Bobby

If you've ever been to my house, I don't have to tell you what the creepiest room is.  Aside from the basement (which we essentially pretend doesn't exist), the room that freaks people out the most is our downstairs bathroom.  Why?  Who knows.  

Last weekend, we had some friends over.  One of my especially-afraid-of-ghosts friends took her two year old daughter into the bathroom to go potty.  They came running out a few seconds later.  Apparently, my sweet little toddler pal started talking to someone named "Bobby" while she was  in there, causing her mom to have a panic attack.

A few hours later, her teeny tiny bladder was full again.  She had to go potty.  Again.  So, with reluctance, her mom took her into the bathroom.  Again.  After about ten seconds, she was yelling my name.  I ran into the bathroom to find her wide eyed and shaking.

"She started talking about Bobby again and I can't handle it," she told me.  "So you have to stay in here with us."  I looked at my little princess seated on her porcelain throne.  She was smiling.

"Is Bobby in here?"  I asked her.  She smiled and nodded.  "Where?"  She pointed to the bathtub.  My friend started backing out of the bathroom slowly, torn between her fear of ghosts and her motherly instinct to protect her daughter.  I walked over to the shower and opened the curtain.  Nothing.  But she seemed to see something.  "Do you see him?" I asked.  She nodded again.  "In here?"  

She smiled, hopping down off the toilet, then waddled her naked baby booty to where I was.  She looked into the bathtub, then made the cutest little gasping noise as she appeared to watch something rise up slowly out of the bathtub, to the ceiling, then hover above the sink.

"Is Bobby up there?" I asked.  

"Yeah," she whispered.  With that, her mom grabbed her and fled, using the kitchen to clean her up and wash her hands.  Huh.  Bobby.  That's a new one.

A couple of things you should know- my friend's two year old has no clue that people think my house, the bathroom, especially, is haunted.  Also, my landlord's name is Bob.  And he lived in the house back in the 90's.  He's still alive, obvi.....but what if there was once a Bob Jr., or, Bobby????  Things that make ya go...

HHHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.............

The Door At The End Of The Hall

There is one room in our house that was not investigated during our paranormal investigation last fall, and it's perhaps the creepiest room in the whole house.  Our main floor bathroom.  People are terrified of it.  A lot of our guests opt to use the bathroom upstairs instead, some of our more rustic guy friends use the great outdoors when they have to tinkle (which are also haunted, I might add), some refuse to go to the bathroom at all in our house, and those who do use it usually either take someone with them, or come running back out of the bathroom like a bat out of hell after they hear something or something falls down or tips over.  (Which always happens.)

Our bathroom is at the end of a long, narrow hallway, kind of separated from the rest of the house.  And I'll admit, even with all the crazy things that have happened in our house, it's the one room that still gives me goosebumps on the regular.  Especially at night.

I mentioned this to the paranormal investigator that's getting ready to come back out and do some more investigating next month (more on that in a minute), and he said that haunted bathrooms are pretty common.  Who knew?  He said there's a theory among paranormal investigators that it has something to do with the water and the pipes, that spirits are drawn to them.  So, maybe there's something to that whole "Bloody Mary" urban legend afterall??



Anybody gotta pee?

Now, back to that other thing I mentioned.  We are having our house investigated again by one of the investigation teams that came out last fall.  Most likely, some time in March.  To answer your questions: YES, I'm insane.  And YES, I'm worried.  (A little.)  Here's the thing, though.  All of the "experts" are in agreement that our ghosts aren't evil or bad.  Quite the opposite, actually.  The fact that they were so willing to communicate and cooperate with the investigators and so active even with the ghost-busting equipment there means that they WANT to talk.  They've got something to say.  And call me crazy, but I want to know what that "something" is! 

In addition to further research being done on the property, there is now a bonafide historian digging into the history of the house and the property it's built on.  I cannot waaaaait to see what he finds. 

In response to my announcement last night about the upcoming investigation, one of my friends suggested that I'm going to make the ghosts mad, and that they're going to start coming at me Poltergeist style.  Another friend said, "There is going to be a creepy preacher that shows up at your screen door and demand to come in! Don't let him in!!!"  At which point I informed her, he's already been to our house.  THREE TIMES. 

