More Missing Things

Of all the things that have disappeared here over the years, none of the things have gone right out from under my nose. Until the other day.

Back in October I found out I am diabetic. No big deal, I’ve since gotten it under control and I feel a million times better. Anyway, because of that, I now have to take my blood sugar levels regularly.

Just the other day I was in the kitchen preparing to test my blood. I went to the counter, opened my tester bag thing and began getting everything ready. I pulled out the last two alcohol pads I had in the case, and because they were attached, I tore them apart at the perforated line in between them, and set them down on the counter.

I then got my sticker ready and my test strip ready. I reached down and grabbed one of the two alcohol wipes that were still sitting there where I put them. I opened it, wiped my finger, did the thing, and wrote down in my chart what my level was.

I then began taking everything apart, and when I went to throw away the used alcohol wipe I noticed the other one was no longer on the counter.

When I say I searched everywhere, believe I searched EVERYWHERE. I still haven’t found it, and probably never will. Then again, I do have other alcohol wipes, and they all look alike, so maybe I have found it already.

That was the only thing that has happened here recently, but that story leads me to my next one that I’m going to post next!

Grandma’s House Pt. 3

Aside from things going missing around here, nothing has really happened in a while. My mom asked me the other day about certain noises, but it’s nothing really freaky. Just noises. It’s an old house, after all.

Well, tonight when I got home from work my wife told me how she was sleeping and then at 11 PM on the dot she was awakened by a knocking. She said the dogs didn’t bark, but she was sleeping very well and dreaming when all of a sudden she had this thought that she had to wake up immediately. And then there was a knocking, and she said it came from the door that goes to the concrete steps and down to the basement.

Did she dream the knocks? I asked if she heard them after she woke up and she said no. Whether or not she only dreamt them, it wouldn’t surprise me if there actually were knocks. Then again, with how my dogs don’t need a reason to bark and will just because they’re awake, and the fact that they didn’t, I doubt there was a knocking. BUT, if they knew it was something paranormal, which of course animals can sense that, then maybe they didn’t want to get in the middle of all that. Who knows?

Missing Things?

Shortly after my wife and I moved back into my Grandmother’s house in 2008 I started noticing things going missing. Mostly my DVDs. I had a nice collection of them back then and every now and then I’d get the desire to watch one that I hadn’t seen in a while. I’d go look for it and wouldn’t be able to find it. I kept them all on one rack, so there was no reason for it to be missing. I hadn’t lent it out to anybody and we never have company, so nobody was here that would have taken it without asking. I was at a loss, especially since more and more kept disappearing. I know of at least half a dozen or more that have gone missing like that, maybe more that I never thought of to check on.

Recently my mom moved in with us and is now in the front of the house, which is where we were when the DVDs started disappearing. My mom just passed a note along to us asking if we had ever had anything go missing, because she’s having stuff go missing now “right out from under her nose.” Here’s part of her email to me.

I’ve had 3 pair of black socks go AWOL! I have looked everywhere! I even used a flash light & mirror to check out the laundry chute! But last night I had one of those 3M plastic hangers lying on the kit. counter, both pieces, front & back, I was making a salad, I bumped it with the salad bag to the point of making it move & make noise like plastic does, & now the back piece is missing!! Just gone! I’ve looked in the trash, I’ve moved everything on the counter, I swept the floor, I’ve looked in the drawers! That is too freaking weird!

She went on to mention how when we lived in the trailer back when I was really young she lost a card holder. My parents used to have people over all the time for a night of card playing and apparently someone dropped a round card holder they all used and it rolled behind the fridge and they never found it. Apparently this kind of thing just haunts my family in general.

My wife suggested maybe we have a hidden room in the house and someone is living there. A few stories like that have popped up lately online, so that’s what gave her the idea. While I don’t think we have that happening here, as I know the house front to back and doubt in the 30s my Grandfather would have built a hidden room here that only a stranger would know of, it sure is strange how things keep turning up missing. I’ve never found my DVDs, so where they went off to I’ll probably never know.

Oh, and a day later my mom sent me a note saying she found that plastic piece. In the fridge.

