Friday, May 27, 2016

Ghosts

I'm from a family that's sensitive to spirts. This we inherited from my mother's side of the family where there were several female psychics among the relatives. I have felt ghosts and heard them, and been plagued by a poltergeist as a teenager after we moved to Westfield when I was an unhappy fifteen-year old missing the friends I grew up with.

We were talking about ghosts at work today. When my friend Darlene moved into her husband's family home built in the 30's there was some ghostly activity with objects being moved around-particularly a set of coasters that were moved and arranged about the first floor. At lunch time we'd go to  her house to eat and I'd bring my camera and take pictures of orbs on and about the staircase, a hot spot in the house.

One day I went up to the second floor to shoot some pictures in her room where things had happened. I shot a few pictures in two other rooms on the second floor, and then opened the door of the fourth room, a junk room. I snapped a series of pictures and then stood in the doorway reviewing them on the camera. I was stunned to see an orb moving from the far side of the room, across to the left side of the room, and then coming closer in each succeeding frame. It gave me goosebumps and I quickly stepped back into the hall and pulled the door shut. I hurried downstairs to show her the pictures and the first thing she said to me was, "What in the world happened to your a name badge?" I looked down and was surprised to see that my name tag, usually horizontal was nearly vertical. I hadn't hit it on anything. It was even more unnerving to discover, when I went to straighten it, that the magnet that clips it on was half inside my bra! To have something like that occur and not even be aware of it happening kind of rattled me. What a fresh ghost! She was telling Kristina about that this morning.

My parents, both gone now, haunt the house downtown where they lived on the first floor. My sister and her husband lived upstairs. My brother now lives downstairs and they've had a lot of activity there. Most recently it's the strong scent of chocolate chip cookies baking that permeates the whole house. Mom made a lot of chocolate chip cookies for us through the years. Things get moved. They hear music and voices. My sister-in-law saw someone standing behind her in the upper oven door and no longer can live in the house. She's even more sensitive to ghosts than we are. Curiously enough we all have French Canadian relatives and have inherited this trait from that side of our families.

So, when I write about ghosts in my books I'm drawing from experience. Jessica's Roommate in Miss Peculiar's Haunting Tales, Volume III, is set in the real haunted two family house I lived in. John and I lived on the first floor. My brother, who was not married at the time, lived on the second floor where the majority of the hauntings occurred, including an apparition of a man that walked right through him. His cat Smokey Joe did get locked out on the sun porch while he was at work. The ghost didn't like his high top bright red nylon sneakers and threw them around the apartment. I worked nights and tried to sleep days but there was always a lot of footsteps and thumps and thuds upstairs that were more than a cat could make while my brother was at work. Some of the events in  the fictional story are taken directly from real life events that occurred in that house.

My fiend Patrice has also led a haunted life. I need to catch up with her on that the next time we're together.

Kelly, by the way, saw our late cat Diego three or four times today passing through the kitchen. She even had to get up and check to make sure Revere was still sleeping on the couch. It was a short-aired black cat, not fluffy smoke gray and white Riley-Beans, in the kitchen. Revere was sound asleep on the loveseat in the living room while she was seeing this other cat. I've seen my Maine Coon cat, Hyper, a few times, but not recently. We had her put down when Kelly was two or three. She had cancer.

Well- our loved ones remain close. Patti told me last night that when she was here on Wednesday my mother's spirit was close to me, she could feel it strongly. Mom watches out for all three of us. It was her mother, Betty, who said, "If you don't get it right the first time, you come back again and again until you do."  Guess I'll have to wait and see what happens down the road!

Unlike horror movies, the ghosts in my life don't hurt anyone, have no evil intentions. They're merely watching over us, keeping us close. I can live with that.


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