Scary Things in the House: Update

From time to time I like to share with you the things that have been popping up in our home. I’ve told you about the noises that start up when I write my ghost stories. I’ve shared tales about (dead) people my grandson apparently sees from time to time. And I’ve mentioned that since going to Gettysburg (thanks, Gettysburg) I’ve been seeing things that I never used to see. I was fine before that happened, but alas, things changed.

One night a few weeks ago I was heading toward my bedroom. My grandson was already in bed, and the door to his room was shut. Out of habit, I turned my head in that direction as I was about to enter my own room and was startled to see a large, white, being (not sure of gender) standing in front of his door. Fortunately (or not) it was looking in my direction, and not his. I kind of looked at it, ignored it, and went into my room. And I was happy not to see it again when I came back out.

There was also this “thing” hanging from the ceiling in the front hall. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but I was not happy to see it. My daughter once mentioned seeing an apparition of some kind that was hanging down from the living room ceiling. I’ve only heard about apparitions that hang from the ceiling on The Dead Files, and since I’m no Amy Allen, I’m not necessarily prepared for this kind of haunting.

But despite these things, the house has been relatively quiet. Except for the one thing that probably scares me more than the two listed above put together: there’s a creature in our garage.

We had snow here the other day, like so many other parts of the country, and my daughter, who was home for once, decided to be kind and shovel the driveway for us while my husband and I were at work. So she opened the garage door, took out the shovel, and cleared the entire space, which was a wonderful surprise when I got back.

However, that afternoon when I needed something in the garage, I heard a loud rustling noise from the corner by the automatic door. Hmm. That didn’t sound good. So I did what I usually do: I got what I needed, turned out the light, and shut the door. Later that night when I went back to get something out of our second freezer, I was not happy to find a bucket and a box knocked down into the middle of the path. (Our garage is frighteningly cluttered and currently has only a narrow path from front to back, but that’s another story.) I put the items back, but thought again that something had stolen in out of the cold and was exploring our space. I mentioned it to Jim who answered with his characteristic “Uh huh” while he was watching his show, and that was that.

But this morning, the Christmas tree stand was on the floor in the middle of the path. Now, I know that was something that got knocked down. And although I haven’t heard the same rustling sound again, I just KNOW there is something we didn’t invite hanging out in our garage. I know it’s not mice: we’ve had them before and they don’t knock down large objects. I know it’s not a skunk. We’d have figured that out pretty quickly. Raccoon? Aren’t they supposed to be hibernating by now? Squirrel? I can’t believe I wouldn’t have seen the hyper little thing scampering around at some point.

So Jim says he has a “plan” to drive this thing back out into the wild. I say good luck with that, because the temperature outside is holding fast to below freezing and I can imagine this thing just burrowing in deeper so it can stay inside. Still, I hope whatever he’s got in mind works, because I’d probably rather deal with a hanging apparition that just, well, hangs around, than with some destructive little beast that’s loose in our garage.

Looking forward to him carrying out his plan.

Maybe It Would Be Easier to Move

I don't know how many of you watch The Dead Files, but I am a true aficionado. I watch repeats. I even record and watch repeats. I've gotten to the point where I remember the clients and their houses just from reading some of the episode descriptions. I also record and watch the new shows. But while I enjoy watching Amy do her walk and explain about the dead--and other things--that she is running into, and while I get a real charge out of Steve's interviews and his research, the two things about that show that float my boat are 1) The Sketch, and 2) The Reveal.

If you don't know the show, after her walk-through of a malevolently haunted site, Amy will sit down with a sketch artist to have one or two renderings done of the thing or things she finds most disturbing on her walk. Somehow, she's always able to decide on just one or two. Me, I'd be having the sketch artist doing a mural-sized canvas. But that's beside the point. The sketches, which are not shown to Steve, the clients, or those watching at home until The Reveal, are amazing. They've included everything from headless, twelve-foot creatures that Amy described as "guardians" of the property, to angry hags and creepy dead men with serial-killer tendencies. 

