My Real-Life Ghost Story

 

I wrote this some years back, when the events were still fairly fresh in my mind.   I have never published it, so I thought it would be appropriate to put in on the blog, for this Halloween night.

My Real-Life Ghost Story

These events occurred around 1985, while we were living in a housing development in west Edmonton called Meadowlark Village. It was a combined townhouse and high-rise development; we were in one of the townhouses. The address was 7E, Meadowlark Village, if my memory serves me correctly.

My wife and I had been together for about three years, and our son Scott was around a year old. He was a very precocious, intelligent child. My wife, Helena, and I are both university educated, her degree being in English and mine being in Physics and Mathematics. At the time we were both working full-time, with all the consequent hassles and the generally harried lifestyle that anyone in who has ever been in that position can appreciate. She has an active interest in such things as astrology and Tarot cards, with a fairly comprehensive knowledge of both areas, at least to my untutored mind. I have a generally scientific worldview, but flatter myself into thinking that I have a fairly open mind. My studies of some of the more esoteric areas of the physical sciences, such as quantum mechanics, as well as various life experiences, have engendered a more open attitude to non-materialistic aspects of reality than many with my education have. That being said, I am not one who lightly departs from the conventional interpretations of everyday life.

I state the above to frame the participants, so that the reader can judge for himself or herself to what degree the interpretation of events are a reflection of preexisting beliefs or desires to believe. It is only fair that someone who claims to have experienced peculiar events should lay out any possible biases, for full consideration.

The Meadowlark Village development was probably built sometime in the 1960’s. I can remember it existing in the early seventies, as a friend and I visited it during late elementary or early junior high years, circa 1970. At the time it was a rather exotic development for Edmonton’s west end, which mostly consisted of bungalow-type subdivisions. We were intrigued by the meandering walkways, the exterior staircases, swimming pool, sauna, and courtyards, referring to it in our secret code as ‘the maze’.

The dwelling that I eventually rented during my adult life was a three story townhouse, with two bedrooms on the second floor and a loft and storage room on the third. The main floor had a kitchen, dining room, and living room, with patio doors leading to a small enclosed yard. The floors were connected by an open staircase.

I recall being quite satisfied with the place initially. The loft seemed to be an especially nice feature. It gave us an area to set up a desk, where my wife could pursue her writing and where I could do homework, as I was taking some part-time university courses at the time. However, I quickly found that the loft was not as welcoming as I had hoped. I put this down to the fact that the open plan allowed distracting noises from the living room to make their way up the staircase, relatively un-attenuated. My wife complained of the same problem.

The first event seemed innocuous. We were sitting at the kitchen table one morning, when the front door nudged open. There was nobody there, so we thought nothing of it. I assumed that it had probably not been shut quite right and a slight breeze or difference in air pressure between the outside and inside had been responsible for its opening.

It wasn’t long thereafter that the main manifestations began. One afternoon I came home from work, and Helena asked me why I had left all the lights burning before I left that morning. She usually left quite early for work, before 7:00 a.m., while I left considerably later, taking Scott to the daycare and then heading to work at about nine. I have a somewhat forgetful nature, so I replied that I must have forgotten, although it was my usual practice to turn the lights off before leaving. However, with all the distractions involved in bundling up a small child, it would not have been very surprising to forget.

It was not too many days later when she again asked why I had left all the lights blazing. I again conceded that I could have forgotten. About a week later this was repeated. By now I was getting a bit annoyed, and protested that I did not think that I had left the lights on. I began to make deliberate efforts to ensure that I did not leave any lights on in the morning, but the pattern would repeat itself at unpredictable intervals. The problem of course, was how to prove, to myself or her, that I was not leaving the lights on. The only thing I could think of was to tick off a checklist, and clearly that seemed like a ridiculous procedure to go through every morning. Besides, it wouldn’t prove anything. Obviously, it was possible that I could tick off something, and still forget to do it.

Since we had only been together for a few years, neither of us could be entirely sure that one wasn’t playing a slightly malicious prank on the other. She could be making up the whole thing, to confuse and upset me, or I could be leaving the lights on intentionally and lying about it later, to confuse and upset her. This is one of the biggest problems when confronted with peculiar events, especially when they are relatively trivial in nature.

Another possibility that presents itself is that one or the other of you is going slightly crazy, and you have no way of verifying who it might be. You begin to mistrust your own memory of only a few short hours ago. Did I turn the lights off or not? I was certain that I did, but later, how could I be sure? It is quite maddening, in a small way. Fortunately for both of us, Scott was too small to even reach the light switches, so at least we didn’t have to turn wondering eyes upon our son.

Shortly afterwards, these spontaneous light turnings- on began to occur while we were at home, usually in the evening. They were focused on the loft, on the third floor. Helena would find the lights on in the middle of the evening, when she was sure that they should have been off. As I mentioned earlier, we didn’t use the space much, due to the TV noise coming up the staircase, so it wasn’t likely that either of us would have put them on ourselves. Even more curious was the fact that the light in the third floor storage room would often be unaccountably on. This room was only accessible through a door in the loft, and the light was on a pull chain. We seldom went in there, as we used it for long-term storage type items, not things that we would routinely be retrieving. There quite simply was very little reason to go into the room. In fact, we wouldn’t have even know that the light was on or off, other than the thin line of light that would show up at the bottom of the door.

