Ghost Case: He Came In the Night

My family moved into Aspen Grove when I was a little toddler. The sights and sounds of the house to me were perfectly normal. Children adapt to realities, like tossing your ball in the air results in it coming back down every time and the sound of a sister screaming at the other sister in another room can be heard through even the thickest walls.

When we first moved in, our family dog, King (a Collie/German Shepherd mix) had some issues with--nothing. My mom would watch the dog growling at the wall, backing off from the center of the room, snapping at something not there, then jumping as if he had been kicked, tail between his legs, howling and rushing off, nearly going through the closed side door. My mother eventually got spooked by his reactions to what seemed to be something he was aware of that she was not. Eventually, King would not come in the house anymore and remained the rest of his 15 years outdoors. We set him up a sweet doggy place in the shed, but he would not go near the inside of the house again.



Then, while father was away on his work that took him off in all hours of the night to locations around the country, mom would lie in bed alone and listen. The house seemed to come alive the minute the last person went to bed. Was it settling sounds? Well, nope. One time, father heard it too and commented. She felt great relief.

One day, an old owner of the house visited and lightly mentioned the ghosts. My mother blinked. She was not a believer in ghosts, but the woman explained a story that gave my mother shivers.

"During the Civil War when the home was being used as a field hospital, a young soldier was upstairs in bed when shooting erupted outside. He rushed out without his boots that his parents had given him. He was shot and killed outside. Every night, he still walks the stairs and hall looking for his boots."

My mom, being a closet historian and an art teacher, found some romance in that story and took pity on the soldier. She began to haunt the library and City Hall in search of information about the home's history. I grew up in the dusty records rooms glancing through old soldier's diaries and other books while mother gathered her information.

And, every night I heard him. Booted feet, walking up the stairs, then down the hall to the middle bedroom. He only took a few steps into the bedroom and then in front of the radiator, the board would creak and that was the end of his vigil. As a kid believing my life was being guarded by unseen soldiers, I would turn and whisper to him, "good night." It was a ritual I grew to appreciate until I became a self-conscious adolescent and the thought of a man in my bedroom was kind of creepy. So, I took the end bedroom in the newer part of the house that had no activity.

One night, tired of telling stories of the ghosts and having kids scoff at them, I sat down on the middle of the stairway, turned on my dad's recorder and waited. He started up the stairs. It was the first time I'd been there when it happened and it seemed to go so quickly and then he was on the board I sat on. And, for the first time in all those years, he paused a moment and then continued on. I held my breath and exhaled as he headed down the hall. I realized in that moment that he seemed to have sensed me just enough to stop a moment and wonder before finishing his trek.

It was in that moment one of my theories began and still persists--perhaps they are not the only ghosts; perhaps we are ghosts to them.

New Point-Comfort: A Southern Tale of Haunting Part 3 of 3

(Above: Graves in the grass, house in the distance)

Across from the summer home was a cemetery. When we were kids, we'd forget it was there because the grasses would grow up and no one would cut them back. Each summer we'd arrive and rediscover it as if we forgot it even existed. There weren't many headstones, but they were scattered out and if you ran through the grass and didn't know it, you could whack into one and knock the wind right out of you. More than a few times, I would get tackled by one.



In the evening around twilight when it was more dark than light outside and the lightning bugs cradled the pecan trees outside the turret bedroom, I would sit there and brush out my long hair and sit on the bed, studying the direction of the cemetery.

It didn't happen all the time, but upon occasion, a blue ball of light, perhaps the size of a baseball or softball would float around in the graveyard, going up and down, weaving in and out of the grasses, obscured by a headstone, rising back up again and flickering slightly before it fizzled out. These blue balls of light were usually just one, but a couple of times, another ball of light joined it, not dancing with it, but also in the same area, moving up and down, in and out. These lights were unusual. They were soft, but not fuzzy as if the light were contained within the ball shape, yet the moisture in the air seemed to make them seem a bit softer looking and not perfectly sharp edged.



I went racing out a few times to try and intercept the blue light, but it would be gone. I did notice where it was in relation to the plants around it. There were headstones below the grasses, but sometimes the light seemed to dance far away from the house and graveyard before I could no longer see it, so it didn't seem to be particularly seeking a certain spot.

What were these magical lights? I'll never know, but I tend to think that in the swampy area, it could have been some unusual phenomena that is nature-based in origin. It didn't seem to pick a particular grave to hang around.

These sorts of mysteries have plagued me all my life, trying to figure out what factors made it show itself one night and not another, what might have instigated it, if it was based on geology or some other conditions, perhaps even spirit-based. I seek answers to these wonders and I wonder at their answers.

Now, you officially know from last week's stories about Aspen Grove and this week's about my summer home on the Chesapeake, what made me come up with theories and seek knowledge and insight.

New Point-Comfort: A Southern Tale of Haunting Part 2 of 3

The New Point-Comfort Lighthouse. It was a favorite sneaky getaway. Whenever we could hijack someone with a motorboat to ride us, we kids loved this place. The lighthouse was abandoned at the time, just sitting atop a rock island in sad and sorry state, but still a magical retreat!

One time, my brother and I sneaked away to it. We climbed the steep stairs with no railing. We'd put a hand on the wall to guide us as we climbed up, our eyes turned skyward in wonder of the more narrow passage as we got near the top. I remember as a kid, sitting there at the top, my brother playing lookout for pirate ships, when I would hear the heavy steady footfalls up the stairway. It almost reminded me of the footsteps at Aspen Grove, but the boots were different, not hard on the bottom, perhaps rubber soled and the steps were taken in a steady cadence, without missing a step. It took some time for the sounds to come up the winding stairway, but they would always end before coming to my perch at the top steps. Many times, I raced down to see who it was. There was no one. The tiny rock pile of an island was all ours.