The show also includes a clip of Amy sitting with the artist, describing what she saw. I always wonder if the artist goes home that night with nightmares. I also have always wondered what happens to the sketches. I don't imagine the clients want those freaky drawings anywhere in their houses after they've seen them. I doubt that Amy keeps a scrap book of them: she's already seen the real thing up-close and personal. I always think the show should auction them off as a fund-raiser to start an account for the poor people who are told that they need to leave their homes and don't have the financial resources to do it, but that's just a thought. I have no idea where those pictures go.

I like the sketch technique so much I borrowed it for my own series. I even had the pleasure of interviewing a police sketch artist to find out how they do what they do. Good thing Nick Borja is an artist, isn't it? And I resolved my own issue with the picture he produced, too. I won't spoil it in case you have not yet read Drawing Vengeance (and if you haven't, please get right on that! But only after reading Haunted and Dead Voices, of course) but there is no question about the real purpose of the picture that Nick draws at Cassie's request.

At the end of The Reveal, Amy tells the clients what they need to do to stay safe. Sometimes she has to tell them to move. If Amy Allen told me  to move, I'd take her word for it. She's scary. But lots of times she gives them various solutions to their problems and no two are ever alike. There are some of the expected answers, such as bringing in a priest or minister to perform a blessing or even an exorcism. Sometimes she'll tell them to find a demonologist, a Wiccan, or perhaps a shaman from the local Native American nation to bring peace to the property. She uses tar water and salt and sometimes a vial of something that she doesn't exactly specify. Occasionally she'll tell them they need a psychic knower, or a Reiki Master, or even a voodoo practitioner. She has been known to suggest a curandero or a chaos magician (I have no idea).

The one piece of advice I have seen her give on a couple of occasions, and the one that would probably be the hardest for me, is when she tells them they need to clean their entire house, top to bottom, all surfaces. I would probably say, "We need to move." Moving might actually be easier than cleaning my entire house, top to bottom, every surface. And I live in a small, three-bedroom ranch, too.

Confession time: I am an amazingly indifferent housekeeper. I used to be really good about it, but something happened and I morphed into a person who tends to focus on some things and not see others, like the giant dust bunnies and webs that decorate the corners of my house, or the amazing amount of splotch that builds up on my windows and that I usually intend to clean off next spring. Or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first. 

I'd say you could ask Jim about how bad a housekeeper I am, except that he's exactly like me. We are not model homemakers, either of us. When I say, "I didn't get to the bathrooms, yet" he'll answer with "That's okay, I didn't get to the floors." We understand each other perfectly.

So if Amy told me I needed to clean my house top to bottom I'd probably shake her hand and tell her, "I think we might just move after all."

So Why Not Animals?

Just this morning my grandson was putting on his shoes, getting ready so that I could take him to summer camp, when he stood up and jumped a little, brushing his hand next to the side of his calf. "Oh!" he said.

"What?" I asked. I thought maybe a mosquito had bitten him. We have renegade mosquitoes that sneak into our house and munch on us when we least suspect it.

"I thought I saw a cat," he said. He looked embarrassed.

And I felt that funny twinge I sometimes get when he tells me what he sees. For one thing, this grandson is THE grandson, the one who saw the boy in his bedroom by his rocking horse so many years ago. The one who told me the previous owners to this house were dead. The one who saw the foot emerging from the laundry room that night.

Just out of curiosity I asked, "What color was it?"

"What color was what?" His eleven-year old brain had already moved onto more interesting topics.

"The cat you saw. What color was it?"

"Oh." Again he looked embarrassed. "It was orange."

I thought about that. Just the other week, his mother (she who sees dead people) asked me if I had seen a cat hanging around the house. Now, just to be clear, we don't have pets. None. Nada. I was a zookeeper while my kids were growing up. At different times, sometimes simultaneously, we went through three parakeets, one parrot, two guinea pigs, two dogs, three cats, two iguanas, a box turtle, and an ant farm. As far as animals go, I'm done. But if it came to having a pet these days, it would most definitely not be a cat, since my grandson is very allergic to them and has borderline asthma. So no cats in the house.

