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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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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Knock Knock. Who's there?

It is very cliché when talking about ghosts to hear tales of doors opening and closing by unseen hands. However, in the house that this blog is about, this very thing has happened countless times over the years. In a house known to be haunted with plenty of unexplained activity in it, I would be surprised if it didn’t have doors opening and closing with no scientific explanation.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would a ghost bother opening a door when they can apparently walk right through walls?”

This is a great question and probably one of the first I will ask, should I ever get the opportunity to have a good old-fashioned gab session with a disembodied spirit. (Believe me, I have questions.) I would assume the opening and closing of doors is because they want us to know they are there. Like all the times they spin coffee mugs through the air. Or walk around on creaky floorboards overhead. Or bang on the  walls of the unoccupied bedroom upstairs. Or rock in empty rocking chairs. Or call us on the phone. The list goes on and on. 

Who knows why they do anything? They have their own agenda to which we are not privy. It’s like they think it is none of our business or something. They live in our houses but apparently think they don’t have to answer to us if they don’t want to. 

The very first incident I heard of doors mysteriously opening and closing in our house was when I was a young girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old. Hearing adults talking about weirdness and unexplained goings-on was just second nature during my childhood. It concerned me and freaked me out of course, like it would any kid, as it was obviously going on in my own house and I spent a lot of time playing by myself upstairs. I was usually scared to some degree to go to bed at night but I got used to it after a while and came to accept it as the way my life was. 

 As you have probably read elsewhere on this blog, I did hear a lot of noise coming from the empty spare bedroom that shared a wall with my bedroom. It was always a “spare” room so no one was ever in there. No living people, anyway.

So as I said, the first time I remember hearing about doors opening and closing on their own was very interesting and startling to me. The incident happened to a family member. He was in the largest upstairs bedroom one afternoon. He would have been a young adult at this time. My mother always said he told her he was reading on his bed. There is a door leading into the bedroom from the large walk-in attic and another door that leads out into the front hallway where the other bedrooms are. Suddenly, he looked up from his book as the door leading into the attic was opening. No one was there but it opened all the way. In a few seconds the other door opened, as if someone had come into the room through one door and exited through the other.

Currently, my son sleeps in that bedroom. There is now a sliding lock on the door that goes into the attic. He often locks it, goes to work, and comes home to find it unlocked. His elderly grandmother is the only other person in the house and she is not able to climb the stairs.

In the walk-in attic, there is also a set of rickety dark stairs leading down to another door that opens up into the kitchen. This door doesn’t close one hundred percent tight, thanks to many layers of paint around the door and casing over the last hundred years. But it does close enough that you can consider it “shut”. I agree it can become slightly ajar because of this but there is a handful of people (myself included) who have been in the kitchen and happened to look towards it at just the right moment when it has opened way further than you would expect due to natural movement in the kitchen or because the house is ‘settling”. It opens a LOT on its own.

 When my mother was a little girl, an older family member used that back staircase regularly when it was time to go to bed. He would take his lantern, traipse up those back stairs, through the two bedroom doors mentioned above and settle in for the night in what is now the “spare” bedroom. Does he still take that route at the end of the day? Possibly. 

Just off the kitchen is a wonderful pantry. And in the pantry there is a door that leads into a typical dirt-floor cellar. While there has been a lot of “activity” in the pantry, nothing unusual goes on in the cellar that anyone is aware of. However, over the span of many years there have been very loud, unexplained banging noises on that cellar door (from the cellar side) to which no explanation can be found. Not like knocking, but like loud “I’ll-bust-this-door-right-down” banging. It never usually lasts long. If you open the door and look, there is never anything visible. Lots of people have heard it. It is totally random. No one has an answer.

One particular occurrence of this was the day my mother’s friend passed away. My son and mother were the only ones in the house. Before they were notified of the death, that cellar door slammed shut (so it must have also been opened first by whoever or whatever) with an alarming noise. My son went to investigate and tried to open it but this time could not budge it even a little. It normally opens no problem, with absolutely no resistance. Finally, he hit the door as hard as he could and it finally gave. Nothing visible was responsible. Was this a forerunner to the death they would soon learn about? Did the deceased come by to let them know her time had come? Again, the answer is “possibly”. 