More than a few times, I heard a man chuckling in the entryway, a slow faintly amused sound. The smell of pipe smoke would waft by in that area, but not anywhere else in the lighthouse.

I never felt threatened. He seemed to be a caretaker of sorts. I later asked my brother if he thought the lighthouse was unusual and he snorted with laughter. "What? You mean the footsteps and the man laughing? Oh, and the pipe smoke and the shadows?" I remember shivering when he mentioned that. I hadn't seen any strange shadows. He told me that when we climbed the stairs, he could see a shadow up above as if someone were pacing in the light's turret.



Well, one more ghostly story of the summer home for tomorrow's post and my unusual and charming childhood has been told.

**Get ready, every Friday I'm posting "Candlelight Tales," videos done by candlelight with wine in which I tell you in under 5 minutes a spooky story from my life.**

New Point-Comfort: A Southern Tale of Haunting Part 1 of 3

(Above: Old vintage picture of the summer home in New Point-Comfort, a quiet town on an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay near a dock on a place called "Doctor's Creek.")


(Above: Not much different when we owned the place)

My father was retired from the Navy, having been in the Asiatic Fleet during WWII and Korean Wars. He was a water-loving boy from Norway. He needed to be on the water. So, my parents found this charming Victorian home on the southern part of the Chesapeake in Virginia, complete with a dock and a 37-foot cabin cruiser called the Vixen II.


(Above: Vixen II)

The home was interesting. It was on some stilts which was a good thing because a few times we went down to board up the home for a hurricane and ended up having to sit it out inside.

When we bought it from a well-to-do older bachelor, he let us having the contents of the house too which was furnished with amazing antiques and a library filled with books from the 1800s. The floors were all yellow pine. Downstairs, there was an entry way with a stairway, a library, a large living room, a big kitchen and a bathroom. There was also a long screened in veranda. Upstairs, there were three bedrooms, one of them an odd shaped one inside the "turret."


I kept the "Captain's Chair" supposedly carved by a sea captain in the 1800s. This gem sat in the library room where I would curl up on a rainy day and read the ancient books. In fact, I kept my favorite book from there, as well. It was the only children's book and used the term "soused," which for a kid I put into context of the character and figured he was mentally handicapped.



We would come in the springtime, plant a vegetable garden in the rich soil and go back home. When we came back in the summer, the garden was filled with abundance, there were pecan trees and us kids would rush to the docks to drop crab traps with chicken necks in them to catch blue crabs.

At 4 in the morning when the tide was low, father would wake us kids up and we'd pile into a rowboat with a lantern on the bow. We'd be sleepy and yawning but excited to go on an adventure in the dark. He'd row us way the hell out in the bay and we'd jump overboard into 3-foot deep water and walk around, feeling for clams and then dive down and get them and fill up the floor of the boat until sunrise.

It was there in the pitch darkness of the bay that we would hear the woman. She would call out one word, it sounded faintly like a name she was calling. A name that ended with an "ee" sound. We debated what she was calling. My father would gesture and we would all stand there in the warm bay water eyes darting all around us to figure out where the voice came from. There was no rhyme or reason. She would repeat it a few times in a row, be silent for minutes, yell it once, then nothing for 15 or 20 minutes. One time, father had us pile into the boat and we sat there listening until the sun rose. None of knew where this mysterious oyster beds were located. We always left in the middle of the night. When the light came up, we realized we could only see the tiniest hint of some land in the far off distance, a jut of land we knew was marshes and held no homes.

Later, stories came back to us through fishermen in the area that the woman's voice could be heard all over the Mobjack Bay area and it came from all directions, all times of the night and sometimes the day. There were plenty of maritime stories about it, but no one ever knew who she was or why she called out. One time, we all attempted calling back, but it didn't provoke her in the least. Apparently, we could hear her, she could not hear us.



This kind of living off the land attitude was important to our parents. They grew up in the Depression Era and knew how important survival was. Ironically, this lifestyle got me very attuned to the earth and healthy eating habits. They wanted us to have a rich childhood, but one that was grounded to the earth and not belongings which was why they never bought a TV for the house and did not buy toys for us as children. They wanted us to be resourceful. I wasn't thankful when I wanted a Barbie Corvette, but I am so thankful now.

With no radios or TVs, so us kids would go out on crazy adventures along the sandy roads of the backwater area. It was desolate and quiet and sometimes we'd play on the boat while father pumped the bilge, trying to get the poor boat running, or we'd play in the cemetery across the sandy road from the house, or perhaps go out to the abandoned lighthouse on an island and play pirates, but those two places are better left in the next two entries of this series over the next two days...

Aspen Grove: A Southern Tale of Haunting Part 3 of 3

Kiddies, this is the final installment. Next week, there will be a 3-parter about my summer home when I was a kid, which also had some haunting features...

We sold the estate when I was 15 and my siblings were 20, 21, 22 and 28. We moved to Arizona because father's heart was bad and the cold weather and the work on the estate was just too much. He only made it a little over a year before he passed on.

I was 16 and arrived home from a sleepover to find an ambulance outside. I rushed in and saw the paramedics working on my father on the kitchen floor. They announced he passed on and my mother ushered us outside to weep when about 4 minutes later, the paramedics rushed back to say the paddles worked and they brought him back. As they wheeled my father past me, he smiled. "It was beautiful. I was at a fiord" (father was from Norway) "all my family was there, mother, father, aunt, uncles, and there were flowers that don't exist and colors that don't exist." He died a few days later in the hospital.