When I asked my daughter for more information about the cat she was seeing, she said that it was definitely in the house, not outside, and that it was black. "Sometimes it follows me down the hall to the refrigerator," she explained. "Sometimes it just sits there and looks at me."

We had two different black cats pass through this house so I asked if it looked like either Willie or Orion, but she said no. 

So. A black cat in the house except we don't have cats. Before I had time to think about that much, she volunteered that when it comes to our hall, it isn't just dead people who walk through the house from our utility room. She mentioned that "other things" come through as well.

Other things? Not something I really wanted to hear, but she was quick to reassure me that none of them seemed evil or malevolent. Just different. 

When Amy Allen, on The Dead Files, talks about beings that come in from other dimensions, they never sound like a good thing. But I have to admit that even with my lesser sensitivity I've never felt anything particularly negative or dark come strolling down that hall, either.

I guess if we can have dead people and unidentifiable beings coming through our house, a few animals here and there wouldn't be so out of line. So why not a cat, whether black or orange? What the heck. A cat is a cat. 

Even if it's dead.

Would You Visit Alcatraz?

The Travel Channel in my area has been marathon-showing episodes of The Dead Files, my all-time favorite paranormal reality show. This has allowed me to catch up on Steve-and-Amy adventures that I haven’t seen before, and last week, the network ran an episode about Alcatraz.

Yikes.

While I know prisons are a reality of life, I struggle to read or watch anything having to do with them. I don’t watch movies that are set in prisons—if I do, it’s usually only once. I avoid documentaries and news stories about them like the plague. Even when one of my favorite TV shows does a story about a prison (a character going undercover at one, for instance) I have a hard time sitting through it. I think I must have died in a prison in a past life. Or maybe several past lives. I know I want nothing to do with them now.

Of course, being places of sadness, anger, despair, and abject misery, most deserted prisons are infamous for being haunted. Some of them are included on ghost tours. Some of them are ghost tours all on their own. The haunted Old City Jail in Charleston, SC comes to mind, for those who might like to spend several hours in a dark and disturbed prison. And then there’s Alcatraz. Alcatraz is like the mother of all haunted prisons. If you want to find a most-definitely haunted incarceration site, this is it. 

Someone contacted The Dead Files about having a paranormal experience there that haunts him to this day, and it was off to the races for entire gang. Steve DiSchiavi even commented how he couldn’t wait to see the place, being a retired homicide cop. (Another reason I could never be on the police force: close proximity to jails and prisons.)

This was also the most famous—and I’ll bet largest—place the DF crew has ever visited. Anyone who watches the show knows that they usually work with couples or families whose homes are malevolently disturbed. Sometimes they may take on the occasional small business, like a bar/restaurant or even an inn or hotel. But for the most part, they confine themselves to privately-owned locations. Amy usually knows nothing in advance about any place she is being brought to “walk through." But in this case, as Matt Anderson (Amy’s intrepid videographer) pointed out, she obviously knew they were going to Alcatraz. He still did his own customary walk-through ahead of her entrance, to cover or conceal historical displays and photographs that are scattered throughout the location. (Wonder what his job’s like??)

Except for that unusual foreknowledge on Amy’s part, she and Steve approached this case like every investigation they do. She walked through the most disturbed areas with Matt and their equally unshakable camera crew to report what she felt and saw. And she described dead prisoners, experiences living people had felt within those walls, cruel and vile acts committed by both felons and prison guards, and at least one gruesome death. Steve did thorough research, even interviewing on-camera an ex-guard, an ex-prisoner, and an ex-corrections officer whose job was to help transport convicts from the mainland to Alcatraz Island. None of it was pretty.

