Supernatural Writing Contest : True Ghost Stories

           

                                                                   

            I can’t say that I believe in ghosts, but they sure seem to believe in me. Everything I’m about to tell you is true, in the sense that it was a real experience. Let me stand as the chief skeptic among us. I have had many not-so-easily explainable experiences in my life that have had significant impacts on how I was able to live. Still, I have to look at all this with a grain of logic and ask myself, “Was I really visited by mischievous beings from beyond our plane of understanding?” My response as a child was, "YES, I did not dream this stuff," but as I’ve grown older I have learned more about perception and the human brain. There is a line between truth and reality.  I will say again that these are all absolutely true experiences. I’ll leave it up to you decide if any of it was real. I'm going to tell you about two of the most significant experiences. My time living at Cripple Creek, and another time while living in Morehead. 

            The first “supernatural experience” I ever had was when I was about five, but this story happened in the early 90’s, when I was turning nine that November. It was a week or so away from starting 3rd grade at a new school and we had just moved to Cripple Creek. I lived with my grandmother and she had recently bought an old mobile home from a man on Lick Creek that we had moved to my Great Aunt Faye’s farm. I can’t be sure, but it’s possible there had been a home there before. The house my aunt lived in was built around 1900. Things got so bad living there that I slept with a bible, a butcher knife, and two pictures of Jesus under my pillow.  We had only been there a couple days, and there were no friends, or T.V. to occupy my time. It was in the evening, still plenty of day light, I was lying in bed, staring at the wall, thinking about who knows what. I look down to the foot of the bed and see a young girl standing there. She seemed to be 10 or 11 with deep brown hair that was set in heavy curls. Her hair was done in a way so that ringlets hung down the sides of her face, and there were purple bows and ribbons in her hair. She was wearing a dress that matched the bows and ribbons and looked like a silk material. She seemed very solid, full of color, and very much alive. I looked at her for a second or so and shook my head. In her place in the hallway, there was man in a red plaid flannel shirt and worn denim. He had muddy brown boots, and he was hanging from a rope. His head was down, so I couldn’t see his face, but his hair was light brown. He was swinging so softly, that you could barely see the movement. That obviously got my attention. I shook my head again and he was gone.  For the next three years, my nights were tormented by sounds and visions from the darkness of the hall. If I was smart and got to sleep before Maw went to bed at 11:00, I was fine. But on some nights when I found myself awake after her, strange things would happen. Some nights it was as simple as hearing the sounds of a newspaper rustling, as though some one was reading. Maybe a clear voice from the living room saying, “Yummy.” There was a small window above my head, and another directly opposite my door in the hallway. 

One night I was lying in bed and it was after 11:00. Outside the window above my head, I heard an odd tap. The tap wasn’t on the window, but in front of it, high above the ground. The closest thing I can compare the sound to, is one of those wind-up monkey’s that beat a little drum. That’s not the sound, I can’t really describe it, but this is the best comparison I can give. The sound was more like TUMP TUMP.  The sound started moving around the trailer at a pretty quick pace. The sound would fade as it went around either end of the trailer and grow louder as it passed the windows. The noise circled twice and then on the third pass, came up on the porch through the living room, and into my bedroom. The sound was louder as if it were all around me. I did what I always did: ran to Maw's room and got into bed with her. Her room was my only safe place. Even if it was in her floor, I felt safe enough to fall asleep.   

I knew it wasn’t the room itself keeping me safe because one night, I had to sleep in her room while family was sleeping over. The closet door was opened, and as I stared at the wood grain, it twisted and morphed into horrific faces and visions of torment. Maw would tell me, “If something was gonna get you, hit would’a  gotcha by now.” That didn’t offer much solace.  I was probably living there a year before my pillow arsenal came into play. My other defense was to wedge myself into the corner as tightly as I could, tuck the cover under me so that it was like I was in a sleeping bag, and then build a fort of stuffed animals around myself. I figured if Wrinkles couldn’t stop whatever from getting me, the butcher knife would. These occurrences weren’t constant, but frequent enough to concern my Maw (only because she couldn’t get a good night’s sleep with me bothering her).  Years later, I was talking with my Aunt Faye. She was telling us about a ghost that she used to see in her old farmhouse. For years she would wake up, and standing beside the bed there would be a young girl with brown hair wearing a nightgown. After years of this, she finally asked, “What do you want?” The girl disappeared and she never saw the apparition again. I had never told her about the girl I had seen, and we both felt a sense of confirmation from hearing the other's story. I often wonder what happened on that little farm all those years ago that cursed a little girl to haunt the land and drive that man to hang himself.     