We had just gotten home from the hospital and had celebrated because his vital signs were good and he was alert. I went to bed in my room and during the night woke up to someone pulling on my big toe. I looked up and at the end of my bed I saw my father's outline. My father always traveled in his work and I wasn't allowed to stay up to see him when he got home. He had a close call in a plane one time and I always worried. He would come in and pull on my toe to let me know he made it home without fully awakening me for a conversation. I smiled, thinking they must have let him home from the hospital early. The telephone rang and I turned to pick it up, but someone else picked it up in another room. I turned back and he was gone. The phone call was the hospital informing us we needed to hurry. We rushed there to find him deceased, lying quietly in his bed.

The people living at Aspen Grove reported seeing my father, in the suit and tie he was buried in (his favorite traveling suit). They were having an outdoor party. They went to attend to visitors, went back and he was gone. They didn't know at the time, he had passed on. He was standing just where I would imagine my father would stand, near the croquet set. He loved to play when he was in town.

My parents had a pact to haunt Aspen Grove. They never wanted to leave, but they did what they had to at the time. My mother died 20 years later having vowed to meet him there.

Seven years later, my brother died suddenly. Before he died, he took a nap, woke up and said he was flying around Aspen Grove and he saw our deceased cousin. He mentioned the tennis courts were gone (something owners added after we moved out and he was right, they were gone).

My sister died 4 years later suddenly and we had talked a great deal about my ghost hunting and she promised to be there, as well.

Then, a couple years later, a family friend contacted me. He was a professor at the university and lived at the end of our driveway in a cottage. He was a dear friend and had done my mother's eulogy. He promised to haunt the place. What he hadn't told me is that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

It's hard to believe, but at one time a contractor bought the house, hoping to tear down the entire property and put up condos. Yes, the DC suburbs really grew up and the housing was very expensive. The neighbors and the historical society fought to protect this historic place.

A compromise was made; he had to leave the mansion and front boxwood maze gardens intact, but could build on the rest of the property. The greedy evil bastard tore up the cottages, the barn, the orchards, the rolling hills, covered over the creek, and sold his units. With a little curse applied his way, he did go bankrupt in the end, so there is some justice in life (or perhaps a bit of karmic mirroring his way in the form of ritual, hee hee). There wasn't even an archaeologist on site when the plowed up the former slave cottage/carriage house, the back boxwood maze or other parts of the property. Other owners had stripped the three huge Waterford crystal chandeliers and almost every artifact when they left.

The nice couple who live there now take excellent care of and love the home very much. They even had the show on an episode of HGTV's "If Walls Could Talk" medical mysteries episode. It feels good to know the place is in good hands.

So, Aspen Grove could potentially hold the soldiers that haunted it, as well as four family members and a family friend. My ultimate dream, of course, is to go there for a hunt with my team, the right equipment and a film crew to document a hunt like no other; a predetermined hunt with spirits waiting and willing to make contact. I don't know if such a situation has ever occurred, but it is rare and unique.

Hope you enjoyed this 3-part series. Next week, my summer home's story will be on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday.

Aspen Grove: A Southern Tale of Haunting Part 2

(Above: When we got snowed in, dad would take the old McCormick tractor and tow a car hood behind it with us kids piled up in it to pat down the snow and make it navigable).


(Above: The little cottage)



(Above: The Barn)


(Above: The Big Cottage)


(Above: My mom on the day we moved in)

The home was taken over by the North during the Civil War and used as a field hospital. Later, the South wrestled it back and used it for the same. Both sides died in there. The wood floors were still stained black with their blood. We dug up and archived an enormous amount of relics in a showcase. We found plenty of arrowheads, dolls, bayonets, bullets, guns, medals, horseshoes, wagon parts, and so much more.

For my mother, the haunting realization began as soon as we moved in. She heard the sounds of booted footsteps up the stairs at night, traveling down the hall to the middle bedroom, resting on an old floorboard in front of the iron radiator. When father was back in town from a trip, he mentioned the sounds and she felt immediate relief. Neither of them were believers in ghosts, but when a past resident came to visit and told stories of the booted soldier walking the stairs at night, they had to come up with a new reality.

The story was that the soldier was upstairs and when fighting began outside, he rushed out without his boots that his parents had given him. I guess boots were pretty precious in war times because the story was that he died outside and came back for the boots. As a budding ghost hunter, I tried leaving him some boots. Perhaps they weren't his size, but he never took them, though one morning I woke up to find one of the boots under my bed a good 3 feet away from the radiator where he usually made his resting sound for the night.

My elder siblings spoke about the ghosts at the breakfast table and as a baby growing up in the house, the term "ghost" was used as if it were an invisible family member. I was probably 7 or so before I understood what ghosts were and that not every house had one. I witnessed some very amazing things, heard things that shouldn't exist, felt things, but never thought it was unusual. I figured it was part of the world's physics, like my ball falling to the ground when I toss it in the air. My parents had a good attitude, telling us that the deceased soldiers were simply missing their families and walking the halls guarding us. They don't mean to surprise us, they simply don't know their own ability to come and go in our vision and hearing.

Over the years people in the home and cottages, as well as visitors experienced booted footsteps, objects moving, wallpaper peeling, ceilings dropping, teacups falling off their handles, things being thrown, things moving on their own while witnessed, voices, dark human shapes, apparitions, the sound of a cannonball hitting the house, outdoor apparitions, phantom smoke, and more.

When I was a kid, newspapers and even NBC came to cover the ghosts and mediums came to perform seances. The house was reported by one publication as one of the most haunted homes in America.