The first time was shortly after I signed the lease, but a good couple weeks before we moved in.  I was there painting and working on the house when there was a knock at the door.  It was a creepy old man in a black suit, with a gray comb over and eery blue eyes.  He was holding a briefcase and had the weirdest smile.  There was a small, elderly woman with him with curly orange hair and glasses.  She didn't speak, just stood there and smiled.  He wanted to talk to me about my salvation.  I told him I wasn't interested.  As he walked away (which puzzled me, because we live on a very busy highway with no sidewalk, and he had no car), I thought, "Man, he was like that creepy dude from Poltergeist."  I wondered if he was there because he knew something about the house that I didn't.  (At that point, I had no idea it was haunted.) 

He came back again that summer, a couple of months after we moved in.  I was home alone, doing some cleaning upstairs when I heard the doorbell.  I looked out the window at the top of the stairs and saw him and the same weird old lady standing on the porch.  I knew the door was locked, so I just ignored them and they eventually went away.  The third time was this past fall.  And I swear to GOD my husband answered the door and talked to him.  I remember it clear as day.  My husband, however, has no recollection of it whatsoever.  Weird, right?

"Excuse me, ma'am, may I come in?"

BOOM.

Soooooo.....I finally did it.  And by "it," I mean a few different things.  I:

• Put out an open call for help to anyone who knows anything about historical research to help me figure out if my house is built on an old Indian burial ground or the former home of a serial killer or something- anything that would explain the level of activity in the house and on the property.  I've Googled the heck out of this place, and it's just not getting me anywhere.
• Sent an e-mail to one of the paranormal investigation companies that participated in the investigation at our house last fall, asking if they'd be interested in coming out again and investigating further.  (On the condition that they try to research the history of the house, as well.)
• Sent a super creepy, stalkerish message to a prior tenant of the house, who I located by way of mail that still comes here in his name, asking if he knew anything about the history of the house, or if anything happened to him and his family when they lived here.

So, with any luck, one or all of these olive branches will lead to some MOTHER FLIPPIN' ANSWERS.  Because it's time.  It's really, really time.

Within These Walls...

I always tell people my house is “in the country,” but I feel like that’s sort of a lie.  It is, pretty much, in the country.  But it’s also on a main highway that is busy at all hours of the day and night.  So we’re not out in the middle of nowhere.  But…we are cutoff from society, for the most part. 

Our nearest neighbors are across the street, but since our street is actually a busy highway, it’s not like we can just run across the road and ask for a cup of sugar or an extra egg if we need one.  Our neighbors to our west are on the other side of the marsh and a mini-forest.  We can’t even see their house.  Our neighbors to the east of us are close-ish.  If I stood outside and yelled SUPER loud, they could probably hear me- only if they were outside too, though.

I’m telling you all of this to highlight the fact that the only noise we ever hear, besides the insanely loud road noise, is our own.  Lawnmower?  Ours.  Snow blower?  I wish.  Kids being loud and crazy?  Those are definitely ours.  It’s important that you understand this before I tell you what happened to me yesterday.

Yesterday, I had the day off (thank you, Presidents of yesteryear!)  I was home alone, and after spending the morning working on things around the house, I decided to get dressed and go to the store.  I was in my room, half naked, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a chainsaw firing up outside my bedroom window.  A CHAINSAW.  OUTSIDE MY WINDOW.  I almost shat myself.  True story.  With shaky hands and my heart in my throat, I tiptoed to the window in my room that was furthest away from the noise and peeked through the blinds, fully expecting to see Leatherface staring back at me. 

It was my landlord.  He’d come over, unannounced, to chop down the remnants of a tree that fell during our last major windstorm.  Oh, that Bob….

I was thinking, as my pulse slowed back down to a normal pace, about how long it’s been since we’ve had an “incident.”  It’s been at least a couple of weeks.  That’s gotta be a record.  Be careful what you wish for, right?

Last night, I was cleaning up the aftermath of my 14 year old’s birthday party.  We’re talking soda splattered on the walls, food crushed into the floor, holes in the walls, broken glass (P.S. He is NEVER having another slumber party).  As I was cleaning the floor for the tenth time, I noticed that him and his friends had been so rowdy, they’d knocked loose a couple of floorboards that had apparently been cut out of the flooring and replaced years ago.  (Important fact: When we moved into the house last spring, I pulled carpet out of the upstairs bedrooms that had been therefor decades.  So whatever was underneath it had been there for a good long while.) 

I removed the pieces of floorboard, and what I found set my heart racing instantly.  What was hiding under my son’s bedroom floor was a multilayered contraption of weirdness.  Two boards, nailed together so that one was facing north/south and the other was facing east/west, sort of like a cross only not really.  I believe they were nailed together like that so they would be impossible to remove from under the floor without removing all of the nails first.  On top of the criss-crossed boards was an old, dusty manila envelope, folded over multiple times.  On top of the envelope were four smaller strips of wood, all nailed down.  I had to pry them up, one by one, to get to the envelope.

