Haunted (10 page)

I sat at the computer and prepared to write a long e-mail message to the paranormal investigator explaining what had happened in our home and asking for any possible advice on how to stop it. But as I attempted to type out the letter containing details of the various sightings and our other haunting experiences, the keyboard suddenly seemed to have a mind of its own. At first I was just frustrated that I could not complete the message and send it, but I gradually began to feel frightened. At times the keyboard would simply freeze and I could not type at all. Or I would be able to type the words but then the screen would go blank and my entire email would be erased. Typing my message proved impossible. In frustration, I turned off the computer. I planned to leave it for a while and try again later.

The following Saturday, while Ted was in the backyard playing with the children, I again attempted to type my message. That time I was successful and managed to explain everything that had happened in considerable detail, including the difficulty I had had in sending out the first message. The next day I received a reply to my e-mail, and my relationship with Rhonda Twine, a psychic paranormal investigator.

The reply from Rhonda was helpful in many ways, not least of which was that I now had someone with whom I could rationally discuss the situation. She had been helping people in similar circumstances for some time and was very encouraging in her hope that it was possible to return our household back to normal.

In response to my mentioning the strange attraction we had initially felt to the house, Rhonda said she sensed that perhaps the spirits had wanted us to come and live there to be of help to them in some way. Regarding our pet's refusal to go up the stairway to the second floor, and especially into Matt's bedroom, Rhonda mentioned that animals were very sensitive to energies other than human, and this would account for the dog's behaviour. She felt there was very likely a portal, or an entry point for the spirits to come and go, located somewhere near the attic or the stairway leading to it. I remembered how the attic and Matt's room appeared to have been closed off before we purchased the property and how it was almost impossible at times to keep that area of the house heated properly.

When I described my sighting of the woman in a cape and headdress in the bedroom doorway, I told Rhonda I had been frozen with fear. She asked me if I meant that I had been unable to move at all, if there been any pressure on my chest, and if I had heard noises in the room. I did not recall feeling physically restrained. I had been so afraid of the vision, it was as if time stood still, but nothing had seemed to keep me from moving other than my own fear. Rhonda told me of a phenomenon called Phantomania or Old Hag Syndrome in which you felt as though something was sitting on your chest, pinning you down. I was relieved that had not been my experience. I had not felt that anything was trying to intentionally terrify or harm me.

Rhonda cautioned me that emitting fear or anger in the presence of a spirit gave the entity more energy to manifest. Although, both feelings were natural responses to the presence of a spiritual intruder in one's home, I hoped I could control my feelings better in the future.

Rhonda encouraged my use of religious items in the house, particularly in the children's bedrooms, and I was glad I had hung up the cross and angel pictures. It made me feel better knowing they were there.

She told me that, because the spirits could see and hear everything, it was important to speak aloud to them to open up lines of communication. Perhaps, I thought, that alone could help settle the spirits and convince them to leave. However, Rhonda felt that, since at least two of the spirits appeared to be children, the haunting may have been quite involved. Why would they be earthbound and so attached to that particular setting?

She felt there was a direct correlation between the new family room being added onto the existing house and the experiences we were having in our home. She sensed that the addition was upsetting to them because perhaps the building itself was now covering something of importance under the ground on the property, something they did not want concealed. The fact that a woman, a little boy, and an adolescent girl had all been clearly seen did not surprise Rhonda, because as she explained to me in her letter, where there is one spirit, there are usually more.

In our correspondence I asked Rhonda about the significance of the smoke detectors going off so frequently in the middle of the night. She said that, since it did not seem to be difficult for spiritual entities to manipulate electrical objects, a smoke detector would be a likely target for such activity. As they were set off only when the family was asleep, a reaction of fear and annoyance was assured, thereby giving them more energy to incarnate. I had thought of those disturbances as random, harmless acts, but I now saw them from a different perspective.

Rhonda wondered if the house had ever been a hospital. I had researched the property's records extensively, and to my knowledge, it had always been a single family residence. That did not help to explain the presence of the woman both Matt and I had sighted, whom I was sure had been a nurse. Rhonda felt that the little boy and young girl may have been under the nurse's care and had died there from an epidemic or some other such tragedy. The woman might therefore still think she must watch over them in that spot. That could perhaps have happened before the present house had been built on the same piece of land, she suggested.

I thought it was entirely possible that the land had been inhabited while it was still Crown land. Prior to its purchase by F. Lincoln in 1865, who had probably used it as farmland, a family may have lived on it as “squatters.” As they were not the legal property owner, their name would not have been recorded in the land registry books.

Rhonda seemed most concerned about whether there had been a fire on the property and thought that might definitely account for the constant manipulation of the smoke detectors. However, there was no evidence that the house itself had ever sustained damage from a fire, and our neighbour Donelle had not mentioned such a tragedy taking place.

I finally asked Rhonda if she knew of any paranormal investigators who lived fairly close to our home. She admitted that she could not recommend anyone in our remote area of the country, but based on all the evidence I had given her, she would be willing to make the long trip to our town herself. As tempting as her offer was, we really could not afford to pay for her extensive travel expenses. Rhonda understood about the monetary restraint and offered to keep in touch with me through e-mail. We could continue to work together and hopefully figure out a way to make our home, and lives, ordinary again.

OUT OF CONTROL

I
felt greatly relieved that I now had Rhonda, with whom to correspond, because she understood the situation we were facing in our house. I had found our contact therapeutic, yet the unusual activity had escalated and was now occurring on an almost daily basis. Items began to disappear, vanishing altogether or showing up again in such unlikely spots that we could not figure out how they could possibly have been placed there. No item of real monetary or sentimental value was ever lost, such as a wallet or jewelry, but cooking utensils, books, clothing, and especially the children's toys would be there one minute and missing the next. They would remain lost for days or even weeks, only to show up on top of a high shelf in a closet or under the stairs in the basement.