(Above: Just one article about the ghosts)

There were a few times in the house that I didn't feel comfortable, like when I was home alone. Then, I felt as if I were being watched more intently than usual. Then, as we were preparing to move, one poltergeist incident had me so afraid, I slept in one of the cottages until we moved. The particular stories of these hauntings can be found on the "ghost stories" tab above.

As if it weren't freaky enough in the middle of the suburbs to be the kid living in a haunted mansion on the hill that no one braved to visit at Halloween at, the house was on the historical tour and in sixth grade, my class had a field trip to my home!


(Above: Miss Koumparakis's class visiting my home)

It ended up the kids were excited to see the inside of the mansion and the display case of artifacts, to learn how to use a metal detector and have tons of room to play soccer in the front pasture. I never knew anyone was curious about the place. I just knew that on Friday nights when I called friends in the class for sleepovers, I could hear their moms in the background say "Day? Aren't they they people in the haunted house? Tell her no!"

Tomorrow, I will continue with the last installment to tell you about what lingers within the walls of that 260-year-old mansion.

**On the POE site, there is an extensive post about EVPs and disembodied voices and on the Hug-A-Blogger site there is another showcased blog**

Aspen Grove: A Southern Tale of Haunting Part 1 of 3

(Above: From the roadway. Best damn sled run ever, except you ended up in the creek!)


(Above: How it looked when I grew up there)


(Above: how it looked in the 1890s)



(Above: How it looked in the 1860s post Civil War)


(Above: How it looks today)


(Above: The grounds in the wintertime)


(Above: The grounds in the springtime)


(Above: Only a small portion of the artifacts)

A wonderful blogger with a blog about southern spirits mentioned an interest in the story of my upbringing at Aspen Grove. It could be a book, so I'm going to put it into parts each day.

Gather around, kiddies, for a southern tale best told by a gal who grew up in a very idyllic setting, although with a good deal of ghosts and a family that, well, I swear Pat Conroy wrote about in "Prince of Tides." This will be a multiple-part series this week and next week I'll do one about our Victorian summer home on the Chesapeake.

Aspen Grove was built in the mid 1700s. My mother told me it was a fort against Indians and the windows were slanted above to thwart arrows. I'm not sure about that, but the windows were, indeed, at a bizarre angle. (See post Civil War pic above)

It was originally called the "Springfield" because it had the most amazing fresh springs. In fact, those fresh springs fed our well that gave water to our home and the outbuildings which at the time we moved in included two carriage houses, a barn and stables. The water was so good, people often brought containers when visiting.

My parents had 5 kids and my mother was an art teacher and historian. The home was surrounded by property owned by George Mason University in Fairfax. It was a nice decent jaunt from dad's job in DC. All in all, an idyllic place to live. There was a glass-lined room in the front of the house that mother turned into an art studio for her classes. There was a glass lined library, as well. The downstairs contained, a pantry room, kitchen, breakfast room, art room, library, living room, dining room, bathroom and music room. The basement was unfinished and rough with a dirt crawlspace and a storm door to the outside. The upstairs held 3 bedrooms and a closed in porch made into another bedroom, as well as two bathrooms and a linen closet. The attic was a huge unfinished one never used by us.

The front yard was made up of a huge pasture, a creek with a bridge where the gravel driveway sat, an English boxwood maze in front and another in back. There were lilac, a wisteria arbor, grape arbor, magnolia, apple orchard, sour cherry orchard, walnut trees, persimmons, pears, berries, wild strawberries, a vegetable garden, and we owned a horse and boarded others.

In nice late spring weather, mother would have art shows on the grounds.


(Above: One of the artists)

The artists would set their work up within the "rooms" of the boxwood mazes. My parents entertained a lot and we had formal parties, as well as nice outdoor ones with badminton, ping pong, croquet, horseshoes events.

My parents rented the cottages out cheap to students from George Mason University. Everyone who ever visited Aspen Grove or lived in the cottages, came back over and over again and again to wander the grounds, enjoy a glass of sweet tea, and tell stories of the good old days. It was one of those places that was a retreat from all that was suburban sprawl and time actually seemed to move slower on the estate than in the surburbs surrounding it.

It was so idyllic that us children built tree forts, explored the woods and creek.


(Above: Can you blame me for wearing a hole under my favorite swing in the world?)

We made forts inside the boxwoods, built huge snow forts, had amazing sled runs where we would use a heavy weighted roller to make a path from the back door down to the cherry orchard, hose it down, put a spotlight on it and then do sledding all night long.


(Above: My best friend, Reed, and her mom trying out the backdoor to the cherry orchard run)

We lingered around the berry bushes, apple trees and grape arbor munching, played in the barn like it was a giant submarine, enjoyed flashlight tag and catching lightning bugs, camping on the property, and all the things young children adore when they are left to their own devices and no DVD players or computers and game systems.

In fact, it was so beloved, my parents vowed to haunt it...

(Tomorrow, another installment)

My Childhood Haunts: The Blue Lights

This story takes place at my family's summer home in Newpoint-Comfort, Virginia on a quiet inlet of the Chesapeake. This Victorian home had some strange things about it, but the area around it was much more haunted. The house faced a cemetery.

I grew up hanging out in cemeteries. My mother being and artist and historian loved to study the headstones. I thought of them as boring parks with awesome shade trees. I wasn't spooked by them or uncomfortable. In fact, I paid little attention to what they represented, like most kids do.

I would often go into the little bedroom in the "turret" of our summer house, an odd shaped curved room. My sister had a beautiful little vanity table with a hair brush set I loved to use. It was all romance with sheer curtains and a poster of Romeo and Juliet on the wall and the smell of fresh rosewater penetrating the humid bedspread.

