Season of Shadows Blog

Welcome to the very first reader’s true ghost story entry, submitted by a visitor that wishes to remain anonymous. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

My encounters with the paranormal began in the house as a child. If they had ceased there and were but a distant memory now, I could probably chalk everything up to the product of an over-active imagination. Unfortunately, my adult experiences in the same home prevent that from being an option. The two things I witnessed as a little girl served as a taste of things to come.

The first experience took place late at night in my room. I awoke to a noise and found the hazy outline of someone sitting in the rocking chair at the foot of my bed. Assuming it was my mom; I watched the figure for a minute or so and then fell back asleep. The next morning I questioned my mom about her activities, in my room, the night before. She informed me she had not been in my bedroom.

The next encounter took place again while I was in bed. After the first run in with whatever was in the rocking chair, I began to sleep with my bedroom door open, so the hallway light could shine into my room. This time, I clearly witnessed a woman, much older than my mother, making her way down the hall. This figure was different than the one in the rocking chair. It was more than an outline; it actually had distinguishable features.

Needless to say, I was very happy when my family and I left that house. This is where my story should end, had my husband and I not received a very generous proposal, years later, from my parents.

We were a young couple just starting out and in need of a place to raise our baby. My parents offered to let us live in my childhood home (which they still owned) for free. We would have been crazy to turn them down, or so we thought. I was willing to move back in, despite my experiences, because I was able to convince myself things would be different. After all, I wasn’t a kid anymore. Even though I was satisfied with that explanation, I still told my husband about everything that had happened. He wasn’t a believer, then.

Here’s where the fun starts:

On one of our move in days, I left my husband painting my old bedroom, while a neighbor and I went to the store to pick up supplies. After a short time he began hearing the kitchen cabinets opening and closing; assuming I was already back, he continued painting. The activity in the kitchen progressed to the point the cabinets were being slammed shut. My husband hollered out, asking me what I was doing. The kitchen activity immediately came to a halt. The next thing he knew, the broom that was leaning against the wall, across the room from where he was standing, hit him in the back!

He proceeded to look everywhere in the house for someone that could have thrown it at him. He even went across the street to check the neighbor’s house (the one that went for supplies with me), in case she was responsible. He found no one. I arrived twenty minutes later to find him sitting outside on the porch.

After his encounter, my husband refused to finish moving in unless we had a blessing performed on the house. A woman that attended the same church as his mother came over to conduct the ceremony. Before beginning, she asked for details regarding the house and what I witnessed as a child. As she was doing the walk through, she stopped cold at the end of the hallway (facing the living room).

She then immediately started performing several ritualistic maneuvers, finished up and wanted to quickly get outside where she informed us that she didn’t see a ghost, but rather a shadow in the room. According to her, she was able to convince it to leave. I was pretty doubtful about her claims, but the interesting thing was when I mentioned this to my mom; she told me that her, my dad and grandmother had all witnessed a shadow in the exact same room when they first purchased the house.

So, everything calmed down a little and my husband agreed to move in. A couple of weeks passed and one day, while he was at work, the activity flared up again. I was lying on the couch, in the den, with my baby on my chest watching television.

Sitting at the top of the den steps, which provided access to the living room, was a pack of diapers. All of a sudden, I became aware of the sound of the plastic being rustled on the diaper pack. As soon as I glanced over to see what was causing the noise, the entire pack launched from the top step down to the den floor. Now mind you, this was not a movement associated with something simply falling or sliding down the steps due to its own inertia and gravity. The package moved with enough force, that it appeared to be kicked off the stairs.

At night time my husband and I could hear people talking inside the house. Many times, while sitting in the den we were able to distinguish some type of movement coming from the entry way into the living room as well as the opening into the kitchen. One night in particular, we heard what sounded like a large window shattering from inside the home. My husband had me call the police while he went to investigate. Neither he, nor the police were able to find any evidence of something being broken.

It was at this point I decided to ask a good friend and her boyfriend to move in. I never told her about any of the ghostly experiences because I didn’t want her to think we were crazy. They had been staying with us for about three weeks prior to anything substantial happening. Then one evening, before bed, my friend wanted to take a shower. I started joking with her about how I was going to throw water over the top of the shower on her.