In a previous blog post entitled More Recent Haunted Events at the Homestead from 2011, I mentioned how my mother had experienced the dining room door slamming shut very forcefully while she was in the adjoining kitchen. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is no wind blowing through the house. Cats can’t slam doors. There is no reasonable explanation for such things to be happening. Yesterday, my mother told me of another incident. She was sitting at the kitchen table last week and suddenly the dining room door just simply closed. Then immediately after, it opened right back up (she keeps it open all the time). She is used to all of this by now, so doesn’t get alarmed too much.

There have been other door-related incidents over the years, such as the door knob on the spare room door rattling in the middle of the night while people slept in there, to more recently the ghost of a deceased cat clawing and scratching at the front door to be let in. It stands to reason that since ghosts/spirits/etc can exert enough energy to move objects, make noise and sometimes even materialize, they can just easily open and close a door when they want to.

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Paranormal Pets (The Cat Came Back)

There have always been pets in our family: dogs, cats, rabbits, and once for a short time, a little lamb and a couple of wild raccoons. My father was known for taking any animal that was up for grabs so I don’t really ever remember a time when there wasn’t at least one pet.

Cats seemed to dominate the scene over the years, probably based on the facts that they were so easy to get free of charge, easy to look after and of course cuddly.

But as with any furry friend, there comes a time when their short lives come to an end.

Around the year 2000, my mother had one cat named Roy. My son was around five at the time and of course, loved cats. I don’t recall what happened to Roy but he did die around this time. Shortly afterwards, my brother, my son and I were in the kitchen at my mother’s house. Suddenly, we heard a cat clearly meowing outside the front door. We all sort of looked at each other because as a rule, deceased cats who have been interred generally do not show up on the doorstep crying to be let in the house. My son became pretty frightened and asked,” What is that??”

My brother opened up the door and I was wishing terribly hard for Roy NOT to be sitting there (so as not to scare the crap out of my kid) while at the same time wishing he WAS sitting there, because let’s face it: a ghost cat would be pretty awesome to see.

Well, wouldn’t you know it….no cat was visible. I made up some lie about the wind blowing around the side of the house making a weird noise that sounds sort of like a cat so my son would stop asking questions about a pet very obviously returning from the “other side”.

He bought it that time but we did hear it a time or two after that so I point blank told him what I thought it was. He spent a lot of time in that house and was well acquainted with the supernatural, which we downplayed as much as we could. But like I did (growing up there), I am sure he spent many hours, especially at bedtime, wondering what he would hear or see before dawn broke the next day.

My mother has also reported that Roy made a few visits to her bedside shortly after he died, as she could feel him on the bed beside her, just like the way he used to cuddle up next to her every night of his life. She says she could hear his happy little purrs.

Eventually, ghost Roy seemed to fall to the wayside.

And then my mother got a dark little furry guy named Casey. Casey lived to be about 13 or 14, I believe, and just died this past December (2017), due to complications from his advanced age.

My mother claims he was her best friend; always eating breakfast with her, keeping her company during the day and listening to her every word, and going to bed with her at night. He was definitely a smart little fellow in his younger days. I remember once when he was just a few years old, my mother was lying down and not feeling well with declining blood sugar. Casey knew something was wrong and cried and cried until she got up and he led her to the shelf she keeps her medications on, at which point she remembered she hadn’t taken it.


He loved roaming around outside, sometimes staying away for a couple of days at a time, causing her to worry and think he’d never come back. But he always did. He would sit on the doorstep and make scratching noises near the doorknob so someone would let him in. In his later years, he just sort of sat on the doorstep and softly meowed and didn’t manipulate the doorknob anymore.

I spoke to her today and as always, I asked my usual question: “Any ghosts around?” To which she replied, “No, I don’t think so, except Casey was here a few times.”

(She said this as casually as if she is telling me it’s going to snow tomorrow)

“What do you mean Casey was there? Like, you’ve seen him?” I asked.

My interest was definitely piqued for several reasons: One, we can add this to the pile of unexplained things in her house. Two, this is even more proof of some sort of life after death/spirit thing. And three, the “Ghost Animals” blog post can be created.

(She hadn’t given me anything to work with lately as she had not noticed anything unusual going on—I spent several days there over Christmas and nothing happened then, either. Sigh..if only they performed on command)

Then she told me she heard the gentle jiggling of the doorknob, just like Casey used to do when he wanted to come in. In recent days, it has occurred three times. Once, she went to the door to look, but could not see anything.