At night, I would curl up on the little bed while my siblings listened to the radio or read in the library downstairs. My parents didn't put a TV in our summer home because we had a cabin cruiser, an outboard motor boat, a dock and tons of the Chesapeake to recreate on. There was little entertainment at night, except for me. I found my own form of distraction.

I would brush out my hair and sit on the bed cross legged and study the cemetery in the tiny sliver of moonlight that penetrated through the mists.

At some point a blue ball of light would show. It was a light blue and looked like it was the size of a baseball. It would move as if the wind interrupted its path, gliding up, down, sideways, darting quickly as it dropped and then rising again, weaving its way in out of headstones and tall grasses.

Sometimes, another light would join it, but usually it was just the one light. It would come from nowhere, just appearing and then leave with no sign it was going to vanish, although upon occasion I noticed it seemed to get brighter just before it disappeared.

In the daytime, I would push down the wild grass and inspect the sparse headstones in search of the magic. I was certain it was fairies. There was no other explanation in my young mind. Yes, I grew up in a haunted house, but this was not like anything at Aspen Grove. This to me was something from a fairy story. The romantic in me saw it as the souls of the dead searching for their loved ones. I found a headstone with no mate and wondered if this might be the culprit. To be buried alone seemed a horrible tragedy.

As I squinted from the grave up to the window of the house, I lined it up in my mind and walked back. That night, it rained. No blue light. Father said we were going home the next day. I was very disappointed and even drew up a map so the next time we came down, I would recall the spot I needed to look. I held the sketch up to the window and made sure it lined up.

The next day, my parents decided to stay and visit their dear friend, Mr. Mills. It was the perfect opportunity. the night was clear. I avoided the board games my siblings had set up and hiked up the curving stairway, went into the little bedroom, closed the door, turned out the light and sat on the bed, hair brush in hand, waiting patiently.

Minutes became an hour before the blue light came out from behind some tall grass. It flickered and went out. I sighed and waited. Minutes later it came back from another place in the graveyard. It was just to the left of the window as I had gauged it as he danced away from the house and then made a sudden curve and dipped down near the lonely headstone and came back towards the house again only to dissolve. I waited until I began to yawn and grow groggy.

We left the next day, but not before I went to the grave and laid out a magnolia flower from the tree near the house. I wasn't sure of cemetery etiquette, but I wished the soul well and left.

I never could explain those blue lights. In retrospect it seemed some kind of natural phenomena created perhaps by the swampy nature of the area or the enormous amounts of sulfur, as the drinking water smelled so awful of it that we often showered as fast as possible and avoided drinking it at all costs. I may not ever know if that lone grave was the culprit, but the blue light really did spend it's time around that one grave.

My Childhood Haunts: The Angry Poltergeist

Every ghost hunter has a moment when they truly want to run in panic. Mine occurred at the age of 14 when we were preparing to move from our manor home to the big bad awful west--Arizona. I wasn't happy about the move. In fact, I tried to make ghostly sounds to scare away perspective buyers with no luck.

Still, the house sold.

We'd boxed up our things to have them unpacked the next day. We had several plaster ceilings just simply dump onto the floor all at once. Disconcerting events, but not unheard of in that house. We had film crews there who watched the wallpaper peel off the walls as they walked by, so it wasn't off the charts. I had a high tolerance so I found it more or less amusing.

Then, one day when my father and brother were looking for a rental house in Arizona and the reality of the move became real, my mother, oldest sister, and myself were home alone. We sat in the breakfast room on one end of the house having lunch and discussing how we hoped they'd find a house with a pool since swimming pools in Northern Virginia were a rarity in private homes.

A huge crash sent us running through the house to the far side music room where what we saw made absolutely no sense and to this day gives me shivers. In fact, I was so hysterical that I was begging and crying to sleep in a hotel. The house didn't seem to want to let us move and I was taking it's cue after this incident. In all my years there, I never took incidents to be directed at me, but this was so violent and so unexplainable that I no longer felt safe there.

We had set up in the music room a TV tray. Those old-fashioned ones with the folding legs that clip into the tray. On top of it we had a pickle jar filled with pennies and paper rolls. We'd been stacking the pennies into stacks of 10 to put them in the rolls. Across the room, about 12 feet away, an oval painting of my mother's uncle in WWI costume was fastened to the chimney. Well, the picture with its glass cover was now underneath the folding tray face down and unbroken. The tray had come out of its clips which cannot happen without lifting it up and out of them, the legs splaying out, it had fallen atop the picture. On top of the tray, the stacks of 10 pennies were perfectly aligned. Not even slightly shifted from place. We studied it, shaking our heads and looking around us.

I slept in one of the carriage houses that night. I was too scared of the house. After that incident, more happened and escalated and the other haunting features of footsteps and voices were louder and more urgent than usual.

Still, I could handle things that were explainable like history repeating itself in sounds and smells, but I could not get my mind around how this picture flew across the room, knocking a tray up and out of its clips, ending up underneath it face down, the pennies still perfectly neatly stacked. I didn't know of any statistic that could explain that scenario ever occurring under any circumstance.

It was a turning point for me and one of the biggest influences in me later seriously pursuing more such encounters and finding explanations.

*It's my day off and I'm going to do something wild and insane that I've wanted to do ever since I was a kid, something my ex would never let me do, something that might change me forever...Details later and pics*

My Childhood Haunts: The Phantom Smoke

For those of you who haven't read my "Alone" series, I put it on the right hand bottom area of my screen. It's about places I've been alone in that people don't usually like to be alone in. Hope it gives you chills.

Today, another in my series about My Childhood Haunts--encounters I had growing up with ghosts:

Having five kids in the family could be a curse, like riding in our Cadillac together, piled into a mess in the back seat, or a blessing like when it rained and we could enjoy penny poker with plenty of players.