               This is the only picture I have of the houses on Cripple Creek. You can see the trailer on the right, and the old farm house peaking through the trees in the center. 

                Ten years later I was 28, soon to be 29. I had signed a lease on a rental with some friends in Morehead, Kentucky. I was trying to finish my bachelor’s degree and this was a much less-expensive arrangement. I was moving in a couple days before the others, and was sitting in the floor going through some boxes, reminiscing over some trinkets and scraps of paper. The room was large and at one end, there was huge picture window that looked out over the street, 50 or more feet down a hill. I stood up to stretch my back and as I looked out the window, I saw the reflection of a young woman walk across. She was around 5’7’’ and early to mid-twenties. She had long, strait, brown hair and was wearing a velour-type sweater that was tan with darker brown stripes going down the sleeves. I saw her for a full two seconds or more. I was a little surprised, but not really taken aback. This was nothing too unusual for me, and there was nothing menacing about her. I didn’t end up staying in the house more than a few months because of mold issues, but I saw her two other times: I saw her standing in the corner of a recessed area that lead into the kitchen. She was darker and looked more, well, dead. Her hair seemed wet and stringy, hanging down around her face. The third time, I saw her reflection in the bathroom mirror. In the mirror, you could see down a short hallway and partially into a bedroom. She was in the door way of that bedroom, looking in my direction. She appeared as she did in the recessed doorway. Some nights, I would wake up with an overwhelming feeling that someone was in the room with me. My widows were blacked out and my room was as dark as you can imagine. I would reach out in the blackness and feel around, searching for the person I knew was there.  One of my roommates thinks they saw her one night as well. They had gotten up to use the bathroom, and in the living room, they saw a young woman sitting in front of the fireplace wrapped in a blanket. They assumed it was our other roommate and went on to bed. Our roommate confirmed that next day that it was definitely not her. The most interesting part of this encounter is what happened toward the end of my stay in this house. While I was living here, my dad died. He had been diagnosed with Mesothelioma just over a year before. I had gone back to my hometown to stay with my mother during the funeral. I woke up in bed and the young woman was sitting there on her knees looking at me. I couldn’t make out her expression clearly because I didn’t have on my glasses. That’s how I know I wasn’t dreaming; I can see fine in my dreams.  She was dressed the way she was when I first saw her. The woman appeared to be made of translucent blue light. I raised up a little and moved my hand through her. I didn’t feel anything and she just evaporated. I fell asleep and that was the last time I saw her. I was amazed that she had followed me nearly 50 miles. Nothing ever came of the encounter. The house still sits there on the little hill. No one has lived there since we left from what I can tell. I drive by from time to time, hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the window.   

These are a sampling of the bizarre things I have encountered. Throughout my life, there seems to be five-year intervals between my experiences, but nothing has happened in the past seven or eight years. I guess I’m overdue. I don’t know how I’ll respond if all this starts up again. I wonder if it’s my skepticism and refusal to just accept these encounters as fact that prevents me from having them. I won’t make any definitive claim to having seen a real ghost, but I can guarantee that all of this and more, really happened to me. I had a violent childhood and I often wonder if my experiences, at least the early ones, were symptoms of PTSD or something similar. Maybe I’m just a nut, or maybe there’s something to those little bumps in the night. Regardless of what the truth is, the reality is that they’re still pretty good stories to tell around a campfire, or on a spooky grey afternoon.