If I had to guess, I’d say he will probably show up next on her bed. Maybe once it’s dark and she has settled down for the night.

This is not the only incident of a pet coming home again after its death that I am personally aware of.

Our fourteen year old dog had to be euthanized several years ago. She was quite a character, well behaved and smart. We buried her beside the lake by our house where she loved to play. We returned to the house afterwards and my son and I were in a downstairs bedroom when we heard her chain collar jingling as she came meandering down the stairs and plopped into her creaky wicker basket.

We looked at each other. “Did you just….?” I was going to ask my son. With wide eyes, he looked at me, I looked at him and we both looked into the hallway where her familiar basket still sat.
"She's come home," he said.

Yup, she most definitely did.

Want to read about other paranormal pets?
Oscar the Grim Reaper

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The Rocking Chair

In my mother’s large country house, there is a particular piece of furniture that, for lack of a better word, seems a little haunted.

It is an old wooden rocking chair painted white that my great-great- grandfather brought to the house in the 1870’s. Although the house contains a lot of antiques, this chair is definitely one of the oldest things in it.

I suppose other pieces of furniture could potentially be good places for a ghost to sit on, and although there is another rocking chair in the living room that was my grandmother’s, the chair in question is the only one in the house that rocks all by itself (as far as we know).

As previously mentioned in this blog, we moved into the house when I was five years old in 1975. I don’t know whose idea it was to put this ancient rocking chair in my bedroom. Maybe it was already in that room and no one thought to move it. I really don’t remember. What I do remember is my mother always telling me the story of how she heard it rocking by itself when she was a little girl.

Her experience with the chair is detailed in this post:

"My Mother's Experiences" <--link)

I also remember that because of that story, there were plenty of nights as a child (and later a teenager) that I went to sleep with that chair at the foot of my bed, praying I would not hear it creaking back and forth, or worse, SEE it rocking in the middle of the night. Mostly, I think I would have heard it, if anything, as at night in that house it is so pitch black you can’t see your hand in front of your face.

In all my years of having that chair in my room, I never once saw it or heard it move on its own. However, there are a handful of people who have.

A family friend spending the evening once, claims to have heard it rocking upstairs when no one was up there. There have been a few friends over the years who also claimed to have heard it rocking on the creaky old floorboards. And of course, my mother, who knew what that chair sounded like once it started rocking.

Is there more than one spirit who likes to sit and rock on a 150 year old chair? Or is it just one who doesn’t want to give it up?

Currently, the haunted chair is in the even-more-haunted spare bedroom. The occasional guest stays in there and there have been no recent reports of the chair rocking on its own. But who knows what goes on when there are no witnesses. As you read this, that chair could be slowly creaking back and forth in that pitch black spare bedroom which is known to have a lot of paranormal activity in it.

                                                         

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What does a ghost have to do to get a cup of coffee around here?!

Yesterday we visited my mother’s house, the one this blog is written about. My mother, my son and I were sitting in the kitchen having a discussion about a vehicle my son wants to buy. The pantry is connected to the kitchen. It was daylight, sunny and everything in the pantry was clearly visible.

I was facing the direction of the pantry. My son sort of had his back to it.

Suddenly, we heard a noise in the pantry. I looked in there, and Scott turned around to see what was going on. There is a shelf in there with hooks attached underneath which holds coffee mugs. There’s probably twelve or so. The hooks are very sturdy and the mugs have hung there for many years.

When Scott and I diverted our attention to what was happening, we clearly saw the mug on the far left in mid air, on its way to falling to the floor. It hit the shelving unit underneath it, then hit the floor.

No other mugs were even moving. The mug that somehow jumped UP off the hook did not even collide with the others that are very close to it. A mug moving upwards (with no human intervention) to come off of a hook is not an easily explainable event. Skeptics could argue the hook was loose and the mug just fell but that would be impossible as the mug handle rests DOWN onto the hook. And the hook was still well attached when I inspected it afterwards.

Scott and I just stared at the scene unfolding, thinking “what in the hell just happened?” I think my mother saw what happened but she doesn’t get too concerned over this stuff anymore. I picked the mug up and put it back on its hook.

What’s even stranger is this exact same thing happened many years ago when relatives were visiting. They were in the kitchen and watched this same event unfold, as a mug came off its hook and ended up on the floor.

Of all the weirdo stuff that happens there, I get most intrigued by these events that I see happen when there are witnesses. And yesterday, there were two.

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