Grandma’s House Pt. 2

The only other things to happen in this house have been small stuff. My Grandma often told me about shadows she saw in the hallway of the house. The hall is tiny and the only one in the house, but I see the shadows too. So does my wife, and the dogs often look that way from time to time. It always looks as if someone had just walked by the door to the living room, which is impossible, really, because as I said, the hallway is tiny.

Another thing that has been happening here is, I’m seeing ghost dogs. We have two dogs, Angus, a black lab, and Redd, a min-pin. I got Angus while I was living here with my Grandmother and she loved that dog more than anybody or anything else. Including me. He was her baby. Right before she died, it tore her up knowing she’d never see him again.

After she died I moved out with my wife who was then my girlfriend, and we acquired another dog, Redd. We moved back into the house 8 months later, bringing both dogs with us. Angus was home, and Redd was in his new home. I know if my Grandmother had met Redd, she would have loved him just as much as Angus.

When we first moved back in, the main part of the house was being worked on, so we stayed in the back where I had lived for so long. We were trying to keep the door shut that went to the main part of the house so the dogs wouldn’t go up there and get dirty.

One of the first nights back, I was standing in the back kitchen heading to the door to close it when my wife started talking to me. I turned to face her, looking away from the door, and I watched Redd walk past her and me and into the kitchen. I turned around to stop him from going upstairs (the main part of the house is considered the upstairs, but only three steps separate the two levels). Once you get upstairs you’re in what we use as an office and that leads into the tiny hallway and the rest of the house. I could see the back end of Redd walking through the office and turning into the hallway, then I didn’t see him anymore. I called out to him to get him back with us so I could shut the door and I heard some clicking. I turned to look and saw him standing behind me, in the kitchen, nails clicking on the floor. What did I see in the office that looked just like him? I have no idea, but that wasn’t the only time I saw it.

Since there’s really only two things left to tell about this house for now, I’ll include them here. The first has to deal with my Grandfather’s first wife whom he was with when he built the house. She was a little nuts, from what I understand, and eventually she found herself addicted to drugs. I don’t know what kind, but she would sometimes leave the house and walk down the street to acquire these drugs while in her night gown.

One thing that she did while she was alive was, she joined a church down the road from the house. It turned out the church was one that was affiliated with  Jim Jones and the Jonestown people. She believed in what they were doing and was funding the efforts via my Grandfather’s bank account. Overall he lost thousands to this church before he figured out what was going on and stopped it. But to my understanding, she allowed them to use this house as a meeting place for what eventually turned out to be the Jonestown incident. And their meeting place was the room in the back of the house where I had lived for so many years and is now my bedroom. Creepy. My Grandfather had forced her to leave the church right before she was to leave with them on their trip.

The other thing is really creepy as well, at least for me. When I was first living here, I had heard you could buy a copy of the Necronomicon at any book store, so I went out and got myself a copy. Being a huge fan of the Evil Dead series, I thought it would be cool to have the book and read it.

That night I laid in bed and decided to give it a try. I cracked it open and read the into to the book, started getting sleepy and decided to just leave it at that and start to read the book itself the next day. I laid the open book down on the bed to keep my place and I got up to find a book mark. As I started to walk away from the bed, something shoved me from behind. It actually felt as if someone punched me in my back rather hard, although I got more of a shove from it than a pain, even though there was a pain. It hit me so hard that I emitted an “Unh” that was more like a scream because of how it took me by surprise. When I turned around, shocked and scared that someone was about to jump me, nothing was there, except for the book. The shot I took came from the direction of the book.

I found a book mark and placed it in the book and set it off to the side. I turned a funny movie on (Dazed and Confused) and tried to watch it to get my mind off of what had just happened. The entire time I was watching the movie I could hear a heavy breathing coming from the kitchen. That was the only time I had ever heard that noise in this house. The following day I sold the book to a friend of mine who wanted to read it and I got it the hell out of this house. I never had either of those experiences again.

Grandma’s House Pt. 1

I first moved in with my Grandmother when I was eighteen. My mom and I had gotten into a fight and she threw me out. If you ask her, I left. Never mind that, when I moved in with my Grandmother, things started happening.

