First, Happy Halloween Friends!! It is of course, our time to shine!
Thinking about ghosts today. Good time to think of them, it is their day. At any rate, I am thinking about how you never really forget it when you actually see a ghost or some ghostly shit. Not just any old thing… Not a breeze, or dust.
An undeniable paranormal sighting is something you never forget. Not necessarily because it was scary, but because something about it… Something… is forever burned into your brain.
I was reading about the St. Augustine Lighthouse in St. Augustine, Fl. A place renowned for hauntings. Reading the article, the image of an old man with a white scarf, brown hat and jacket popped into my head. It is an image I know well. He is probably the first ghost I ever remember seeing with my own eyes and I can still remember him clear as day 40 years later.
My mother told me he was the old lighthouse keeper, she didn’t clarify that he had been dead for some time, so I never knew he was a ghost until much later on. Sitting on the swings in Lighthouse Park, I used to watch that old man come out of the back of the Lighthouse Keeper’s house and shuffle over to the Lighthouse. He always looked the same and I never saw him return to the house.
Portsmouth, Virginia. At one point in the late 80’s and early 90’s was considered one of the most haunted places in the United States. After St. Augustine, I figured Portsmouth couldn’t be that bad…
I believe there is a difference in Florida ghosts and ghosts elsewhere. For one thing, many people come here specifically to die, so there’s that. They seem perfectly happy with the situation. Up North, things seem a little different. Stranger. Darker at times. Those dark skies that take weeks and months to clear. The smell of industrial tinted rain always hanging in the air. The ghosts are different. The ghosts are damn scary.
The two ghosts I encountered in Portsmouth were personal. In both instances you could tell that the spirit took an intense liking to one person in the house and a severe and dangerous disliking of others. In the old Stanley Court Naval Housing is where I met the Captain. That is what we called him in the house. The Captain liked me and no one else but this really didn’t become apparent until the very end. Until then, it was quite obvious that he hated my mother and didn’t care much for my best friend either.
We all saw these things too. Not just me. My friend and I were sitting on the couch which faced the staircase. The stair case had a few steps, a small landing, and then went up to the bathroom at the top of the stairs. My mother is coming out of the bathroom and coming down the stairs. She gets almost to the landing…
I was talking to her as she approached and then, my friend and I watched a hairbrush come flying down the stairs like someone threw it, at my mother. It flew over her right shoulder and hit the wall in front of her. Amused, my mother looked back at the top of the stairs and I don’t even remember what she said. Some joke.
The next instance it was my friend who was the target. She happened to be standing at the end of a long bookshelf mounted high up on the wall. It was loaded with books. I’m sitting on the couch, in about the same spot as before. I’m turned towards her though because she is standing at the end of the bookshelves in the room.
We are talking and I see the entire row of books move, like someone slid them down a little, and the last one falls off and hits Lisa in the head. It was crazy.
For some reason I keep remembering almost cutting my thumb off in the refrigerator. I was trying to slice a watermelon in the fridge, the knife slices right through, way faster than I expected. I still have the scar, but the whole incident could have just been my own stupidity. So, I don’t really count it, but for some reason, I keep remembering it for this post… There was a lot of blood…
The end of my family’s relationship with Stanley Court came while my father was in Iraq. My mom didn’t want to be alone in Portsmouth after he got shipped out so we went up to stay with family in Indiana. While we are there, she gets a call that there is a problem with the Stanley Court house. Turns out the radiators had exploded and flooded the house upstairs and down with scalding water.
There were specifically some strange things attached to this event. First, this was a townhouse. The third one in a row of five. The pipes were all connected but our house was the only one affected by this thing.
Second, it started in my mother’s bedroom. Apparently her radiator was the first to blow out of the wall. It had landed squarely in the middle of her bed and if she had been there sleeping she probably would have been dead. This was per the fire inspector guy. Her bed was soaked through with boiling water that had proceeded to cook the floor and when it was all over, her bed was partially hanging through the living room ceiling.
My room on the other hand, was fine. Not only fine, but my stuffed animals that I had boxed up in my closet had been taken out and lined up on my made up bed. A bed I didn’t make up. I never make the bed…
As a side note, and no offense to Indiana, but at the time I fucking hated Indiana and wanted to come home. It was February and the worst cold I had ever experienced in my life. After the Captain blew up our house, we ended up coming back home way sooner than expected…
So my parents rent a new house. In Portsmouth. Lord… This one was the worst. For me.
