Ghosts and unusual happenings

Halloween has come and gone. The haunting time of year always brings to mind the different times that things have gone bump in the night and made me think we had a ghost in our house. Well, to be perfectly honest some of the time the occurrences were not at night, nor were the occurrences at home. Most of the occurrences happened to family members, friends or me, since Ray does not believe in ghosts, he does not believe they happened to him, yet there are times things that happened, he cannot explain. For example:

We had recently moved into our single wide manufactured home, I was working in the garden, laying landscape blocks with a couple neighbor kids who happened by and decided to help. Ray was lying on the bed resting.

Several years ago, when Brandy was about 12, she found some small lamps that she wanted to give me for Mother’s day. She picked them out and Dad paid for them as things like that usually happen, or it could be that Dad picked them out, paid for them and had Brandy sign the card, who knows. The lamps are small; maybe about 15 inches tall, goldish colored trim, with curved glass insets with a small flower decal in the middle of each glass pane. This is a touch lamp, meaning if you want to turn it on you just touch someplace on the metal part of the lamp and it will blink on, touch it again and it will glow brighter, a third touch it will glow brightly, touch it a fourth time and the light will blink off.

While I was busy rearranging the dirt of the front yard Ray suddenly popped out of the house and asked if I had turned off the electricity and turned it back on. He seemed quite flustered to me, rather strange I thought, since electricity usually doesn’t fluster me that way, and besides, I hadn’t been in the house which is where the fuse box is. If I had turned the power on or off, he would have heard me moving around in the house. No, was my answer. He started to go back in the house, then stopped and turned around and came back and told me that while he was lying on the bed, all the sudden the lamps had come one, bright, brighter, brightest and off. He could not figure out why it would have done that as he had never known them to do that before. I told him that it was probably the ghost of the house.

The single wide we purchased was previously owned by a couple, she passed away right after they moved in and he passed away about six months later. I am pretty sure they had at least a dog and a cat; I don’t know why I think they had a dog, but when we took out the stove to clean behind it we did find cat toys hiding there. Well, perhaps the reason I think they had a dog was because there was a large urine spot right in the middle of the living room floor. I would prefer to think a dog piddled there than to think the man had fallen and died there. I have had the feeling ever since we purchased it and moved the house to its present location that we have had an unseen visitor. Cremesickle, our orange tabby, was walking by the front door one day, shortly after we moved in, I believe he was coming down the hall next to the door, when he turned, looked over his shoulder, jumped and turned so he was facing the hall, raised his hackles, hair and tail and hissed. He ran through the living room, kitchen and into the bedroom to hide under the bed, not to come out for a couple hours. Ray and I were sitting in the living room at the time and saw nothing and we had no other pets. What scared Cremesickle so bad, I can’t say.

The summer after we moved in Ray decided to take the camper up to the campground to go fishing. He left on Wednesday and one of the last things he said to me was “Don’t forget to wake up and go to work.” I am notorious as a person who can sleep through alarm clocks, turning the buzzing irritation off without even opening my eyes or my conscience enough to even realize I had done so.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about me, I’ll get up.”

The next morning, I was vaguely aware that the alarm had gone off, but I turned it off, several times and rolled back over and went back to sleep. From the corner of the room I felt an almost physical movement of air, a shock wave, a tidal wave of a blast that I could feel vibrating throughout my entire body with the words “LYN, GET UP NOW!” Though I couldn’t see anything, the voice and the mental image was of an older man. I got up. Verbally stating that was what I was doing.

When Ray called me at work later that day I told him about my wake up call.

A couple months ago we were watching television, I was crocheting in my chair and Ray was sitting in his chair on the other side of the room. Mia had been sitting on my lap as I crocheted, then she had hopped down to go sit in Ray’s lap for a while. She is an equal oppertunity cuddler. As I was crocheting I saw a small dark head pop up and look over the left arm of the love seat at the yarn. I thought Mia had been sitting in Ray’s lap so I was surprised to see the cat in the corner, then I realized I had a bag holding several balls of yarn in that corner, she could not have been on those balls of yarn because that bag crackled every time it was touched, I would have heard her if she had climbed up on it. I noticed the cat was still looking over at the yarn I was crocheting with; I sharply turned my head to Ray who was oblivious to me, no cat in his lap. I turned to look back at the cat in the corner. No cat. I turned back and looked around the room and saw Mia asleep with her back toward me on the hassock, as my head turned back to look at the corner I could still see the cat looking over the arm of the loveseat with one outstretched paw almost touching my yarn.

This, of course, brings us up to last night.

Mia passed away at midnight Oct. 31st. Last night Ray was dozing in his chair when he felt a weight on his lap, like when Mia used to lay on his lap as he watched television. So, Ray, do you still not believe in ghosts?