She headed off to the bathroom and within ten minutes we heard her screaming bloody murder. The next thing we knew, she came running out of the bathroom, naked, soaking wet, with shampoo still in her hair. Her boyfriend pulled her to their bedroom and wrapped a blanket around her. He then led her to the den because she insisted that she felt safer there. She was white as a sheet, wide eyed and crying, and I was sitting on the couch just looking at her. I was so terrified to hear what she had to say, that I almost didn’t want to know.

She finally worked up the courage to tell us that while she was washing her hair, she heard something hit the top of the shower door. Thinking it was me, she turned around, fully expecting to see water being dumped over the top of the door onto her. There, with her in the shower, was a shadow that appeared to be trying to wrap itself around her.

As she related her story, I could tell she was embarrassed because she probably assumed we thought she was crazy. It was at this point I decided to fill her in on all the details surrounding the house. As I was telling her about our experiences, she remembered something else strange from the night before.

She said that shortly after her and her boyfriend went to their room, there were two knocks on the bedroom door. She got up (thinking it was me) to see what I wanted. On her way to the door there was a third knock and as she reached for the knob, the door opened partially, hitting her in the face. She assumed it was me joking around with her and went back to bed without pursuing it any further. The only problem was that it wasn’t me.

My husband decided to call his mom and inform her about the recent experiences. She came over to the house and went through a similar ritual that included speaking in tongues near the bathroom, which also occurred during the initial blessing. She then proceeded to beg us to move out. It was all very dramatic and I still am not sure what to make of it to this day.

By now, my friend refused to leave the safety of the den. I agreed with her because I realized I too have always had a better feeling while spending time there. All of us decide to spend the next three nights in the den, while packing our things during the day in preparation for moving out.

After leaving the house we found it very hard to live with other people, especially when our old home was just sitting empty. We decided to have another blessing done (by someone that was said to be even more experienced than the first lady) and then tried moving in once again.

This time around we did some major changes by adding new carpet and plumbing. The first week or so everything went great until we again started hearing people talking. You could never make out the words, but you could definitely tell it was a conversation.

One night my husband got up to use the bathroom. As he came out of our room and started down the well lit hall (we always left our bedroom door open and the hall light turned on), he noticed someone making their way between rooms. They crossed from the room that was next to the bathroom, and went into the kitchen. My husband immediately turned around, came right back to our room and begged me to go with him. I passed on that one.

Two nights after he witnessed the ghostly apparition in the hallway, I was lying in bed, wide awake around 2 or 3 am. Our bedroom was my parents’ old room and it connected to my daughter’s room by a door I left open. I also left a lamp turned on in her room. The lamp sent enough light into our bedroom that you could detect any movement or activity.

As I lay there, I watched several human looking shadows, emanating from her room, cast against our bedroom wall. Right then and there I got up, made my husband grab what he could, got our daughter and left. We went back a week later to collect the rest of our belongings and never went back.

A lady bought the house from my parents five years ago. It burnt to the ground two years back. When my mom met her at the bank to get the insurance pay off, she couldn’t resist asking the woman if anything “weird” had happened while she lived there. The lady simply replied, “No.”

I want to thank the anonymous submitter for sharing her amazing experiences! If you have a true ghostly or paranormal encounter you would like to see posted, please contact me. Entries may be edited for grammar, spelling and flow, but the content will remain accurate to the original submission.

If you enjoyed this post, please share the information and this site with others. Thank you.

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Since I’m shifting the focus of the blog section to featuring strictly information on ghosts and the paranormal, I decided to dust off some old questions that visitors sent me back in October of last year. October ‘07 was my “ghost month” here in the blog, but with all the Halloween preparations, I didn’t have an opportunity to address several of the questions that were being emailed to me. My apologies, but I’m going to play catch up over the course of the next several posts.

Question: Do you believe ghosts are actually the energy of the deceased? And why are most ghost sightings only associated with things we are familiar with, like people and pets?

Answer: I have mixed emotions regarding hauntings. I believe they most definitely have the potential to be a form of the conscious awareness of a deceased person. However, I also believe they are somehow tied into or stemming from the unified field of consciousness, in a manner we cannot quite understand.