I was giddy, wondering what I would find.  An old love letter?  A murder confession?  Money?  Savings bonds?  Photos?  Gaaaah!  I was so excited, my hands were shaking as I finally broke the envelope free from its shackles.  What I found was…..unexpected.  Baseball cards from the 1950’s, one of which looked like it had been cut from the back of a cereal box.  These weren’t some young boy’s hidden treasures, however.  Each card was folded into teeny, tiny pieces, and had a nail going right through the player’s head.  Ummmm……???

I don’t even know what to say.  Was it some sort of weird baseball ritual?  A voodoo curse?  I have no idea.  I did Google the players today, Eddie Joost of the Philadelphia Athletics and Jim Pendleton of the Milwaukee Braves.  They both lived long, seemingly happy lives, and only died within the past few years.  (I’ll be honest, I expected to find that something horrible happened to them both in 1952, which is the year I’ve deduced the cards were hidden under the floorboards.)

Add another mystery to the list.  We’ll file this one under “WHAT THE HECK?!”  Seriously, I have no idea what to think.  This has got to be my strangest discovery to date, aside from maybe the old arcade games in the barn.  It just makes me wonder….what else is hiding within my walls and under my floors?   And what’s hiding in the attic?  Oh, did I never mention that?  Yeah, we totally have an attic.  What’s in it?  I can’t tell you…..because none of us have ever been up there.  Cue the Twilight Zone theme song…..     

Playtime

I was in the middle of a meeting at work this morning when my phone went off.  Normally, I would have ignored it.  But since The Teenager had called me from school just before my meeting started saying he didn't feel well, I checked it immediately.  It wasn't a call from the school, rather a text from my husband.

"I know you're at your meeting, but I gotta ask you.  Did you hear the two little boy voices playing in our room at 4 this morning?"  (Important fact: None of our children were home last night or this morning, it was just the two of us.)

Say whaaaaat?!  While it was certainly disturbing, it wasn't an emergency, so I waited until after my meeting to respond.  The answer, however, is no.  No, I did not hear two little boy voices in my bedroom this morning.  I actually slept okay last night, for a change.  It was thunderstorming.  Yes, in Michigan in January.  I looooove thunderstorms.  They relax me and help me sleep.  So I heard nothing. 

A stickler for details, I had to know what, exactly, he heard.  According to my husband, shortly after it began storming, he heard two little boys laughing, and then one said, "It's my turn."  "My turn" to what?!  Scare the crap out of these nice people who are just trying to sleep?  Good job, little ghost boys, good job.....

She's Like The Wind. Who Is? You Know, Karen....

I’ve been under the weather all week.  My hope is that it’s just the remnants of the nasty flu bug that tore through our house with a vengeance over Christmas break, and that I’m not getting sick again.  What does this have to do with our haunted house?  Well, nothing really, aside from the fact that I tend to feel worse when I’m at home, but that might just be because it’s the end of the day and I’m exhausted.  It simply serves as an explanation as to why I was having a terrible night last night, which is where the story I’m about to tell you begins.

When I laid down to go to sleep last night, my head was pounding.  Not hurting, but literally pounding.  Pulsating.  Throbbing.  It kind of freaked me out.  I thought I was going to have a stroke or a brain aneurysm or something.  Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep.  I would drift off for a few minutes, but then the pulsating would rip me right out of dreamland and drop me back into my cold, uncomfortable bed in my cold, dark room.  Probably around 12:30 or so, I turned off the TV and committed myself to falling asleep.  I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself with my breathing, attempting to ignore the super bass dance party going on inside my brain.  It was working!  I could feel the weight of sleep bearing down on me. 

And then, right before I fell asleep, I heard it.  “Karen.”  A woman’s voice, in my ear, clear as day.  A voice, I might add, that sounded very much like the female voice caught on many of the EVPs during our paranormal investigation.  She said, “Karen.”  I bolted upright in bed, the pounding in my heart now matching the pounding in my head.  I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and turned on my flashlight app, quickly scanning the room.  Nothing.  Not that I really expected to see anything, as I’ve never seen anything (or anyone) before.  Then again, I’ve never actually heard a voice like that before, either. 

