Let me preface this piece to say that I have no fascination with the supernatural nor do I find programs like Ghost Hunters to be any more than complete idiocy, but……….

Whether one might think that apparitions or paranormal activity is either from a demonic source, the spirit world, elementals playing tricks on humanity, or whatever I can attest to the presence of something that defies what we normally accept as mundane reality. In the following accounts I will simply mention testimony by family and friends without too much prejudice or interpretation. These incidents may seem shocking to some, but are very real to those who experienced them.

Pam’s encounter

In 1984 during the most severe recession since the Great Depression my first wife and I were raising our four children in a new neighborhood of small builder designed home in an affluent North Texas town. We had a neighbor down the street by the name of Pam, a single mother with one child, recently divorced. She was managing a jewelry store at the new local shopping mall, but didn’t have anyone to watch her child after school. She and my wife met and after a couple visits they made an arrangement for Courtney to stay with us until Pam got home from work.

Her haunting

One night after Pam came to get Courtney we all sat down and talked for a while and had a drink. It turned out that Pam had an interesting story to tell about a haunting. She had recently moved from Arkansas due to this haunting at a home she’d purchased shortly after her divorce. It was a nice home just outside of Little Rock that sat on a wooded slope with bay windows and beautiful views so she bought it. At first everything seemed okay. She would go to work each day and drop her child off at the daycare. Most evenings she came home exhausted and would have to make dinner before going to bed for her and her daughter.

First incarnation

One evening as she prepared a meal she glanced up to see an illuminated mist above her head. At first she thought she’d left a hot pan on and the smoke had risen to the ceiling but no. It gave off little flashes of light and was suddenly gone. She wasn’t frightened but more stunned than anything else. She did not think of the experience as a threat and chalked it up to simply being tired and mentally stressed. As life went and a succession of dating jerks and single motherhood took their toll she became ill and began having female problems that required trips to the OBGYN occasionally. Then came the dreams of hooded figures with gleaming knives standing around her bed in a bizarre sacrifice ritual. She would then awake in a sweaty panic!

Dream execution

It continued almost every night becoming more intense until one night the robed faceless entities raised their daggers about to pounce when Pam awoke again in hysterics but that wasn’t all. There were screams from her daughter’s room. She rushed to her little girl’s bedside to see her standing on top of her mattress squealing in fright and crying. Once she calmed her little girl down and got her a glass of water she asked her daughter what had happened. Her little daughter told her about a nightmare she had just had-the same as hers. It was the exact same dream Pam had experienced! That was it! She put the house up for sale and her daughter slept with her at night. A friend at the local university did some checking on old land records and said the property the house was built on went all the way back to the days of the Conquistadors. An archaeologist with a team inspected the grounds around the house and found remains of Indians who apparently were buried in a mass grave. An apparent atrocity had occurred on the land at one time-a mass execution. These incidents were not uncommon under the Spanish conquerors, especially among their Indian captives.

Change came quickly

Pam moved out, put the house up for sale, and relocated to Plano, Texas where she found a builder’s home he couldn’t sell and he worked out an owner’s finance with her after she had gotten a management position at a jewelry store. It had all led to her finding a better job, new home, and eventually a new husband she’d met while in church. This is what had brought her to our neighborhood. A haunting that had transformed her life! Oddly while her life turned out for the best I would soon become a single parent myself of four little children.

Life went on

After losing my house to the rapid economic collapse of the mid-1980’s while running my own business and suddenly becoming a single parent a series of strange incidents would ensue. Luckily I found an older but nice settled neighborhood not far from where my kids and I had lived so they could continue going to their favorite schools. It was an owner finance with a middle aged couple who had lost their daughter in a tragic school bus accident that had not resulted in any other children on the bus being killed. They had converted the garage to a large back bedroom that looked out across the alley to a grave yard in the distance.

Of things to come

The first night there the next door neighbor’s daughter who my little girl played with during the day then asked her to spend the night she gladly accepted. All day my brother and I had been painting, cleaning carpet and moving furniture to get the family settled. In the middle of the night the neighbor’s little girl got up and went home. In the morning my daughter asked her why she had left and the girl replied that her best friend had lived there, slept in that bedroom, and had died in a bus accident during a school field trip, and she just couldn’t bring herself to stay all night.

Near tragedy

The following day with a cold winter underway while I was moving from one house to another the furnace almost caught fire. My brother and I got it under control in a couple of minutes but it left smoke marks on the some of the vents. That should have been an omen, but we were so glad to start anew in another home we just shrugged it off after the Heating A/C technician showed us what had happened and fixed it. A few days later something strange happened. My daughter came over to me and told me to check out something in her room. She showed me a bizarre image, a coincidence, or a freak occurrence.

Ghostly?

On her mahogany stained wooden bedroom door was a perfect silhouette of a little girl! It was in the grain of the wood. It was clearly evident once one were to pay attention and examine it! This was too bizarre to simply write off as simple random chance! That kind of spooked us, but I blew it off and reassured my kids there was nothing to it. I think I painted the door to hide the eerie imprint.

