Season of Shadows Blog

In the Haunting of Ramstein I described some pretty strange events, which centered around my family’s new residence in an almost eight hundred year old German Village. Well it’s been a little over a month since that post and I thought it might be time to tell off on my family again - err, I mean relate some more of my family’s experiences. None of the experiences in this post are quite as detailed as the events that took place in Ramstein, however I feel they are valid and worth mentioning since they seem to point to the consistent activity of supernatural events around myself and members of my family.

Paranormal in the Peach State

In the early 1970’s after my parents married, they were stationed on a marine base in Georgia. Living in very small quarters they didn’t own many possessions so it became obvious when certain items, which had no monetary value, began disappearing from the home. This house is where my mom also had her very first run in with a lone straight pin, sitting neatly in the empty kitchen sink. The pin experience in Georgia alerted her to the fact something was amiss when similar pin events began years later in Ramstein. After a while things settled down, until my parents began packing to leave for their next duty station.

As they were filling their suitcases and cleaning out their bedroom, they noticed an empty coat hanger lift off the bed, sail across the room, past my mom’s head and hit against the closet door. Both of them were standing on the opposite side of the room, away from the bed. The hangar was completely at rest one minute and was whizzing across the room the next. According to my parents it looked as if it had been thrown by someone, yet no one else was in the house.

Spooky Doors, Phantom Voices and More Pins

My grandparent’s home has also had its share of unusual phenomenon, off and on for the last twenty years. This in fact, is the home where I had my experience with straight pins that was somewhat similar to my mom’s experience in Georgia and Ramstein. In the living room, leaning against a shelf, sat several oversized throw pillows for lounging on the floor and watching TV. The room was dark except for the light emanating from the television. As I reached for a pillow and removed it from its position against the shelf; I noticed a mass of tiny glistening items tumble to the floor. Curios, I turned on the light to further inspect what had fallen. Lying on the floor were hundreds of straight pins, which had apparently slid off of the pillow. Now, my grandmother is not a seamstress and only has use for a little sewing kit to mend buttons, which was no where near the pillows at the time this occurred. In fact there was nothing on the shelf containing straight pins that may have inadvertently turned over, spilling them on the pillow below. Maybe it wouldn’t have been odd to find one or two on the pillow where other people had rested- when you consider the possibility that a pin could have come out of a new shirt, but this was hundreds of them. It only happened the one time, but the sheer volume is what’s strange and fascinating. There may be a symbolic reason for the pins, in Georgia, Germany and at my grandparent’s house, but I’ve yet to figure it out.

Their home has also been known to produce a disembodied voice or two every now and again. My grandmother and aunt (while being the only ones in the house) have both heard conversations being carried on, by two individuals, in the back bedroom. Upon investigating, no one was in the room or outside the house near the bedroom windows. The bedroom is no where near a busy street or sidewalk since the house sits on a significant size lot.

A couple of different times (while living in the home) I awoke late at night to find the back door to the house wide open. There were no children in the home that could have done this and my grandparent’s and I were always very adamant about making certain the house was secure, prior to going to bed. On this one particular occasion, something woke me from a deep sleep around two a.m., prompting me to get up. I walked into the porch to find, not one, but both back doors wide open. Nothing was missing from the house and there was no sign that anyone had tried to force their way in. In fact, only one of the doors ever had a key made for it. The other was always locked, and was extremely difficult to open, even when it was unlocked from the inside. It had a tendency to stick and freeze up, so we pretty much quit using it altogether. No one else, outside of my grandparents or I, ever had keys to the door, nor did we ever figure out whom or what decided to open both of them.

Twenty years later the events still seem to be prevalent, only they express themselves in different ways. My grandparent’s now have a cat that spends the majority of her time in the house. Several times a week she stares off towards different parts of the home and begins hissing and growling at something that apparently is revealing itself to her. There are no other animals in the house and she doesn’t display this type of behavior when she leaves their home to spend time outdoors.

Another recent experience happened a few months ago while paying them a visit. I had an encounter with the bathroom light turning itself back on, practically right in front of me. I had just left the bathroom, walking in one direction, then changing my mind and going to a different part of the house- in doing this I had to walk back by the restroom. As I walked by, I noticed there were no lights on. I made my way into the kitchen, when out of the corner of my eye I saw what I thought was a reflection shining out of the entry way into the bathroom. I went back down the hall and found the bathroom light had been turned back on. It had only been a few seconds since I had walked by, noticing the lights were all off and no one else in the house had been in the bathroom since my visit.

What do these stories say about my family and the supernatural? I’m not really sure, but I suppose we are somewhat in touch with events and circumstances which are deemed paranormal.  I’m not completely convinced that ghosts and ghostly occurrences are under the control of fully conscious disembodied entities though. I’ll be further expanding on this idea in an upcoming entry, which will be a sort of follow up to my Specters, Spirits & Time post.

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Related Posts

Haunting of Ramstein
Family Spirits: Part II
Specters, Spirits & Time
Calling Cards From Beyond the Grave
Q & A: Seeing Body Doubles in a Haunted Location
Through the Eyes of a Ghost

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Ghosts, Hauntings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.