BE A GHOST HUNTER

I bought Todd a radio/cd/iPod player for his birthday (really I wanted it) and we’ve had it in the kitchen since Sunday. We listen to music when I’m cooking or during dinner and Will has been charging his iPod there, playing music for us. Yesterday, as I ate lunch in the living room around noon in front of the tv, I heard the radio come one. At first, I thought it sounded like a garbage truck or something on the street outside so I ignored it but eventually I went into the kitchen and the radio was on. But Cooper was sitting next to it so I thought maybe he’d stepped on it, or on the little remote and turned it on. I shut it off and forgot about it…until today when I was, again, eating my lunch, same time, in the living room…and that radio came on! No cats required! Freak out!
Now I know that it is probably just some frequency being picked up by the remote or whatever that is turning it on…but same time every day? A little fishy…

Thursday afternoon, at a regular planning meeting for the free community meal we do at the church, three of us were sitting on the couch in the parish hall, talking, while Sarah’s kids were in the nursery, playing.
The light in the hallway was going on and off and I wrote it off as the kids playing downstairs and finding the light switch and wondering what it turned on, as kids will do. It just went on…then off, not flickering at all.
Well, pretty soon, I became aware that Ce and Charlie were in the nursery, playing really quietly and well together. And that hall light was still going on…and off. On…then off. It was irregular but not at all flickery like an electrical problem. A lot of the wiring is old but the switches are heavy and stiff and require a little effort to engage.
Weird.
We tried talking to whomever might be trying to get our attention but then the light just stayed on and that was that.
Maybe some long-gone church member trying to communicate something to us about our efforts. Hopefully good…

And what home would be complete without a good ghost?
Here is the latest ghost story in our house…:

Todd is working 2nd shift this week and so both of us, especially with our colds, were still in bed at 7am, listening to the cats playing downstairs. They ran and jumped and meowed and played with some jingle bell toy…but I’m used to it. As I contemplated getting up, I heard someone yelling, “No! No! No! No! No!” over and over, similar to what I’m sure we all sound like when we are trying to get the kitten to stop scratching the furniture. I assumed it was Sophie and I groaned inwardly at her volume at such an hour, and when her father had only gone to bed a few hours before. I pulled myself out of bed and headed down the stairs, meeting little Sophie on the way. She greeted me with, “What happened? What were the cats doing?”
“I don’t know. What were they doing? Weren’t you yelling at them?”
No, she claimed. She had just gotten out of bed, awakened by the yelling herself. Will, too, was still in bed and Todd, of course, had been beside me the whole time.
So, who, I ask you, was yelling “No” at our cats?!

It was a dark and stormy night…No, really. Tuesday night/morning when the giant thunderstorm hit, rain poured down, lightning cracked and thunder more than rumbled…and Todd saw a ghost.
The crashes and booms were so loud that I jumped at each one and when the electricity went out, we were visited moments later by a terrified Sophie, clutching a toy, who crawled into bed with us and braved the storm with me. Because Todd was pushed out and he shuffled down the stairs to stretch out on the couch.

That’s when he saw a “full-body apparition” just inches from his head. He says a white figure (he thought it was me) was standing in front of the coffee table. Now Todd being Todd, he just rolled over and went back to sleep. I think he actually probably told it “Hi” when he thought it was me but still…if he had reached out his hand, he could have touched it! I am not inclined to ignore such a thing.
Keep in mind that the power was out all over town so there were not reflections or glare from the tv or streetlights.

If you know Todd at all, you know that he is a pretty straightforward type of person. He watches Ghost Hunters with me and we turn out the lights and get all scared, but he’s usually pretty skeptical. For him to tell that story about a personal experience is pretty real.