Knowing that I most definitely wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon after that, I got up.  I decided to research my symptoms on WebMD and self-diagnose my illness, which is never a good idea. Especially not at 1 in the morning.  For once, WebMD didn’t scare the bejesus out of me.  It informed me that I was most likely suffering from a migraine.  I’ve had migraines before.  Usually they’re really, really painful.  This one was just bothersome.  I wasn’t completely convinced it was just a migraine, but I decided to take a couple Ibuprofen anyway.  Couldn’t hurt.  (I also considered taking a Xanax, since one of our ghosts seemed to be in the mood for girl talk, but I refrained.)

In all the commotion, what with me jumping out of bed, turning the TV back on, surfing the internet and getting up to get medicine and water, my husband decided the couch would be the best place for him to try to sleep since he had to get up for work in four hours.  So he left me alone.  With….Karen?  Super.  (In his defense, I didn’t mention to him the whole ghost voice thing, so he had no clue that aside from being sick, wide awake and crazy, I was also scared.)

I propped my head up on a stack of pillows, turned the TV to a home shopping network (boring enough that I wouldn’t want to watch it , but having a little company was nice), and tried to fall asleep again.  SUCCESS!  I didn’t move until my alarm went off, a whole five hours later.  I took a shower, then went upstairs to wake the boys up for school.  They are still enjoying the newness of our homemade trundle bed, so they were sleeping in the same room together.  At some point (probably during my shower), the puppy had joined them under the covers.  Our other dog, Sammy, was passed out on the couch downstairs.

I sat at the end of the bed, talking to them both and gently trying to wake them.  Turns out, I had some help.  There was a loud crash in the hall outside the bedroom we were in, as if someone had thrown something.  They both sat up straight.  “What was that?”  The teenager asked sleepily.  I assured them that “something just fell.”  (Upon investigation, I discovered that nothing had fallen.)  Then, while they were still trying to wake up, it happened again.

It’s hard for me, sometimes, to maintain a calm façade in front of the kids when creepy things happen at home.  In theory, I know our house is haunted and I’m cool with it.  But when things happen, I get freaked out sometimes.  This was one of those times.  “Mama, what was that?”  E-Man asked.  “Ummmm….the wind,” I answered.  Yeeaahhhh, we’ll go with that.  The wind.  Whose name, apparently, is Karen.

Do We Stay Or Do We Go?

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since we moved into our “spirited” new home.  My, how time flies when you’re being haunted!  The end of our first year in our haunted farmhouse means the end of our lease…..which means we have a big decision to make.

When we first got confirmation from bonafide professionals that our house is haunted, most of our friends and family expected us to pack up and move out in the middle of the night, even though we were only about halfway through our one year lease.  Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

I’ll be honest, I’m definitely glad that we’re renters instead of homeowners at this point in time.  It gives us some freedom.  If sh** ever gets all Amityville Horror on us, we can abscond swiftly without having to worry about things like deeds and realtors and mortgages.  I’ll simply call my landlord out on knowingly renting out a haunted house, forfeit my security deposit, and that will be that.  But….for now….

We’re happy.  Things are peaceful.  And I love our house.  It’s spacious.  It’s got more character than just about any house I’ve seen.  It’s home, even with its quirks.  But with our lease ending in a couple of months, we have a decision to make.  Do we stay or do we go?  Our decision might surprise you.

The only way our house being haunted factored into whether or not we wanted to renew our lease was if A.) scarier, more serious incidents started occurring, or 2.) the kids were too freaked out and uncomfortable to stay.  I’m happy to say, neither has been the case.  So we’re staying.

YOU’RE STAYING?!?!  Yes.  We are.  We have a reasonable landlord who’s flexible when it comes to paying rent a little bit late (and unfortunately, that happens occasionally.)  If something breaks down, we don’t have to cover the cost out of our own pockets to fix it.  Our kids are just now starting to feel at home.  And…we HATE moving!

Reading this, you probably think we’re insane.  But here’s something to consider: this is real life, not a scary movie.  Most people who are afraid to come to our house (and there are a lot of them) are pleasantly surprised by how homey, laid back, and un-haunted it feels when they finally work up the courage to come visit.  There aren’t apparitions hiding in the shadows, waiting to jump out and possess people.  There’s not ominous music playing in the background.  (Although….that’s a good idea. I should try that sometime.)  Ghosty things don’t happen ALL the time.  In fact, they either very rarely happen at all anymore, or I just don’t notice them as much.

Besides, if we do move, who’s to say our next house won’t be haunted?  Who’s to say YOUR house isn’t haunted?  Have you ever had it investigated?  No?  Then you can’t be certain, can you?  Chew on that while you’re lying in bed tonight.  You’re welcome.