We had an odd phenomenon from time to time that occurred when I was growing up. When I was really little, I didn’t think much about it because my mother smoked so I was used to smoke being around the house.

The smoke I’m going to tell you about, however, was something quite different.

On the cool marble coffee table in the front room, we would sit on the sofa and play penny poker. Right behind the sofa was a huge bloodstain from the Civil War (when the house was a field hospital). We never knew if that stain was from the soldiers or from a particular incident. Beside the blackened bloodstain was a piece of metal riveted to the floorboard. A repaired patch. The story passed on to us was that a soldier tried to sneak into the cellar to steal some wine and was shot. We had no way to verify it, but it was quite obviously a very ancient repair and the bloodstain too was very ancient.

I arrived at the table one evening, waiting for my siblings to finish supper. I was the lucky one. I was so skinny that my mom would let me have whatever I wanted for supper, sometimes just a whole pot of beans (I was a finicky eater). Well, while they were trying to choke down stuffed cabbage, I awaited their arrival and began to stack up pennies for all the players so we’d start with the same amount of money.

While I was leaned back and sorting through the pickle jar of pennies for some more, my eye caught something out of the corner of it. I turned my head and there on the smooth marble table, a single swirl of white smoke rose up. It moved in a gentle funnel shape like a mini tornado until it was a foot tall and then it dissipated. I reached through the vapor to feel no heat. I touched the table. It was cold marble. I leaned forward and smelled. No scent.

This phenomenon had happened before on the same table. I’d seen it coming out of a book that was opened on the table, as well. My siblings had mentioned this phenomenon before and they all had their own theories from dust getting caught in the light coming through the window (although all times I had seen this at nighttime with the chandelier the only light on the other side of the room), to a cigar smoking general's ghost, to the poor soul who got shot trying to get some booze.

Looking back, it’s a phenomenon I can’t explain. Even as a child, I was very creative, and yet at the same time tempered by my innately logical mind. I tried many explanations for the smoke but one never seemed to fit. There was no source for smoke to arise, no heat, and no odor. So, it was a vapor. Was it ectoplasm? As a child, that’s what I thought it might be (although I always imagined ectoplasm to be like that Nickelodeon slime stuff).

With a bit more time and maturity to consider it, I wonder if it was a residual of some sort. A photographic memory in a space. When my mother came to sit at the sofa, she would lay her ashtray down there on the table. Perhaps somehow the house memorized that event and replayed it without any of the dimension (odor, heat) that would normally accompany such an event. Some sort of optical recollection. That explanation has suited me the best of any of them.

Still, I feel a strange shooting thrill whenever I see a tuft of smoke rising up. But, invariably, it’s always accompanied by a cancer stick someone just set down.

Oh well, the search for answers continues, but you can see now why my childhood made me ponder these things.

*Don't forget, you have until Thursday night at 11 pm EST to enter the contest to win the MP3 player*

My Childhood Haunts: The Drowning Nurse

When I was growing up, we had a creek running through our property. The Pohick Creek to be exact, a small tributary of the Potomac (although we always called it ‘Po’hick’ as if it were some kind of Southern derogatory name for a poor hick). The creek was fascinating. I spent most of my childhood following it into the woods where it meandered with fallen trees for bridges and mossy banks, snapping turtles, frogs, and fish. We even named parts of it that were especially beautiful like “Queen’s Throne” and “Witch’s Hollow.” I spent a lot of time too making my Barbie dolls dive off the stone bridge that spanned the driveway and creating jumps for my sled when winter came, only to break through the ice and get wet.

The creek was lined by heavy willow trees. There were five of us kids and the three middle ones were all a year apart. My mother was exhausted with their antics. Even having all that acreage, they still managed to get into trouble. One time, she told them to go to the willow trees and pick a switch for her to hit them with. My defiant middle sister came back with a log, in her own way daring mom to hit her with it. Mother laughed and the switch search parties ended. She took to middle child’s rebellion with a broom instead which was really quite comical and ineffective.

As engaging as the creek was, it apparently had a dark history. We learned of it in the summer time at twilight. It happened quite often on the hottest days just at that time when the sun was out of sight but the world was still fairly bright. You would hear a woman screaming as if she were trapped and needed help. The sound always came from the creek, one specific area near the fence. We would rush there to see what was up, but there was no one there. Sometimes, there would be claw marks in the muddy banks. Other times, the water would be disturbed and cloudy where it was usually still and clear. No matter where you were in the yard, whether you were at the hickory trees on the far opposite side of the 7 acres or if you were sitting at the creek, the woman’s screams were equally loud. My friends would want to rush and see what was happening, but I would stroll. I knew it was useless. We had done this every summer of my childhood and whoever produced the screams was nowhere to be found.

Being a person who likes explanations, I figured my mom the historian would be a good source. One day I prodded her to tell me about the creek’s history. She told me that the creek used to run like a river, quite larger than it was now. During the Civil War, the story was, a woman helping to nurse the soldiers in the house was overcome with anguish. The man she was falling in love with died. She went down to the creek and drowned herself. I asked her where the woman drowned herself and she said, “somewhere near the property line at the fence, I think. Why?”

I had to smile. I knew something my mom didn’t know. I knew about the screaming lady. Us siblings didn’t really talk to each other about it until one summer when a few of us heard it with our friends and all met at the same place. My brother, the skeptic, scoffed that there was a ghost doing the screaming. His friend looked rather uncomfortable with the idea. My friend was excited and thrilled to see claw marks in the mud and the water all dirty and churned up. I, however, was frustrated. Why did she scream if she drowned herself? My logical mind was active even as a child. It’s the curse of Virgos, I suppose.