In other words, hauntings may require our attention to intercept or perceive them. Otherwise, they would cease to be. It’s a lot like the age old question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, will it make a sound?

Conversely, if no living person is focusing their attention upon a haunted location will an apparition still appear or will a disembodied voice be capable of speaking? This attention doesn’t have to be provided in person either. Even if someone focuses on audio or video footage, recorded in a haunted location, they are still providing the conscious means.

There appears to be a certain level of our focus needed to elicit the response of whatever’s causing ghostly activity. And if this is a correct assumption, then that may indicate hauntings are stemming as much from within our awareness as they are from an external source, like a deceased individual.

This may sound silly, but I often ponder why we don’t run into the ghosts of many of the prehistoric creatures that once roamed this planet. Dinosaurs, for example, spent hundreds of millions of years on the Earth, yet I’ve never come across an account of someone witnessing the apparition of a stegosaurus or triceratops. In contrast, humankind has only spent the blink of an eye on this planet and we appear to have left our ghostly marks everywhere.

Think of the immensity of the energy fields of creatures the size of most dinosaurs and their emotional investment, based upon the severity of their life experiences. Shouldn’t these factors be enough, considering the usual explanations for hauntings, to generate large occurrences of “dino” ghosts?

Yet, we hear many accounts of people seeing ghostly apparitions of comparatively tinier animals, like dogs and cats. Why do some species appear to be capable of ghosting while others do not?

I believe the reason is because we (as the witnesses) have a reference point and an emotional soft spot for domesticated animals and (sometimes) fellow humans, so it makes it more feasible and possible to occur. We have zero reference points (outside of fossils and artists’ renditions) as to what an actual living, breathing dinosaur looked like.

Then there are the accounts of ghost ships, and ghost cars, along with ghost guns and weapons included in battle scene “reenactments.” Since most ghost investigators believe a soul is a prerequisite for an interactive, intelligent haunting; the above inanimate items are usually allocated to the category of residual haunt.

I believe our entire life experience is actually occurring inside a vast sea of energy. Everything, even inanimate objects are made from the same conscious “stuff” humans and animals are made from. While there does appear to be enough of a difference in haunt styles to warrant two separate categories (residual and intelligent); I don’t think a soul is the deciding factor as to why some appear more interactive than others.

The interesting trend, if we stop and think about it, is that the only things capable of appearing as ghostly are those which we have a conscious awareness of. If something doesn’t seem to be very familiar in the world of mass human consciousness, it also seems to have zero chance to manifest as a ghost; even spirits that appear more shadowy or ectoplasm-like always seem to take on a slight humanoid form.

There’s also another possible explanation for why many species and things outside the human realm of awareness do not show up as ghosts: perhaps, the phenomenon of ghosts didn’t come about until mankind made its presence known on this planet. There’s something about our specific energy that appears to be responsible for contributing to the phenomenon of hauntings.

It seems the more species and items we, as humans, bring into our fold, the more those same things become “tainted” with the potential to show up as a ghost. I mentioned there are no ghosts of dinosaurs roaming around, well there also seem to be few, if any, tales of modern wild animals showing up as spirits either. Of course, many native tribes have wild animals as their totems, but these aren’t seen as lost or confused specters. They are seen as intelligent spirit guides, flourishing in the afterlife.

Domesticating animals appears to imprint something from our energy upon them, causing the potential for some to hang around after crossing over. Should that really surprise us? Humankind approaches death in so many fearful ways, it’s quite possible we have managed to not only carry that fear with us into our own transition; we have handed it over to the animals we consider our pets as well.

While I don’t deny there appear to be factors of consciousness at play, in hauntings, which are external from our input; there seems to be much that’s simultaneously contingent upon our awareness. No matter what explanation we choose, we appear to be involved to a certain degree and/or partially responsible for what does and does not show up in a haunting, even if it’s at a level of believability that’s based in our collective subconscious.

And that does it for this question and answer installment. I would like to thank the individual that sent in the above question and everyone that took the time to read this post. If you have any paranormal questions you’d like to see addressed, please contact me. As always, your name will be kept private unless you request otherwise.

If you enjoyed this post, please share the information and this site with others. Thank you.

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