My Ghost Stories

Recently, I’ve been listening to paranormal type podcasts, and they bring up a number of things that I am super interested in or have had a interest in.

For instance:

What does time look like for ghosts? Is it linear? Does it warp, speed up, slow down? Does it feel like hours to them, but is days, weeks, months, or years in our time?

Do they live in a space where they can hear themselves, but they can’t hear us? That sometimes the force that blocks the sound thin so they can become audible?

Do they change clothes?

Do they see the people in the here and now as someone they knew in their own life, or as we are?

In other podcasts, leylines, liminal spaces, time travel and various other ideas are discussed. I think a reason why I find these things so fascinating is because of the home I grew up in.

The history of the home I’ve known the longest is rather interesting. I haven’t researched it, so I honestly don’t know how true it is, but the hings that happened in the home paranormally speaking, it is easy to believe.

The home was originally built in Arizona and was moved to where it sat when I was there in Southern CA. The family was a mom, a dad, and about three or four kids, tow of them sons, most of them in their teens. The parents were often away, leaving the kids at home alone. This was very obvious from all the phone numbers and names carved intot he solid wood cabinets where the phone line was. I know that sounds very “old person” of me, but I would like to believe adults use pens and paper. Supposedly, the kids had some weird ritual in the living room that resulted in the floor catching on fire. My mom told me it had been Satanic in nature, but given that was also during the Satatnic Panic timeframe, I now wonder if that was the activity going on or something else, however there was supposedly a huge hole burned into the floor. When we were there, it was covered by carpet, so there was no way to prove it, however, I was always terrified of walking across the floor in the room, convinced it would fall out from underneathe me, causing me to fall into the 3 foot crawl space below the house.

The land itself was also interesting. At one time, it was supposedly owned by a doctor who performed surgeries in the home next door, many of them noted to be “illegal operations” that would result in death, or better known as abortions. He owned most of the land on the street and beyond. At the end of the street I grew up on, there was a sizeable orange grove that was said to be haunted and we were told never to enter there. In honesty, it was a shack town for homeless people and those who did drugs, but still not safe to be at.

So, it isn’t all that surprising that the home I grew up in had lots of residual ghosts and transitional ghosts. i do believe that due to the history of the things that took place on the property, it has become a sort of “way station” for spirits. I know that growing up, we’d have spirits that we would only see once and never again, some for a few months, then the long term “house spirits” that were always present.

Like the Lady in Pink, she was residual haunting. I believe she was just replaying a walk of hers that she did way back when. I also know there was always a conversation going on in the living room at night between a man and a woman. It was always civil, as if they were just discussing things casually over a coffee. I used to wonder if it was the fish filter causing it, but when I would walk towards the source of the sound, it would stop and I would still hear the fish fliter. Things would go missing then show up days later in places we had checked at least 10 times, usually after we would say out loud, “Okay. Bring it back, please.” These were regular things at my house that were never scary. They just happened.

Then we’d have the transitional spirits. The ones that would mimic one of the members of the family at times, or just show up, let their presence be know and disappear, or stick around for a while. Some I think decided to stay because the home was hospitable and some of them would become protective. I had a friend over one day when my parents were out of the house. She had changed clothes in the main bathroom that had two doors, one to the hallway and one to the back room that no one ever used. After a few moments, she came into my bedroom and asked if I was certain we were the only people in the house. I told her that we were, then asked, “Why? Did you see something?” She said she had left the door to the backroom open because she figured there was no one home and she said she saw a person’s face peering into the bathroom for a moment. I smiled and simply said, “Don’t worry about it. They were just checking to see who you were.” She asked me what I meant and I said, “My house is haunted. They don’t do anything bad to you, but they do tend to be curious.”

There was the night where my parents had been gone for the weekend and I was in the house by myself. The house was *super* noisy all night long. So much so that I called my boyfriend to either convince him to come over and stay with me, or just to have someone to talk to. While I was on the phone with him, I heard the refrigerator door open and close and I told him what I had just heard and said, “Well, I don’t know who it was, but they can have anything in there!” I left my bedroom light on all night long as the noises continued till shortly after 3 am when it stopped. I promptly passed out from exhaustion.

The next day, my parents came home in the early afternoon and a neighbor came over and asked if everything was all right in the house. They said they hadn’t been inside yet, but hadn’t heard anything from me. The neighbor told them there had been a prowler on the street till 3 AM when the police came and put them in custody. When my mom came in and asked if anything weird had happened, I told her about all the noise and activity in the house that had kept me up. She replied, “Oh…They were protecting the house then.” and explained what the neighbor had told her.

So not all hauntings are terrible or frightening, though they can be when they happen. I learned to live with the comings and goings of spirits in the house. These are just a few of the long list of things that happened in the house, but it was never threatening or worrisome. It gave me a unique perspective on the spirit world and formed some of my personal theories into hauntings. I don’t talk much about it, but it was one of the more interesting things in my life that shaped my spiritual thoughts.