Weird and Weirder...Part 2

A couple of months ago, in “Weird and Weirder…Part 1,” I wrote about some strange events that happened during the time I lived in a house with four other guys a few blocks from the college I was attending. I concluded by hinting that the strange phenomena have continued, so I want to share how life continues to be weird and weirder.

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"What's going on in here?" That’s the question that was on my lips late one evening as I opened the door and entered my oldest son’s bedroom. There was no answer, because he was lying under his covers sound asleep. Let me back up a little and tell you what happened.

The house in which we live now was the first place Cris and I lived after we were married. For a time, she and her family lived here when she was a little girl. This place was actually two separate houses at one time, but the other house, in which my wife’s grandmother lived until she passed away a few years ago, had been moved and joined to this one to form one house. The house originally belonged to her great-uncle, and it's very old judging from the timbers – and some of the electrical wiring.

We moved out of the house for several years after I went into the United Methodist ministry. After several years enduring the strain of trying to balance full-time graduate school, a growing family, and parishioners who felt that all my time should be spent focusing on them – plus ongoing pain and recuperation (including neck surgery) from an automobile accident – I left the ministry, broken and exhausted, and we returned to this house. There was a lot of stuff already in the house, so we had to make do, stashing stuff here and there for a while.

We had to place two dressers in a corner on adjoining walls in my oldest son’s room in such a way that the front corners almost met. This left an unused square space that I decided to utilize. I had several boxes of books and magazines that would fit perfectly, but the only way I could get them in the corner was to hold them above it and drop them in. I stacked boxes to the tops of the dressers and a couple beyond. The boxes were heavy, and I realized the only way to get them out would be to move one of the dressers, but I didn’t anticipate needing any of these books before making more convenient space somewhere else.

Late one evening I was sitting doing a little reading and writing in the former dining room that we had converted into my study. One wall of this room adjoined my son’s room. All of a sudden there came a sound of banging and crashing from his room. It sounded like somebody was tearing the room apart, so I quickly went to his door and pushed it open. I was shocked to see every one of those boxes of books scattered across the floor, with some having burst open scattering their contents. I said, “What's going on in here? How in the world did this happen?” But I realized my son, lying in bed under his covers, was sound asleep.

I picked up some of the strewn books and placed them back into boxes and shifted the boxes out of the way as best I could. The next day I asked my son what was going on in his room and why were my boxes of books scattered. He was obviously as perplexed as I was, and when I asked him about it recently, he shook his head and assured me he had no idea what happened that night.

Looking back, there were several other events that happened here through the years that were creepy and generally unexplainable. When my oldest son was a toddler, he came out of our room where he’d been playing screaming. We held him and tried to get him to show us what was wrong, and we examined him to make sure he wasn’t hurt. He couldn’t tell us what had happened, and we examined the room and found nothing. He wouldn’t go back in the room without us for some time.

After we moved back into the house, because of limited room, we originally set up the youngest two boys’ bunk beds against a wall in our room. One night Gabriel went in the room and came out screaming a couple of minutes later. He was terrified and told us his dinosaur (a stuffed Toy Story character we’d gotten at Burger King), had moved across his bed and flew off. Sure enough, when I went in the dinosaur was lying on the floor, and earlier it had been on his bed propped against his pillow.

Another evening Gabriel woke us up screaming. I jumped up and ran to him and held him. He told me he had seen two dark figures with red glowing eyes standing between his bed and ours. He said the figures were watching him. I tried to convince him he was probably dreaming. Gabriel still insists emphatically that he was wide awake and that he did see the shadow figures. It sounds like a phenomenon I believe parapsychologists call “shadow men”.

The boys have complained many times about hearing doors opening and footsteps. I shrugged it off reminding them that you hear noises in old houses. Then one day I was sitting at the computer typing when I heard the back door of the other part of the house open and footsteps sounded through the house, into the kitchen to the hallway and through the living room. Then I heard the front screen door. I jumped up and ran to see who had walked through the house, and – you guessed it – there wasn’t a soul there…at least not a living soul.

