Haunted houses are a popular phenomena to the point that television now provides a variety of shows devoted to ghost hunting for our viewing pleasure. My love of the unknown first peeked its scary head at me when I was nine. At that time, my family moved into a hundred-year-old haunted farm house. Things happened in the house. Unexplainable things. (My fascination with extraterrestrials came later.)

My family credits me with having the ability to sense those spirits who still linger in the present. They seem to find me or follow me, I’m not sure. My husband and I moved into a new house four years ago. Soon after bringing in an antique sideboard and mirror to add to our home decor, I sensed the presence of something. Flickering lights. Eerie sounds. Electrical devices going dead for no reason. I sought the advice of a shamanic healer and he believes it is connected to the mirror. However, it’s almost a familiar presence. One from my childhood.The antique buffet is a relatively new purchase, not one I brought forward with me into my adult life.

This will be my fourth haunted house to live in.  Which makes me wonder: is IT the same ghost?

I don’t sense that she is. In the past, the ghosts were always male. My new ghost seems to be female. And she gets most upset when we leave home for any period of time. Like when we returned from our last camping trip, I found my WiFi modem  and my printer dead. I can’t work without my WiFi. Power outage you say. Perhaps. But nothing else in the house was affected. And all the digital clocks in the house still showed the correct time. A time delay would have indicated a power outage.

My printer should give me an error code to tell me what’s wrong. It’s just dead. Nothing. Except for the occasional flicker of a code that is all zeroes. The printer repair guys and the makers of the printer have no clue as to what the code is.

Elementals

Great ghost story by Michael McDowell.

Currently, I’m reading a novel about a haunted beach house by  Michael McDowell titled The Elementals. It’s a fantastic read and what makes it so captivating is its chilling perspective with all the subtleties of a haunting. Those things that you sense are not quite right, but explaining them to someone makes you sound a bit crazy.

Since my blog is all about weird, and since ghosts seem to be an intricate part of my life, I thought  it was time to do a couple blogs on the paranormal, so for the month of August we do a little Ghost Hunting on The Probe.

My Hauntings: First Contact

This old barn is similar to the one in which the dogs were imprisoned. Image by Viateur on Pixabay.

From the time I woke from a nightmare about witches and whales, and found thousands of tiny white snakes slithering around my feet, I’ve been scared of the dark. My mom cleared out a small closet of a room to create a bedroom for me. I’d turned school age and she didn’t think it was appropriate for me to continue to share a room with my brothers—one older and one younger.

On those nights that the night terrors came to visit me and something grabbed my hand, or laughed in my ear, or screamed, or lifted the blankets and crawled in beside me,  I’d creep into my parents’ room. My mom would wake to find me standing over her in my white nightgown. After numerous times of being almost scared to death by my ghostly presence, she placed my dad’s old army cot into the boys’ room for me to sleep on.

Three years later, we moved from Austin, Texas into a dilapidated two-story farm house near Fort Worth. It was at least a century old. Every board in the house was loose. Every joint and brace moaned with age and the old barn loft had once housed the now dead owners pack of angry dogs.

When my parents cleaned the loft to store hay—which reeked of dog urine and was littered with feces—they found a large assortment of gnawed on bones. Some human in appearance. They invited the sheriff out. He took a look and a whiff. And told my parents about the bat-crap crazy owners who—before axing each other to death—released their near rabid dogs into the wild.

The dogs howled all night as they gorged themselves on our flock of sheep. They ripped open the stomachs of the ewes and feasted upon their unborn and left the mother ripped to shreds but alive. My dad or older brother, if my dad was out of town, had to put them out of their misery

In an effort to protect the ewes, my parents built a pen near the house for those who were due to lamb. It was my sheep’s time and in the middle of the night I heard her bleating. I tiptoed down the stairs to the first landing. A door leading into the attic was fixed there. As I passed in front of the door, I felt a slight breeze. I pivoted around. The moonlight filtered up the stairs and provided enough illumination for me watch as the door crept open, though my dad had installed a bolt lock on it after my urgings.

An icy hand reached out from the attic darkness, wrapped around my arm, and pulled me toward the opening. I screamed and fell backwards down the stairs to the bottom floor.

Of course my parents came running. I told them I heard Lambkin crying and was going to check on her when the hand grabbed me. They checked the attic door. It was still bolted tightly shut.

My sheep was missing, though she was in a completely enclosed pen with a gate. The gate and pen had not been tampered with. She was never found, nor were her remains.

On some of the nights that followed, I heard my sheep. I knew it was her because she had an unusual bleat. It was more a baa with a cough at the end like an old person. Her cry came from the attic—from behind the bolted shut door.

On the nights I heard her, the wild dogs would commence to growling and howling. I’d feel a slight breeze, and then hear the attic door creak open and slam shut.

I pulled the covers over my head and trembled in the dark.

My parents and brothers heard the howling dogs, but said they heard nothing else. My dad said the baa was the wind. However, we soon moved after only living in the house for a year.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Having first hand experience, I believe.

The above is just one of such ghostly occurrences from my past. During the month of August, I will offer more of mine and add other people’s paranormal encounters. Please share if you have one.

I hesitate to post photos, because non-believers are so quick to judge and criticize. The following is an example. Just recently posted on America’s Most Haunted Hotel website, while visiting the notorious Crescent Hotel in Arkansas, Joni Moseng captured this shot and shared it.

Image captured by Joni Moseng, a visitor to the infamous Crescent Hotel, and shared on FaceBook.

Facebook comments went something like this:

• Kid playing on an iPad.
• Looks like someone on a laptop. 

BUT then someone else asked:

It almost looks as if it’s on the outside of the window. What is on the ledge to the right?

AND someone, who had visited the hotel, replied:

I thought that too. Its def on this side of the curtain and if u have ever visited the Crescent you know the windows from inside have no casing on which to sit. Just a window seal about 1 inch thick. This child looks to be outside the window where there is a place to sit. Also the 4th floor is haunted by a child and I believe a little boy has been seen bouncing a ball on the 2nd floor. We were told that blue flashes of light in the form of orbs, streaks, and mists can be seen on camera because they are the energy that the spirit needs to show itself. Who knows???? Creepy though.

Photos offer a visual and are spellbinding in a could-this-be-real way like WTFrack is that. So I will be offering photos as well. Please share if you have some. And please, if you are a non-believer, no need to comment. We’ve heard all the rational explanations.

And what fun is being rational? It only leads to a shriveled-up imagination or indicates no imagination at all.

The Probe’s Mission Statement

Smallville’s Chloe Sullivan and her Wall of Weird.

The Probe is a blog devoted to the exploration of the unexplainable, to finding the truth in occurrences that resemble science fiction, and to researching and reporting on topics that could be flung upon the wall of weird.  New posts are featured every week.

(Mostly on Mondays, but sometimes I release early, like on Sundays, if I have a writing deadline, or if I’m going camping, or if I have something exciting I just can’t wait to tell you. And sometimes I’m late if I’ve gone camping or have family visiting or an alien has taken up residence on my face—like last week.)

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The Probe has been nominated for the 2015 Liebster Blog Award

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Clara Bush

Clara is creator of the popular Science Fiction novellas, "The Creep Mesquite Anthology." It's SyFy with monsters and a little romance, available on Amazon Kindle.

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