“Did you hear the lady scream?” My mother asked me softly.

My eyes widened. “You know about her?”

“I’ve heard her.” She told me. “The summer after we first moved in. I was having my coffee on the porch. She screamed three or four times.”

“Yes!” I agreed excitedly. That’s how many times she usually screamed.

“I went down there but there was nothing. She didn’t scream again until a week later. I went down again. Nothing. She did it again a few days later. That time I gave up. I don’t think she wants to be found.”

A shiver raced down my spine. “Do you think she wants to scare us?”

My mom smiled knowingly. “I think when she went to the creek, she screamed out in anguish and then decided to climb into the creek and let herself drown. What we’re probably hearing is her last emotion before she gave up. That could be a powerful thing.”

I swallowed past the lump in my throat.

A week after that, she screamed again. This time I gathered up some wild violets and a few bluebells and went down the creek and tossed them into the spot where she drowned.

“It’s okay now.” I told her. “Go and join your sweetheart.”

I didn’t hear her the next summer, or the one after that. It could be because in adolescence, I tended to go out and about the neighborhood in search of cute boys rather than explore the property. She might have screamed. She might not have screamed. I’ll never know if she heard me or if we made a connection, but I like to think that sending that spot some positive and loving energy and an offering might have helped to erase its memories. Give it new ones.

Still, decades later at twilight in the summertime when the air is a bit thick with moisture and the scent of wet earth, I get a nostalgic tug. My body poises in anticipation. I can almost sense what’s going to come. But it doesn’t. Only in my memories and even time can’t seem to erase the impression she made on me. I feel restless and excited and at the same time scared and sad.

In truth, her ritual had become my ritual.

My Childhood Haunts: The General's Conversation

This is another in my series of my childhood hauntings. Expect a new installment on Wednesdays.

I was never scared or threatened by the haunting at Aspen Grove. In fact, as a child I determined that the ghosts of soldiers missing their families had just attached to my large family and were walking the halls at night to guard us. There was, however, one haunting feature that so disturbed me that if I were home alone, I’d stay outside on the swing set.

My parents’ master suite was an original part of the house. The largest upstairs room. Of course, used by the most important people living there. I like to think that included the troops who had set up shop in the house during the Civil War and were performing surgery on its floors. It’s the only explanation for what happened in that room even a hundred plus years later.

We had three huge Waterford crystal chandeliers downstairs in the house; one in the music room, one in the dining room; and one in the living room. They were multi-tiered and tinkled beautifully if someone were walking upstairs in one of the bedrooms. My mother could tell how good a sleepover party was by how loudly the chandeliers tinkled. We’d get an abrupt holler up the long stairs to “act like ladies.” (Mother always prided herself in good Southern comportment.)

Occasionally, and the activating event is still unclear (part of why I research ghost occurrences), the chandelier in the living room would tinkle. Directly upstairs was the master suite. The only problem was, no one else was home or if they were they were in the room with me and we were both staring at the ceiling.

Soon after the telltale tinkling, sounds would begin. First, a scraping like a chair being pulled out from its place at a table. This occurred directly in front of the fireplace in the master suite that mirrored the location of the living room’s fireplace as well, since they shared the same central chimney. Heavy booted feet would pace back and forth around what seemed like a circle. Another scraping chair being drawn sound, perhaps a fist hitting a table. All of this was very muffled as if it had been run through something like seeing a Doris Day film with cheesecloth over the lens.

The voices would start up. Low and murmuring, occasionally one or two what sounded like words would rise up in tone, but still the volume remained so low it was more like muttering. Different voices would sound, two or three of them.

A discussion was being held around a table.

Not one of us who witnessed this phenomenon attested to any other explanation. We all came to the same conclusion simultaneously. A group of soldiers around a table, planning, discussing, sometimes disagreeing, pacing the floor, making their point with a fist to the table…

I heard it only a few times as a kid, others in the family heard it quite often. I’m sure my mother had it the worst because she was a stay-at-home mom and didn’t drive, so she was housebound most of the time. Mother, however, had an endearing Southern way of handling things like ghosts, she was a romantic and the notion that someone else loved the estate as much as she did, warmed her heart. Being great at making sweet tea and welcoming folks, she’d accept them like a grizzly old father-in-law who moved in and upset your world, but you had to love him for being cantankerous because he’d earned it. To mom, these soldiers definitely earned their prankster behavior and she wouldn’t deny them of one second of it.

The last time I heard the voices was the last night I slept in the house. Everyone was gone, except my sister who slept inside. I slept in a cot in the “thicket” area of the property with my best friend as a kind of “last sleepover.” We had seen lots of shadowy figures going in and out of the thicket over the years and we wanted one last ghostly encounter. (this is probably where I got the notion to write my present manuscript "The Thicket") What we got instead was my sister waking us at midnight to come up to the house. The “men upstairs” were carrying on and she couldn’t sleep. We didn’t think we’d sleep either. You can be a lot braver about the voices when the house is filled with people than when you’re alone with it. We had so much stuff acting up as we packed to move that we fully expected the ghosts to be truly troubled that night. We curled up on the sofa in the living room, our eyes towards the ceiling, studying the chandelier in the bits of light that made it into the room.

The tinkling started an hour later when I was almost nodding off. The voices and scraping and footsteps and knocking began. This time, however, I wondered to myself why a ghost would reenact something over and over in the same fashion. There weren’t terms and concepts like residual hauntings out in the world of paranormal research being bantered around in the newspapers, but I came to a conclusion myself that the house simply remembered something, like a scar. It left a mark of an event and when conditions were right, it replayed that event. I even wondered if some my childhood high-energy antics would replay for the next owners.