Neither of the youngest boys will go into the other side of the house (the part that used to be Granny’s house) alone, because they insist it’s haunted. Gabriel claims one of his sisters dolls eyes opened and the doll looked at him. I’ve always written it off to an overactive imagination, until the other afternoon my niece, who comes down to play sometimes, found out I was writing about the weird things in the house. She told me that one evening one of the dolls was looking at her. I have to admit, when I go over there at night, the porcelain dolls give me the creeps. Another afternoon, she and the boys had gone into the other side of the house when, according to the three of them, the temperature all of a sudden dropped, and one of my wife’s music boxes (that hadn’t been wound in years) began to play.

Here lately there have been several times when I’ve seen someone out the corner of my eye, or so it seemed, but when I look, no one is there. Our cats have exhibited bizarre behavior on several occasions recently (bizarre even for cats). For instance, one of our black cats started staring at one of my bookcases in my study, then he bowed up and his hair stood on end. A few days later another one of our black cats reacted the same way and then started trying to get behind the book case. Of course, I suppose that could be explained. A mouse, perhaps? Do mice make the hair stand up on a cat’s back? Do mice make a cat bow its back? We carefully searched behind and around the book cases, but we found nothing strange.

The room on the other side of the wall from my study (the same room that was my oldest son’s when the boxes were strewn) now belongs to my next to youngest son, Gabriel, and he says he frequently hears my chair sliding and the keys of my computer being typed upon when I’m in bed. Patrick, my youngest, says he’s heard it too, and one evening he heard the familiar sound and thought I was in here and came in to ask me something – but I wasn’t here. Who knows – maybe my ghost has followed me here, and maybe it has something to say. If my ghost happens to start a blog, I'm very interested in reading it.

Weird and Weirder… (Part 1)

From ghosties and ghoulies,
And long-leggety beasties,
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord deliver us.

- Old Scottish Prayer

Do you believe in ghosts and other strange things that go bump, or otherwise disrupt the night – or perhaps even the day, if they’re malicious or mischievous enough? I have to admit, I’m a pretty hardcore skeptic. I don’t believe in UFOs or ghosts or aliens who abduct innocent earthlings from their beds to poke and prod them. If there are aliens, and I’m sure there’s something else living out there somewhere, and there is probably a lot of intelligent life in the cosmos, but they surely have more pressing things to do than pick on us. However, that being said, I do have a history of strange experiences that lasts till this day, and I really can’t explain much of it away. Let me take you back to when it began – or at least when it became very noticeable.

In the summer of 1981, a year after my discharge from the Marine Corps, I enrolled at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. After four years in the Marines and a year spent working hard at a variety of jobs, there wasn’t a lot that I was afraid of. That was a good thing – a very good thing.

After commuting my first couple of quarters, I moved with three friends into an old house a couple of blocks from campus. Originally there were the four of us who'd agreed to split the rental cost of the house – Mike, Andy, T.K. and me – but soon Ron, a friend of Andy's, an English major transferring from the University of Georgia, moved in with us.

The house was a two-story white wood-frame, and the inside walls were plaster. The front door opened to a small entrance way which led to T.K.’s room on the left and the living room on the right. In the center, there was a large open room which we called “Central Receiving” because that’s where we put all our stuff while we were getting settled in. Central Receiving opened into the kitchen and into a very small square hallway leading into my room and Andy’s room, and a tiny cramped set of jury-rigged stairs leading to one big room with a bathroom and shower upstairs. My room was the smallest and had two doors, one leading to the kitchen the other to the small hallway.

