by Brenda Roger
I woke up about 6:15 one morning in 2001 with a sense of urgency that I must get down to the basement where my Springer Spaniel puppy was because she was choking. She was two floors away, crated in the basement of our 90 year-old house on Walnut Avenue in Greensburg. When I got to her, she was indeed choking. I cleared her throat and she was just fine.
Afterward, I was very full of myself for listening to my maternal instinct. My, my, what an intuitive creature I thought I was. Now, I’m not so sure.
When we first looked at the house on Walnut Avenue, it was outside of our price range. As is often the case, the house you like the most is the one you can’t afford, but I knew it was our house. It had a good vibe. Good juju, you might say. That sounds flakey –even to me, but it was true. I was home. The price was eventually dropped and that is how we were able to buy it. We took great care of that house. It needed heaps of work, much of which we did ourselves. By the fall of 2000, it was gleaming.
I never really had any major creepy experiences on Walnut Avenue. You would think that in a house that old with such a strong vibe that you would. There are only a couple of incidents that in hind-sight seem odd. More than once, when I was in the master bedroom sleeping, I heard footsteps in the hall and felt someone sit down on the bed. Once I was completely convinced that my husband had come home and if I turned around I would see him on the bed, but of course, there was no one there. It always happened when I was hovering between sleep and consciousness, so I thought that I imagined it.
I’ve been reading the book Lily Dale by Christine Wicker. Lily Dale is the town near Chautauqua, New York owned by the Spiritualist Church. Christine Wicker is a journalist, from Texas who usually reports on religion for a newspaper. She made a series of visits to Lily Dale in search of some proof that the mediums there can talk to the spirits. She recounts many compelling tales balanced with stories of chicanery.
For about a week now, Wicker and her ghost stories have had me convinced that it wasn’t my maternal instinct that woke me up when my puppy was choking. I’m pretty sure that whoever is in that house giving it the good vibe, told me to get up because she was choking. You see, when I woke up, I already knew she was choking. I was much too far away from her to have heard any noise that she was making. I didn’t open my eyes and lay there listening for her. I woke up from a sound sleep and got right up and went down to attend to the problem. There was no time spend deciding to do it.
Maybe whoever was there liked what we did with the place and helped me out to say thank you.
So, would all of the other level-headed, logical types like me care to share a story?
8 comments:
The leader of a psychotherapy training program I attended talked about one of her clients, who was a nurse in the intensive care unit. The therapist said to her, "And I bet you make all the young nurse's lives miserable! You expect them to pick up on things you sense psychically. You couldn't really hear that man choking, it was too far away." Apparently, the nurse was quite suprised and somewhat embarrassed that she'd expected the student nurses to have the same sensing powers she did.
I think it's a good example of how many of us may be using psychic powers in our daily lives without even realizing it. I have a friend who was a home care occupational therapist. I swear she's psychic about directions!
Anyway, that's my take.
Sorry, Brenda. I don't know that there are any level-headed, logical types here.
I like the idea of a protective ghost. I could sure use one of those. But not one of the vengeful ones. Just a Casper the Friendly Ghost would be good.
My grandfather died when I was 12 years old. Grandpap had a habit of tapping his keys on the front window whenever he returned home before coming in the house. That night, as we all gathered in the living room, there was a distinctive tapping on the front window. Everyone in the room heard it, but the funny thing is no one thought it was that unusual (we're part Irish). It was just Grandpap telling us he was "home."
Great story, Brenda!
I wish I had a similar story to share, but I don't. We had mysterious things drop off the walls when we first moved into our house, but I don't think something spiritual had anything do with it.
That book sounds interesting, though. I'll have to check it out.
My blog on Friday was about Lily Dale. Are the spirits trying to tell us something?
The house I grew up in was haunted, but it was the scary kind of haunting. We moved in when I was in first grade; after my parents moved out, my grandmother (who had once lived next door to it) said no one would live in that house in the 1930s because the disabled man who lived there had killed himself on the third floor. People moved back in due to the World War II housing shortage. It was a three story house, with a kitchen, powder room, living room and dining room on the first floor. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor -- my parents shared one room and my little brothers shared the other. There were two rooms on the third floor - one was my bedroom and the other was used as an attic.
I spent most of my high school years sleeping on the couch in the living room because I was too afraid to sleep in my own room. Something would scratch on the window or walk in from attic. My parents -- who didn't believe me about the ghost at first -- put a hook-&-eye lock on the attic door. I'd wake up to the sound of something pounding on that door, then it would eventually come open and something would walk into my room and walk around the bed. I'd hide under the covers and pray until it went away. I never had the guts to look. A few times, my alarm clock spontaneously fell off the bedside stand and once a mirror fell from the wall.
After I moved out, my parents heard a crash on the third floor, followed by the sound of running feet that fled down the stairs and out of the house. They thought it was a burglar until they realized that whoever it was had run right through a locked door.
Yes, Cathy, but you've actually been there! I've just been led to believe in the spirits from a little paperback book!
What do you think the message could be?
I am actually reading it as research for the short story I'm working on. I needed my supernatural angle to have some substance.
Gina,
You are full of stories. That one gave me goosebumps. Creepy!
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