I fell asleep as soon as the sounds and voices muted, but I felt strangely sad as I realized I’d never hear this occurrence again. The funny thing about ghost hunting is that you get attached to your ghosts.

The Ghosts and Flashlight Tag

Imagine living on an estate with two enormous boxwood mazes. Then, imagine having five kids in the family and parents who, no matter how well they were doing financially, didn’t buy their kids toys. They wanted them to be creative and resourceful. The land and its outbuildings alone had more than enough to work with, from building tree forts to using leftover furniture in the barn to turn it into a playhouse. One of our favorite activities was flashlight tag. It was especially fun on a hot Virginia summer’s night with lightning bugs competing for attention.

The back boxwood maze was more mature in height and an ideal place for a great game of flashlight tag. The ancient birdbath with the naked cherub statue in the center was our starting point. Usually my brother wanted to manage (or is that micromanage?) the game, so he would begin by being “it.” The rest of us would scatter like buckshot throughout the winding maze of English boxwoods to find the perfect strategic point to make our way towards the birdbath without being seen.

It was just after a particularly violent late afternoon thunderstorm that we played this one night. I was perhaps 10 at the time. I always did great at the game because I was able to hide behind most of the boxwoods with my short height and not be seen. Plus, my brother was more threatened by my two sisters who were one and two years older than him, so he’d be dogging them the entire time.

This night, however, the boxwoods were a wet mess and I opted to go hide in the hickory tree grove nearby. Between the maze and the hickory trees was a huge rectangle of about a half an acre or an acre of land that we used as the family football field on Sunday afternoons. Darting from tree to tree in the perfectly straight stand, I giggled as I saw the light click on and off and my sisters yelling at my brother and instigating his assault on them in the darkness.

Besides the buzz of mosquitoes, the hickory stand was pretty lonely and extremely dark. It lined up against the woods of an estate beside ours called “Tallwood” owned by George Mason University and left unruly and natural. The land there always bothered me and, in fact, I usually avoided the hickory stand all together because it felt like someone was at my back the whole time.

This night would prove why I instinctively avoided the grove.

The lightning bugs around me were intense since I was bottled in between the trees and the fence line where the raspberry bushes grew. Their sluggish light soothed me and made me feel sort of trance-like. I leaned against the tree, knowing I should make my run for the birdbath, but hoping he’d take out my sisters first. I had a tendency to end up in the crosshairs. Not this time. I was determined to win again.

Hushed voices sounded a few trees up from me. I leaned back and studied the line of gray tree trunks. Nothing. I looked over to the boxwood maze, the light blinking on and off. My sisters together darted through what I called “the great hall” because it was the biggest empty “room” in the maze.

Murmuring voices continued to talk. I stormed up the tree line, studying it carefully. It wasn’t unusual for local kids from the surrounding suburbs to try and sneak into the yard and play. I usually didn’t mind. It got lonely there when my siblings usually avoided me. They let me play the game along with them mostly because as the baby of the family I’d stomp and cry and get attention, so I found myself playing alone a lot. There were, however, a few unsavory neighborhood kids I didn’t want to enjoy my personal haven, so I came to a stop between the trees and waited. Scott got my sister, Kathy out and she took over the flashlight. Scott took the game like a tactile engineer so my chances of winning were looking pretty miserable. In my mind, I begged out of the game, more interested in who was in my yard.

The voices sounded again. This time they were where I had originally been standing. I rushed over fast and came to a halt. There was no one there. They sounded again like quick hushed whispers behind the berry vines. I turned and studied the darkness, unable to see anything but the pulsing of the lightning bugs.

A sense of movement behind me made me turn and study the long line of trees. I peered out from behind one, almost afraid at this point. I’d heard these hushed whispers in our house, but never on the property. A dark shadow stepped out from behind a tree about five trees up from me. Just the long length of half a body coming out from behind the tree and then—whoosh! It was gone.

Still imaging Kurt or one of the other pranksters in the neighborhood, I stomped over to the tree and looked. No one. Of course. I rolled my eyes and leaned back against the tree waiting for Scott to hopefully become “it” again so I could maybe rejoin the game. I looked down the row of trees and watched as something tall and dark stepped out from behind the tree and started a slow cruise along the tree line away from me.

Kathy? Tina? Could it be one of my sisters? No, probably Scott!

I ran towards it, feeling myself gain on it when it just vanished. It didn’t step behind anything. It didn’t run. It just suddenly wasn’t there. Winded and confused, I looked up at the cloudy sky. No moonlight. I waved my arms. No shadow. The murmuring voices started again in the raspberry bushes not far from me.

I didn’t even look this time. My mind immediately focused on reports that college people made when they rented our cottages on the property. Shadowy figures peering into windows, taking off through fields, riding horses, disappearing without notice, and murmuring voices.

As I high-tailed it towards the house, the flashlight’s beam hit me and I stopped.

“You’re it.” My sister said.

“I’m done.” I looked back at the tree line.

She looked there too.

“We don’t play outside of the boxwoods. You disqualified yourself, She-She.”

“Yeah, well I’m done.”

“I don’t go there at night.” She told me in a hushed voice.

“Why?” I looked up at her wide-eyed.

“That’s where he walks.”

“W-who?”

“Don’t know.” She shrugged. “I think he’s having a meeting with someone. Did you see him?”

I nodded dumbly.

To Tina, none of this was unusual. She took it as part of nature. No threat to herself.

“I think he’d rather be alone, so I just give him a wide berth.” She sighed. “Take off now, I’ll tell them you were sick. I know how you hate for Scott to beat you.” She ruffled my tangled hair and I rushed off towards the relative safety of the house.

The spirits in the main house I could take.