The first time I recall noticing anything strange was one morning shortly after Ron moved in. His stuff, including a large box of books from literature courses, was sitting in Central Receiving, and I was in the kitchen cooking some sausage for my breakfast. There was a double sink that dripped constantly, and the faucet was over a glass of water in the right sink. The drip-drip-drip was annoying, so I pushed it over the center so it would drip silently on the metal . Since watching sausage fry is pretty boring, I walked to Central Receiving and began lifting Ron’s books out of the box one-by-one looking at titles. I went back to the stove to turn the sausage, and started to return to Central Receiving and noticed drip-drip-drip. The faucet was over the glass of water again. I pushed it back to center thinking I must have meant to move it and just thought I really had. I looked at a few more book titles before returning to the stove for my sausage. When I went to the cabinet for a plate I heard drip-drip-drip. This time I knew I had moved the faucet. It was tight and didn’t move freely; it would have taken a stiff push to place it back over the right sink to drip annoyingly in the glass of water. Odd, I thought… no, not odd – creepy!

Not long afterwards I came home from class and opened the door to my room. It was late afternoon and the room was dark – I had the window covered with a blanket, since we bachelors didn’t know much about putting up curtains. As I opened the door something came shooting out of the room and hit me square in the center of the chest. I saw the blur sailing toward me, but I didn’t have time to react. I picked the object up off the floor – a piece of hard candy, like a generic red Jolly Rancher. I flipped on the light and searched the tiny room. Nothing out of the ordinary – no hidden catapult or rigged strings. I mentioned it to my roommates, but they denied knowing anything about the candy and said they had never even seen a piece of candy like that.

A few weeks later something similar happened. I opened my door and, of all things, a potato came flying out of the room and hit me so hard that it left a red mark on my chest. This time my girlfriend was with me. Fortunately she was out of the way, but she saw it happen. We searched the room. Just like the previous time, there was nothing, but the potato had sailed out of the room like it had been hurled by a baseball pitcher.

Several other strange things happened over the next few months before I got married and moved out of the house. One evening while I was lying in bed reading, the light in the little hallway came on for a few seconds. I thought maybe Mike or Ron had returned – both of them were out of town for the weekend. I got up and ran up the cramped stairs; luckily I didn’t trip and break my neck. I checked everybody’s rooms. There was nobody there except me and… whatever.

Meanwhile, Andy had his baby grand piano moved down from Covington, Georgia, and set it up in Central Receiving. One night as I lay in bed trying to go to sleep a key struck – and sustained. I jumped up and ran out to see who was getting ready to play the piano at that hour. You guessed it. Nobody was there.

Another evening, T.K. and I were the only two at home. He was in his room in a separate corner of the house, and I was in my little room. There came a loud sound like the crashing of a box of glasses. The sound came from Central Receiving. I ran into the room to see what had happened. T.K. came in a few seconds later. "Did you hear that , Jimbo?" he asked. I told him I had, and we both searched the room and the kitchen and the living room, but there was nothing disturbed anywhere. Everybody had begun to talk about my ghost, and T.K. just looked at me and said, "The ghost! " We laughed it off nervously and went back to our rooms.

Another phenomenon that I was experiencing at this time was that various outdoor lights would go out as I walked or drove by. I mentioned this to some of my friends, and some of them even experienced it with me. One evening I was walking with a girlfriend (not the one who witnessed the flying potato) across the campus. There were two lights that stood on either side of the steps to Atkinson Hall, the building where business administration classes were held. They were mounted on brick columns and covered with large spherical globes. As we walked by, the first light went out. The girl looked at me and said, “That was weird!” I said, “I’m used to it.” When I made the return trip across campus alone a few minutes later, as I walked by that same light, it came back on. I stopped for a second, took a deep breath, then continued walking.

I talked about these things with a good friend of mine who had an interest in strange phenomenon. His eyes got bigger as I relayed story after story. “It’s a poltergeist!” he exclaimed. “The house isn’t haunted; you are!” I dismissed the whole thing. “There’s got to be a logical, non-supernatural explanation for all of this,” I reminded myself. My two youngest sons are amazed that all of these things could have happened to me – and that we continue to experience strange phenomenon on a regular basis – and I can still be so skeptical. I still don’t believe in ghosts or the paranormal. I’m sure there are things that go on all the time that we simply don’t have the empirical foundation to explain, but I hold my ground on my disbelief. Nevertheless…I still get the creeps walking around this house in the dark. Why? That’s for part 2 of this story, which I’ll tell you soon.