Scott, who as I mentioned earlier was a lively and intelligent child, was just into his crawling phase. He loved to crawl and explore in the way that babies do, with one of his favorite activities being to crawl up the staircase. He could only crawl up, not down the staircase, so we were constantly having to retrieve him from the landings of one of the upper floors. At about this time, he began to avoid crawling up to the third floor. On the odd occasion when he did, he would start crying, and we would rush upstairs to retrieve and comfort him. This spooked us a bit, as babies are reputed to be able to sense things that adults can’t.

At first we had joked that my apparent forgetfulness with the lights was really the work of a ghost, but now that things seemed to be occurring while we were home, the joke was wearing thin. The whole thing was becoming unnerving, especially for Helena. She was the one now that was sure that she had turned off lights, only to find them unaccountably turned back on. I was never as sure about the lights, but her worries were definitely beginning to affect me. In the mornings, while I took my shower, I would find myself worrying about Scott, who was still sleeping in his crib. I would hurry through my shower to check up on him, but thankfully there was never any problem.

One night, in the wee hours of the morning, Helena got up while I was sleeping, to use the bathroom. From the bathroom, which was on the second floor next to our room, she could see the lights burning upstairs. She was entirely positive this time, that they had all been off when we went to bed. She reports that it took all the nerve she could muster to walk up those stairs and shut the lights off. Opening the door to the storage room, and quickly going in to pull the chain to turn that light off, was particularly scary. She fairly flew back down the stairs, crawled into bed, and curled up against me. As she said later, “nothing in the world could have got me out of bed again that night, until the morning came”. I slept through this scene, blissfully unaware.

Helena has a friend who is a bit of a mystic, so she called her up and told her about the goings on. Lorrette is a Metis woman, with sensitive eyes and knowledge of both native and European traditions. She came over to do some sort of reading of the situation. She said she felt a powerful influence, most likely of a young girl, perhaps about five years old. She believed that the girl had died in a fire, shortly after moving away from the townhouse, and her spirit was returning there, as that was the place that she was most familiar with. Lorrette said she had probably had her bedroom in the loft, and that is why the focus of the events was there.

That seemed like a good yarn, but I didn’t put too much stock in it. I worked at a volunteer agency at the time, and occasionally related to the people there that there was something strange about our townhouse. One fellow, a French Canadian from Montreal, named Guy became quite interested. It turned out that he was more than just a die hard fan of the Montreal Canadians; he too claimed to have some psychic abilities. I bade him to come to the house and have a look around if he wanted. One more opinion couldn’t hurt. I was careful not to tell him any details about Lorrette’s reading.

He came over later that week and after a coffee and some hockey talk, he asked to see the loft. I took him upstairs and he did a walk-around of the loft and storage room. Then he went into a slightly spooky bit of a trance. His reading of the situation was eerily similar to Lorrette’s. He too said that he felt the presence of a young child, probably a girl. He didn’t mention anything about a fire, but did ask me if I had found a particular object that he had envisioned. He mentioned something long and thin, perhaps a pipe, with a crosspiece at the end. I told him that I hadn’t come across anything like that, but was impressed that his story was so similar to the other one we had heard.

Things continued to happen, but less frequently, after that. Still, the whole experience had been unsettling enough that we decided to move ( plus, the rent went up). We put in our notice, and appropriately enough, moved out on Halloween night. A few friends helped me move.

We were moving stuff out of the storage room beside the loft, when my friend Marvin came across something poking out of the sawdust insulation between the open rafters in the far end of the storage room. He picked it up, and eyeing it quizzically, asked me if I wanted to take it with me. As I examined it, a chill went through my veins.

It was a long thin piece of bamboo, perhaps three feet long, with an X shaped configuration of black tape at the end. That fit the description of “a pipe, with a crosspiece at the end” pretty well. Perhaps it was the little girl’s home-made magic wand. There was no way that my French Canadian psychic friend could have planted it there; it was too big to conceal, and I had been with him all the time anyway. I told Marvin to put it back where he had found it. I definitely did not want that thing, whatever it was, to follow us to our new home.

Since then, we have had no repetitions of any experiences of this sort in any of the places that we have lived in. Of that, I am glad, and so is my wife. Looking back on it, the experience was interesting, but not one I am eager to live through again. Even though nothing threatening ever happened, it was deeply unsettling to have my normal notions of reality challenged. Many people might think these events to have been misinterpretations of perfectly natural occurrences, or even fabrications. With the passage of time I sometimes have doubts myself. But then I remember the chill I felt when seeing that bamboo object, just as Guy envisioned, and my doubts are dispelled.

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Here's a fictional ghost story that my wife wrote and published.  It is free on Amazon right now.

Beyond the Blue Door

Here's a tale of a haunted house, of a sort.

Really, two haunted houses are involved. But where does the greater evil reside - in the safe family domicile of our everyday world or in the creepy old abandoned farmhouse? And then there’s the question that we must all face eventually. What lies Beyond The Blue Door?

 

Amazon U.S.: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OX60XJU
Amazon UK:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00OX60XJU
Amazon Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00OX60XJU
Amazon Australia: http://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B00OX60XJU
Amazon Germany: http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00OX60XJU
Amazon Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/B00OX60XJU