20 July 2020 | Haunted houses, Your Stories, Your True Encounters
An experience that comes to my mind often is when I was in the 8th grade and my family was throwing a surprise 60th birthday party for my Grandfather. We got his sister to fly in from California back to us in Philadelphia, I had always heard of her but never met her till this time.
Well, I went to bed at my normal bedtime the night before the party and my Aunt was staying at my house to hide her from my Grandfather. I left my Aunt and my Mother in the kitchen and said goodnight. At some point in the middle of the night I woke and looked down the hallway of our rowhome and saw a light on downstairs and I figured my aunt and Mother were still catching up in the kitchen. I got halfway down the steps, I heard talking and music. The steps faced the front door of the house, the kitchen was in the back of the house. The music wasn’t anything I had ever heard my parents play, it was Big Band and my parent’s music ranged from 50’s to 70’s rock. I leaned over the railing to look at back of the house towards the kitchen. You can’t see the kitchen from the steps directly but my step father had put in mirrors in the archway alcove between the living room and dining room, so you could see a reflection of the kitchen door through the mirror. The kitchen light was on and the music was clear as day. There were muffled voices, not distinct enough for me to understand and the sound of clinking dishes coming from the kitchen.
I froze and the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I knew at that moment that if I went into that kitchen, I was not going to find my mother and aunt. I turned right around and high tailed it right back to my bedroom and hid under the blankets wondering who was in our kitchen, the room right beneath my bedroom.
The next morning after my stepfather had left for work, I found my aunt and mother in the kitchen talking about the party and updating each other on events since the last time they saw each other. I told them what I had heard and saw and they both stared at me like I was crazy. They said that they had in fact gone to bed not a half hour after me and it was not them in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning.
My mother made me tell her the story over again and was convinced it was the old lady that previously lived in the house.
Over the 10 years from the time I was 8 to 18 I had had many experiences in that house. From doors opening by themselves to a bathroom faucet turning on right before my and my cousin’s eyes. Nothing ever felt malevolent, or out to harm me but all the same it did scare me and caused me to sleep with my head under a comforter in the heat of the summer or run into my mother’s room with my blanket and pillow to sleep next to her bed on the floor.
The second story is a story of my mother’s experience.
Her mother, my grandmother who we were very close to passed away a few months before this. She was alive when this house was purchased and helped us paint and repair the house but died before we actually moved in.
My mother had sent me off to school and decided to lay on the couch for a nap before starting her chores for the day.
She was about to drift off and heard the floor in the dinning room creaking like someone was walking around the table. She immediately thought she would open her eyes and see me standing there in my catholic school uniform with some excuse as to why I needed to stay home that day, but she couldn’t open her eyes. When someone touched her shoulder her eyes suddenly opened and she saw her mother standing there dressed in her favorite shirt, smiling at her. The strange thing was that she had a yellow ribbon tied around her arm. My mother blinked and Grandmom was gone.
That experience was the topic of dinner that night and I had just learned about Purgatory in religion class and I had said that Grandmom was stuck in Purgatory and needed our prayers to get into heaven. That was when I started praying for my grandmom every night and I haven’t stopped.
My grandmom and I were baptized Catholic together from Protestant so I could attend the local Catholic school and we went to church together every week till she passed away. My mother was a single Mom and we lived with my granparents till I was 8 and she married my stepdad so I was extremely close to them. She went to work one day, had a massive heart attack and died at the hospital that day and I never saw again. It broke my heart to have someone just disappear from my life like that.
I always said my grandmother smelled like the color Yellow and Spring. Its what came to my mind when I smelled her pillow.
Well I was having a rough time still dealing with her loss and moving to a new house with a new Dad. I prayed to my grandmom one night really hard and practically crying. When I woke up in the morning my room SMELLED like my grandmom. The smell, of spring and the color yellow. I called my mom into my room and she smelled it right away. She actually kept me home from school that day and we spent most of the day, in my room talking about Grandmom. That night she had my Grandfather and my aunt come for dinner. I took my Grandfather into my room and he just sat on my bed and wept. The first time I ever saw that man cry. I held his hand and said you smell it too don’t you? He looked at me and said I don’t know how this is possible.
For weeks I refused to let my mother wash my bedding but she eventually did it while I was at school. One thing that my grandfather had given me after grandmom passed away was her pillow, because of the way I stuck my head in it and smelled her. The adults got a kick out of my reaction. That pillow smelled like my grandmom for YEARS!!!! I slept with it till I was an adult and married, my husband never really understanding why I got so upset if he borrowed it to sleep on. The darn thing was flat as a pancake and by the time I put it in a plastic bag for safe keeping it was starting to dry rot. I still have it though.
Another time I went to the cemetery with a cousin to visit my grandmom and her mother who passed from Breast cancer the year before. I sat at grandmom’s grave and my cousin went to her mother’s a few spots over. I quietly spoke to my grandmom, telling all my news and how I still missed her dearly. I said I Love You and the touch sensor on my Jeep went off, Beep Beep Beep, Not the actual alarm but the beep to say a ball hit your car or someone taps the bumper. I looked around to see if my cousin heard it. She didn’t and I said Grandmom, I love you. Beep Beep Beep again. I ran to my cousin and told her what happened and she told me to say it again. I did, and sure enough the touch sensor sounded again. Beep Beep Beep. We repeated this at least 4 more times with the same reaction.
We were ecstatic! Grandmom was hearing us and reacting.
Sorry this was so long but once I started typing I couldn’t stop. I have more stories because for some reason things just happen to me or around me, or maybe I just notice them more then other people. But I’ll save those for another time.
Submitted to Weird Darkness and My Hauntedlifetoo.com by Amy Sine
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