been a few phone calls like this over the years. Reflecting on this, I always think if it was a spirit, why don’t they just say something into the phone? (and we think my dead grandmother may have done just that one time but I digress….) Then again, I never get phone calls where there is just dead air. Lucky me…I always have a telemarketer on the end of my calls. So I am not convinced it is normal telephone activity to pick up a phone when it rings and no one say anything.

Sighting #2 of 2016: Shortly around the time of the above-mentioned sighting, there was another one. This time my mother clearly saw a little girl standing in the pantry. She was young, maybe five with blond hair. She was not transparent and she was wearing a little gingham dress and just standing there plain as day. A young girl did die in the house back in the 1800’s or thereabout, so it may have been her. The apparition lasted a few seconds and then was gone.

The pantry has become a very active area over the last little while. In addition to the ghosts being seen in there lately, there is a door in there that leads to a dark wet cellar. That door has been known to have lots of thumps and bangs on it when there is technically nothing to thump and bang on it. Why the pantry, you ask? Who knows, but there always seems to be baked goods in there so seems like a good place to me.

Lastly, there was an incident where some dishes on a shelf in the dining room somehow managed to get to the floor by themselves (???) and my son’s favorite sneakers seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth into the great beyond. Those don’t seem to be coming back after repeated requests. He has new sneakers and the ghosts have been warned to keep their paws off. Replacing sneakers could get expensive.

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The Blue Light (Reported by an Anonymous Family Friend)

I know the house that Rebecca grew up in. I had known her and her brothers since we were little kids. We lived in the same neighborhood for years. When the family moved to the old home place miles away it did not stop the friendship and the house kind of became my second home. I know well the strange goings-on there and have heard the rocking (from an unoccupied rocking chair) up stairs when no one could possibly be there.

The series of events I am about to describe did not happen in the house but just outside. Everything I am about to write happened over 30 years ago. I might be a bit fuzzy on the details but the events truly happened.

It started late on a Sunday evening, 10 miles away, when my brother asked if he could borrow my car. He wanted to take a female friend of his to where she was staying, just a few miles away from Rebecca's home. I said okay and at about 11:00 pm he left.

The next morning I got in the car to go to work. It was during a gas crisis and the price was skyrocketing. I had wrote the mileage on the car down before he left as he said he would pay for the gas he used. What was confusing was that the miles driven on the car and the distance he had to travel to complete his journey did not add up. It seemed like at least 7 miles was missing.

I asked him that evening if he had gone to her house and back. He said "Yes, where else would I be that time of night?" thinking I was going to ask for more money than he really owed. I replied that it wasn't that, it was the fact that there weren’t enough miles on the car. He assured me he traveled there and back. He also mentioned that he did not remember the drive home chalking it up to what happens while driving a familiar road and not remembering the last couple of miles you just drove. I did not think any more of it until a week later.

The next Saturday night we were next door to Rebecca's house at her brother's playing cards as we often did. We all had girlfriends and partners and still spent a lot of our free time there and at Rebecca's as her mother was like a second Mom to us all.

The conversation was flowing freely when her brother's partner started saying about not sleeping well the previous Sunday night. She related how she was awake when the bedroom started filling with a blue glow from outside. Not knowing what it was she got up and by the time she looked out the window she saw a blue glow in the sky, towards the house heading along the coast towards the beaches. It was about 2:00 am she said.

Ufo's were a big thing at the time and we had all seen something at one time or other that was strange but nothing quite like what she described. We talked about it for a while longer and the conversation when on to other things as it does.

The next day my partner and I went to Rebecca’s' house to meet up with her brother and go to the beach. We always paid our respects to Rebecca's Grandmother who lived with the family. She would be in the sitting room, by the window in her chair. She always had a story to tell and this day she had quite a story indeed.

After hugs and kisses by all she looked at us and said to Rebecca's brother “I saw something strange last Sunday night when I got up to go to the bathroom; did you see it too?" She went on to say that when she came out of her bedroom, just off of the sitting room, she saw a bright blue light coming towards the house. She said that it lit up the sitting room so brightly that she could see that it was 5 minutes to 2 on the clock (the exact same time Rebecca's brother's partner saw the same). "It went right over the house. I went into the kitchen and it was heading towards the ocean. The whole field was lit up." Well you could have heard a pin drop.

The conversation became about what was seen by both on the same night. I mentioned that my brother would have been in the same area at the same time and that there were miles missing from the car. Rebecca's brother joked that he was probably abducted by aliens. We all laughed except that ever since my brother has never been the same.

I said that day that he had been acting a bit weird that week but that I had attributed it to girlfriend problems. What has happened between him and the rest of my family since is nothing short of bizarre. But that is another story.
~A Friend of the Family

Want to read more about UFO's in Nova Scotia?

Unidentified Flying Objects

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Strange Picture (taken at my mother's house)

By this time, most people who read this blog know about the paranormal conditions at my mother's house. The picture we are going to discuss today was taken there by me a few months ago. I don't think anything unusual had been going on in the house during that time. I sometimes just snap a few pictures for later examination and this happens to be one of them that made me go, "Whoa, now what is that?"

Clearly, you can see a white blobby thing in the chair to the right. There are several reasons why I think this is a significant photo and could be spirit-related.

1. Ectoplasm ( a physical manifestation of a ghost/spirit) can appear opaque in photographs. It is common for it to show up in photos but is hard to see with the naked eye.

2. It is all over the chair as if it is "sitting" there. That small brown square thing is actually part of the wooden armrest on the chair and the blobby white thing is all around it. Imagine yourself sitting there with your arm dangling around the arm rest. The way it goes down into the carpet is also interesting.

3. No, no, no it is not a reflection from the window on the other side of the room. Have you ever in your life seen a reflection look like that?

4. No one else was in the room with me when I took the picture. No one was in there blowing cigarette smoke around. There was no fire in the adjacent stove so it is not wood smoke or obviously we would have called the fire department. So you can toss those explanations out the window. And while we're at it, it was not caused by "the wind" ( my all time favorite skeptic-explanation for anything weird or unusual).

So there you have it. A little more compelling evidence to mull over. I can't explain it, you can't explain it and we'll probably never know for sure but I'm going with GHOST.

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