Dahlgren and the old lady. She hated me. Tormented me from day one. I swear she possessed my mother. Man, I was so glad when we got out of that house.
It was such a pretty house, I had the whole upstairs, a big loft room and a little room across the stairs and above the garage. My mother’s room was downstairs. We were very excited when we moved in. There was a huge Camellia bush beside the garage and it was in full bloom. I picked a whole bunch of them and put them in water in a jar in my room the first morning.
All day long I’m in and out of the room with nothing happening. Then around evening I’m in there. Moving stuff around and I notice the flowers look like they are moving. Like there’s something on them.
Spiders.
Hundreds of baby spiders. All over the flowers and moving down the jar to the dresser. It freaked me out so bad I still won’t pick Camellia’s. I ran to get my mother and by the time we came back up the spiders were gone. Now that is some horror movie shit. The whole house was.
There were so many things now looking back on that house. The personality changes in my mother, the, let’s say for all sakes, strange, behaviors that she started indulging in. The cabinet doors always standing open in the kitchen.
The cats. Cats hated that house. First there was Friendly. A cat named for being so sweet and friendly. She had kittens shortly after we moved in and then proceeded to eat them all. We couldn’t keep her away from them either. She would bite and growl and every time the garage door was open she would run in and grab another kitten. It was awful.
The second cat was a gift from my friend. All white with one blue eye and one green eye. Very sweet. But the moment I brought that cat into the house she scratched me up and bolted up the stairs to the room above the garage. She wouldn’t leave it either. She would scratch and bite if you tried to take her out of there. I finally brought her back to Jessica.
The third cat is the one that triggered the last episode, the last anything, I remember there.
I was sick and sleeping in my mom’s bed downstairs. She was gone to the store. By this point I mainly slept on the couch in the living room because I never wanted to be upstairs. Having to go up there to get dressed and shit was bad enough.
So I’m asleep and the cat wakes me up. I had the door open and the cat is running into the bathroom and freaking out. I can hear it slamming and banging around in there. Then I hear it tearing up the shower curtain. I get up, get the cat out of the tub, throw him out of the bathroom and close the door. The cat saunters away. I go lay back down, and I’m laying there watching the hallway.
Here comes the cat. Full speed run and crashes into the bathroom door. It walked off stunned and I got up and closed the bedroom door and laid back down. This time I have my back turned to the door and I’m just about to fall back to sleep when I hear this clicking noise.
Click, click, click, click, it’s like a two click rhythm. I think it’s the cat again, but the door is closed so I roll over and am watching the closed door now. We had those old glass door knobs. The ones that are kind of loose in the door. I’m looking at the door when the door knob starts turning back and forth before my very eyes.
Click, click, click click. I’m watching this. Hairs still stand up on my arms when I tell this story. I don’t deal with fear well. If I feel that I may die or I’m under attack, I feel the need to attack back. I don’t have a wait and see type of attitude for things like this. Especially at fourteen years old.
I jumped out of bed, grabbed that old door knob, snatched that door knob right out of that old lady’s ghostly claws when I swung the door open and ran out the room. My mother found me wrapped in a blanket on the front porch waiting for her to get home. I refused to ever go back into that house. I don’t really remember if I did or not quite honestly. I don’t remember when we moved out of that nightmare.
Scary shit. My mother loved ghosts. She felt ghosts and literally looked for haunted houses to live in. With me. With my poor dad. Lucky for him he was out to sea most of the time. Not me. Nope…
The third time I saw a ghost, in it’s physical form, was again, in St. Augustine. I was back home, working for the ghost tours and alone in Potter’s Wax Museum for a short second after the guests file out down a hallway to the back door. Terrible, terrible place to be alone at night. I’ve never liked it in there. Even in the daytime. Anyways, here I am. And I turn around to head towards the door and I see the curtain pull back a little. I’m like, no…
Then she pops her little foggy white head up and see the little girl ghost. Smiling at me. The one they call Elizabeth I guess. That’s what I’ve heard since. But Elizabeth haunts the City Gates, while the distance is not far, that is amazing coverage for a ghost. Just saying. I don’t know who she was but years later a visitor to the Tolomato, the cemetery behind Potter’s, caught a photo of that exact same little girl. She hadn’t changed at all. They had posted it on Facebook.
Well my friends, there are some good and real one’s for the Halloween Spirit! I like to tell people always mind those hairs on the back of your neck and arms. When they rise, so should you, and get on out of there. Be Safe! Be Happy! And Have Fun!!! Love Y’all.