Obviously, Alcatraz is too big a site filled with too much negativity to be cleansed out by an entire army of mediums, Reiki masters, chaos magicians, priests, ministers, Wiccans, Voodoo practitioners, and Shamans. Well, maybe an entire army might do it. But that wasn’t the point of this show. The man who had called for the investigation wanted to know that he was safe, that whatever he encountered in Alcatraz was not following him around. Amy reassured him that the entity who grabbed and threatened him (and continues to poke and touch other visitors to this day) was stuck within the prison and was unable to leave it. Their client was more than relieved.

Alcatraz is huge and dark. In its past, it was used to imprison “the worst of the worst”: convicts who murdered, assaulted, and otherwise preyed upon fellow inmates at other institutions and were therefore moved to this maximum-security prison. Amy described the place as “full of anguish.” I think it’s full of a lot of other things besides, and none of it is good.

I will not be going to Alcatraz.

Perceiving Ghosts - And How They Look

In my third Bridgeton Park Cemetery book Drawing Vengeance (no spoiler ahead), there is a scene where Michael Penfield is looking out the bookstore window and sees a handful of dead people out on the street. I based this scene on the experience of someone I know who sees dead people, as M. Night Shyamalan so famously put it. I will not include the names of any of the folks I will write about here out of respect for their privacy, but what I put down in this blog will be details of sightings as they were told to me. That aside, the first gentleman I write about who can see the dead told me about various places he has run into them: a party, a storefront window, a home a block or so away from his home, even in his own house (this one followed him there: YIKES!) We did a book signing together and I believe he mentioned being able to see "a dead someone" across the parking lot adjacent to the book store where we were situated. 

Since the book signing took place in the neighborhood where Steve's bookstore is, and where Cassie and Michael and Nick and Eloise frequent the Ice Cream Shack for burgers and sundaes, I guess it only seemed natural to let Michael start seeing dead people on these same streets. Like the gentleman who did the book signing with me. 

I know another person, also a man, who told me that he sometimes sees dead people around the hospital close to his house. He's seen them sitting on the bus stop bench, or wandering through the parking lot, or just walking around the front of the building. He did give me an interesting tidbit about his sightings: he told me that when he sees them it's a very quick glimpse. Even just a flash of a glimpse. But it's enough for him to see the entire person and register gender, clothing, even facial expressions. I thought that was interesting because between these two guys that see spirits, the actual perception is different: one sees them for a length of time, the other only gets a quick shot of the ghost. But both are able to give me explicit details about what they've seen.

I know a woman who not only sees them but can hear what they are saying, if they actually speak. She has described being passed by a dead woman who was mumbling to herself the whole time. You might say, but that could have been any crazy person out on the street. Yes, it could. Unfortunately, the woman I know was standing in her own house when this mumbling ghost went past her. Where she was coming from, where she was going, and why she was in the house is anybody's guess. Glad I missed out on that!

When I first started writing the Bridgeton Park Cemetery series, I was worried about depicting how my psychic characters perceived ghosts, but as I've gotten farther into the field, I'm beginning to realize that those who can see spirits don't necessarily all see them in the same way. The dead might appear with or without sound; they might show themselves for an extended period of time or just for a split second. I've been told that they can also project the way they choose to be seen: the gentleman in the first paragraph told me about a house that is haunted by a little girl, but he knows that the little girl is the spirit of a woman who was in her '90's when she died. In the Mary O'Reilly series, my friend Terri Reid has her ghosts appear the way they did at the time of their passing, which makes sense. In the show The Dead Files, psychic Amy Allen will sometimes mention that the spirit "is showing itself" to her in a particular way even though she knows that is not how they may have appeared when their lives ended.

What this all tells me is that I have quite a bit of freedom when it comes to writing the ghostly characters presented in my books. They can appear older or younger. They can be scary with dripping wounds and faces filled with terror, or show up as any average man or woman who just happens to be dead. And I'm so glad for that sense of freedom - because I think that Cassie and Michael are going to run into all sorts of things as the series progresses.