My Grandmother had been witness to some pretty messed up things throughout her life, paranormally speaking. After a few incidents at the house that I had encountered, I finally spoke with her about it and she said that she had known for a long time about this house. It was then that we both began sharing these things.

When I lived here the first time, I was living in the back of the house. The house is set up, basically, like a two family house. So I stayed in the back part of the house, in the second family part. That part of the house is just two rooms, a kitchen and a big living room, or entertainment room as it should really be. Since I had basically one room for everything, I slept on the floor on a mattress. It was positioned so that to my left was the couch with about a foot clearance between it and the mattress and to the right was my TV, with about three feet clearance.

Most nights I would lay there, trying to go to sleep, and I would hear shuffling on the carpet, as if someone were walking around my bed. I also heard the familiar sounds of the floor creaking, which is how I could track the movements. Those creaks only happened when someone was walking on the floor.

I heard that off and on for several weeks. And then the noises from the stairs happened.

There’s one basement to the house but two sets of stairs going to it. The first set is an old wooden case that was built when the house was originally built, and it leads from the basement up to the main part of the house.

The addition was added a few years later, and was where I was staying. The stair case it has leading to the basement is cement. There is a wood door at the top of the steps separating the main room from the stairs. At the bottom of the steps is a small landing where there are two doors. One that is just a screen door and leads outside and the other is a heavier wooden door that leads into the basement. On this door, the handle jiggles and is very loose. Actually, it doesn’t even latch anymore. The door just stays shut from being a tight fit in the frame.

When the noise in the stairs started, I wasn’t really aware of it, although I was. I heard the noises, they were new noises to the house that I didn’t know, but they weren’t really anything to worry about. All I heard was a slap or two. Basically, it sounded like a shoe was stepping on one of the steps. I put it off.

Then it started building, there were more of those sounds, coming up the steps. Somebody was walking up the stairs! Three nights in a row I’d hear this and I would jump up, grab the shotgun in my closet and open the door, quickly turning the hall light on that lights up the steps. I figured somebody had somehow quietly came in through the screen door and was in the house. But, I found nobody there.

After the third time of catching nobody, I finally gave up and just laid in bed, listening to whoever it was walking up the steps. And then more happened. It was like a movie being pieced together each night until finally I got the whole thing. When it was all said and done and the entire thing played out, this is what happened.

I could hear the handle of the door at the bottom of the steps jiggling. It would stop, and the foot steps on the stairs would happen. I’d hear them all the way up to the door at the top of the steps, just about ten feet from my bed. Then that door handle would jiggle as if someone were trying to open it. I always kept it locked, thankfully.

These noises happened every night for six months until finally it stopped… with a bang. One night after those noises went through their progressions and stopped, I heard the foot steps around my bed again. I was laying down, facing the couch to my left and I heard the foot steps directly behind my head between me and the TV. I turned quickly to see nothing there, as per usual.

I turned my head back to the way I had it and laid it back down and closed my eyes. I then did an open eye blink, where I had my eyes open for just a second. And in that second, I saw a woman sitting on the couch, just a foot away from me, staring at me with her head tilted to the side. I’m getting chills just remembering this and writing it.

She was wearing a long white night gown and nothing else. She had long white, straight hair. I couldn’t see a face.

I screamed and opened my eyes and she was gone. After that night, the noises stopped. A few months later I’d hear variations of those noises every now and then, but never like it had been. I asked my Grandmother who she was and she didn’t know. She said she could have been my Grandfather’s first wife who lived in this house with him until they got their divorce and he met my Grandmother. She hadn’t died in this house, though, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be her.

That was the only time I’ve ever seen her, and it was actually the only time I’ve ever physically seen a ghost.

Currently…

Currently, as I fix up this new blog of mine, while alone at home with my two dogs, I’m hearing noises around the house and just now one of my two dogs began barking at seemingly nothing. This house is haunted, and recently activity has started acting up again. Sometimes it lasts for a few months, sometimes a couple of weeks, sometimes just a day or two and then there’s a break in the activity that can last just as long as the activity does. I’ll post those stories as well, one day.