What’s bad is that now I have to wake him up to come downstairs to the bathroom with me if I wake up in the middle of the night. I see ladies in white all over the house…

I seriously suck as a ghost hunter. I am sitting here in the living room, with this laptop in front of me, listening to sounds of shuffling, scrabbling, chewing, clawing coming from the front hallway. Common sense tells me that there is somehow some sort of animal in the walls up there but my being-alone sense tells me that someone or something is there, in the actual hallway, maybe digging through one of our boxes or playing with Will’s toy he left there. It all comes down to…I am too afraid to even get up and go see let alone start doing anything productive for the day.
Will someone come over really quick and help me investigate?

My ghost hunting skills were put to the test the other morning and I think I failed.

Christmas morning, I woke up a little after 5 and, knowing I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, I just cracked open my book and read. The wind was blowing pretty hard right at our hundred-year-old windows and rain was literally pouring onto the front porch where the gutter has pulled away from the rotting eaves. Nice, huh? Anyway, lots of scary noises were about. But when I heard footsteps on the stairs and the sound of the banister rattling as if someone were coming down, I just assumed it was Sophie and Will finally venturing out and the excitement of Christmas morning was about to begin. I glanced up at the doorway (covered in plastic as well) but…nothing. No one came through it.

Whatever. I went back to my book. But there was no denying the sound the next time or the fact that I didn’t get up to go check it out, like the real Ghost Hunters would have. I was scared witless, waiting to see what would emerge behind the plastic if it wasn’t going to be my children. Ghost hunting fail.

Later that morning, Sophie, too, commented that she’d heard people on the stairs…but she also swore she heard jingle bells on the roof so I’m not sure how much credibility we’ll give her in this episode…

Ok, the last time we went to Nikko, I took my camera of course. It’s an old clunky thing that really needs replaced. So when we were walking through the shrines and mausoleum areas and the battery light indicated that the batteries were drained and at a maximum low I just thought it was because the stupid camera was losing it.

Except, yesterday, it did it again, right at the same spot in the shrine where I started noticing it before. Weird. And I hadn’t used that camera much at all in the past week since I charged it last.

You know, they say that supernatural, uh, beings? draw on things like batteries to gain energy for their manifestations…

Friday, we stopped in a place called Gnadenhutten.
This is the site of the 1782 massacre of 90 Christian American Indians as they sang and prayed. The freaky thing was that the rebuilt log buildings are in the middle of the little town’s cemetery, surrounded by headstones from last week as well as ones from the 1700’s. The museum on-site was closed, of course, but we walked around, read the signs…and looked in the windows of the reconstructed cabins. One cabin was built on the original site of the house in which the Indians prayed all night…they’re not the original cabins…but when I bent down and looked in the window, I was freaked out. It was just pitch black in there and I had to move away from the window pretty quickly… Todd was way ahead on the path.
I learned about this site from a series of books called Haunted Ohio. The author said she could hear the Indians’ voices singing…
I’m kind of glad I didn’t listen that hard…

But you can’t convince crazy neighbor D of that. He wanted to go to the cemetery last night. We had been thinking maybe we’d go to a drive-in movie (it’s not too difficult to do b/c the kids will fall asleep in the back…) but we ended up packing them into the car instead and heading to the cemetery. It’s an old cemetery, with the tall, old markers. D and I walked around and took some pictures…but this is really not easy to do w/kids waiting in the car and we went too early in the evening, anyway…about a quarter til 10…
When we got ready to leave, a police car pulled in. He was kind of ineffective, though. He just told us the cemetery closed at 7 (7 is dusk?) and that he could see we weren’t doing anything. Yeah, unfortunately, we weren’t…

I wanted to do this even more after last night. The season finale of Ghost Hunters was on—an hour and a half at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado where Stephen King got the inspiration for The Shining. All those investigators said they just started out like 15 years ago on the weekends trying to find something in cemeteries etc… I think I’d start out pretty bad though. One guy was in his hotel room at the Stanley and the closet door opened and closed among other things (they got it on film). I don’t think I could sleep in there after that, no matter how good or professional a ghost hunter I was!