As those articles went missing, however, the children began to find coins throughout the house in equally strange locations. That phenomenon, which had started on our first day in the house, had continued, although the coins had never appeared in that same large quantity. Ted and I had never given the matter a great deal of thought. Certainly people did drop coins now and again, so it was not unreasonable to assume the money had come from one of our own pockets. When added to all the other incidents, though, the frequency of the coins' appearance and the locations in which they were found finally caught my attention.

We also experienced a problem with all the clocks in the house. No matter how often I would replace the batteries, it was impossible to keep them running consistently for any length of time. Even the few that were plugged into outlets would stop for long periods, for no apparent reason.

Watches were also affected. My gold wristwatch, which had been a gift from Ted the previous Christmas, quit working one afternoon at 2:30 p.m. Replacing the battery did not restore it to working order, so I put it in a desk drawer and later bought another cheaper watch. That one stopped working at 7:00 a.m., within a couple of days, even though the sales lady had installed a new battery when I had purchased it.

I planned to take both watches to a jeweler the next day to see if they could be fixed. When I opened the desk drawer to retrieve the gold one, I found it was now not only working properly but was somehow even set to the correct time. Puzzled by this, but relieved to have it working again, I put the recently purchased but seemingly broken one into the desk drawer. A few days later, I opened the drawer and saw that it too was not only working again but was set to the correct time.

Our nights were fraught with an increasing number of disturbances. After we were in bed, we could often hear loud knocks the house. It was difficult, though, to determine from where the noise was originating. The sound had a rapping quality, as if someone were knocking on a door to gain entry, yet it seemed to resonate throughout the walls.

On a number of occasions, just as I was dozing off to sleep, a drop of cold liquid I assumed was water splashed on my hand, abruptly rousing me. I would lay wide awake in the still of the night wiping the wetness off my skin as my husband slept peacefully beside me. I found those incidents more strange than frightening. Certainly the liquid I wiped off my hand was real enough, yet I could not explain how or why it had come to be there.

On many nights my sleep was interrupted by the strange sensation of having my face, and especially my nose, tickled with a fluffy object such as a feather or a piece of lace. I was not terrified by that and could appreciate, at times, the comic element of the gentle playfulness. However, I could not help but become annoyed when it was so often repeated, and affected my sleep. I reminded myself not to show anger or fear and thereby further energize the entity who was tickling me. And, when I ignored the sensation rather than growing upset, it did become less frequent and less intense.

Aside from the sighting of spirits, the most frightening occurrence I experienced in the night was the sensation of being touched. Once the feel of a very heavy, cold hand on my arm awakened me. I knew it could not be Ted, as he was turned away from me, and the surprising weight and chill of that hand did not resemble his touch. The sensation of having my arm gently gripped lasted for several seconds, long enough for me to notice that, although it was so heavy, the actual size of the hand was quite small. Even when I could no longer sense the weight of the hand upon me, the coldness of its touch against my skin remained for a long time.

I awakened another night to feel someone gently running their fingers through my hair. I felt a hand brush the locks away from my closed eyes and tuck them carefully behind my ear. From the angle of the hand's touch I knew that someone was standing over me, and I reached up, assuming it was my husband. But no one was there. When I opened my eyes, I saw that Ted was sound asleep with his back towards me, and it had not been him at all.

In my next e-mail message to Rhonda, I mentioned that the haunting activity persisted and actually seemed to be increasing. I had taken her previous advice and frequently spoke aloud to any unseen listeners, explaining that our family did not want to be frightened by their presence. That had had little effect on the strange occurrences, however, and I was starting to feel convinced that the only way to remove ourselves from that bizarre paranormal situation was to remove ourselves from the house.

FINDING A KEY

R
honda
responded immediately to my e-mail, in which my desperation had been clear. She had gone back to my original letter and carefully read it over once more, seeking more insight into the case. The activity had increased alarmingly when we had built onto the existing house, that much was clear. But she wondered if that was the only thing that had triggered those disturbances; she felt there had to be more to it. When she re-read a particular paragraph in my original letter, she thought it might hold the key to many of the problems we were experiencing. In the paragraph to which Rhonda was referring, I had mentioned the items Stuart had unearthed in the backyard as he dug the footing holes for the addition onto the house. Rhonda asked me for more details on that.

The increase in unusual activity had certainly occurred when the new room was being added onto the house. Since the footings had been dug at the very start of the project, perhaps it had been the disturbance and subsequent removal of those objects that had triggered that phenomena and not just the construction that followed.

In a long e-mail message, I described exactly what had been found when the construction began the previous spring. I told her how the builder had been deepening the holes in the backyard to about five feet in depth for the footings, which would support the cement piers for the new room. I described the items that had been found: a small, perfectly preserved white glass jar that had probably contained some kind of cosmetic or skin cream at least a century ago; a small and even older clay ink-well, in good condition, that must have been buried in that spot for several generations; and a very old glass button that looked like it might once have adorned a young girl's dress or coat. I told her that all of those items had been given to Kammie, who displayed them on the window sill in her bedroom.

On the day I received Rhonda's response, I was busy nursing the three children back to health from a stomach virus. Kammie had been the first to get sick and had almost recovered from it when the two younger ones starting showing the same symptoms. All three were confined to their beds, and I went from room to room tending to them. There was an out-of-town family reunion that weekend, and I was anxious to have everyone feeling better so we would not have to miss it.