Dead uncovered

 I later began dating a Latin woman, a bit older than me, who was nice, attractive, and even looked like the actress, Faye Dunaway. She also loved my kids. She told me of a haunting in her Dad’s house as well as another incident in a rental house he owned. She told me her father was mayor of a small Mexican town and owned some rental property. He had sent her off to school in another town for a better education, but she would come home during the summer. By then he had bought another rental property and told her she could sleep there but her first night she could not rest. Something kept her awake all night. Her father ordered one of his sons to stay in the house with his daughter and the next morning he too had reported that he couldn’t sleep well and that something was in the house. A neighbor told the father he had seen a demonic dog running across the property with glowing red eyes!

Bad luck

Being mayor of the town her father ordered some laborers to dig around the foundation and soon they had turned up human remains. It seems that the house had been the site of another Conquistador atrocity where Native Americans had been murdered and buried on an unmarked site. These kinds of stories are more common than most people think. The bones were dug up and given a proper burial in a nearby town cemetery, and apparently the haunting stopped. However, bad luck seemed to plague the family after this with the same son who had stayed at the house that night dying in a freak accident where he slipped and fell backwards on a tile floor and fractured his skull killing himself due to the fall.

From beyond the grave

Not long afterward her father died. While the family gathered and mourned after the funeral at their home a strange incident happened. When her father was alive it was his nightly ritual to get up each and every evening to get a drink of water in the kitchen. Late in the evening as the family sat together in the living room they heard footsteps coming from their parent’s bedroom. The footfalls continued all the way down the hall  to the kitchen where the sound of a cupboard opening, water filling a glass, and the footsteps returning down the hallway occurred. No one in the family dared to get up to see who was making the noise. Then the youngest sister exclaimed, “That was Papa! He came back!”

New life new struggles

Time passed and the Latin lady and I broke up. I then met my second wife to be. She moved in with me and the kids in the same house my daughter had showed me the silhouette on her door in. On the weekends we picked up her two sons whom she shared custody with her ex over or they were brought over by the former husband and his new wife. Things went okay with the normal adjustments that occur under a new family, but the paranormal activity did not stop. When I told my wife that my bed would sometimes vibrate for no reason at all while I lay in it just thinking she didn’t believe me. Then one afternoon when it was vibrating I invited her to lay down and feel it! She was shocked. We did some inquiring and found out that it’s possible for an individual to make this happen like a form of telepathy or telekinetic capability. I thought there was more to it than that! Did any of this have to do with the nearby graveyard? I wasn’t sure. There were times while I worked in my converted bedroom office when everyone was gone that I felt an eerie presence. Was that just my imagination?

An entity

One weekend while the her two sons were over, all the boys carried their bedding to the sunken living room to have a sleep over. Together with their pillows and blankets they laid out in front of the couches and the TV. The youngest step son, a bright and funny kid, said that one night he saw an animal crossing the room with red eyes and asked me if we had a cat. I told him no. We had lost a cat some time ago, but we no longer had a cat. A week later as everyone slept on a Saturday night, again the step son saw something unnerving! He claimed he had seen a dark figure sitting in my reclining lounger, my normal chair when watching TV. It was a dark figure with glowing red eyes that stared at him as he lay on the area rug in his sleeping bag. The boy said that he would hide his face under the covers simply to check again and see the same thing glaring at him. He told his mother and I the next morning. All the kids seemed fascinated at first and then claimed he was just joking, he didn’t laugh or think it was funny.

More mishaps

It seems the bad luck from these incidents continued to affect my life as I would go on to buy a large two story house with more bedrooms and living area along with a much larger yard for all the kids to enjoy. However, my second marriage became ill-fated due to problems caused by my wife’s ex-husband’s new wife over custody, the problems of blending different families and other things too personal to mention. In less than 5 years I would be forced to sell the house after my ex and I had been separated after less than 3 years of marriage. I had kept the house long enough for my remaining boys to start their lives as adults with their wives once they moved out before my having to sell it and divide community property. My ex-wife had once gone to a psychic who claimed that the spirit of her father in law clung to her in life. She did not have a good relationship with this person.

Observation

As far as I am concerned this world is full of mystery and evil that people take too lightly trying to explain terrible incidents away as coincidence or pure happenstance. They try to rationalize evil as a byproduct of human existence instead of what it really is. Science is simply not enough to answer the unexplained 100% of the time and as we know these days can be used for political purpose. If there is good and evil in this world as I see it, there must be a spiritual reason for it. Chalk it up to God and Lucifer because there seems to be evil for no logical reason other than hatred for the sake of destruction. It serves no constructive purpose, no justifiable explanation, but it perpetuates itself! According to Einstein for every force in the universe there is an equal but opposite reaction. So, if there is evil then there must be a source of good to counteract it. Just as we have negative and positive people. For those who think that people are just naturally good, think again, People are not. Something drives man to be his own worst enemy. Some of us are better than others, but that has always been the case. There is more than dark matter and worm holes responsible for the universe as we know it.