Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 21

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

My family and I have often had present the human members of our family after they have passed and our animal companions have been no different.

Bandit was a cattle dog / corgi cross – tan with a black eye patch of fur across his face (hence the name Bandit) that my Dad bought when I was three. The only conscious memory I have of my Dad, is the back of his head as he drove the car home the day we bought Bandit.

Bandit was the only constant in my life until he died when I was 18 and in my last year of High School. In his day, not even 6′ wooden fences could stop him escaping with his strong cattle dog shoulders, he’d just jump and power climb the vertical wooden wall until one day an encounter with a bus during …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 20

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

Now I’ve lived in a few homes all around Australia and all has been quiet in relation to paranormal activity in comparison to what went on in my mother’s house growing up. Until we moved into our current army house in Darwin, Australia. DHA (Defense Housing Australia) have a code that they dispose of any homes that have had a suicide in them – given the nature of serving members this sadly does have a higher incidence than the general population.

I’d arrived in Darwin in 2006 to get married before my husband was deployed the first time. My husband had not left for weeks for the second time when I got the news we had to move to another house suddenly. Why they couldn’t have done all this BEFORE he left is anyone’s guess! My girlfriend and I did the rounds of Darwin, …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 19 My First Ghost Hunt

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

As an adult now and a parent of children myself, I have remained very open minded about the paranormal and have always been very supportive of my children and their experiences.

I have been able to determine I have shut down a lot of my abilities due to a fairly negative reception when I was younger, but suspect I could have been a medium/ psychic if I had developed my powers in a supportive atmosphere. That hasn’t stopped my ‘spidey sense’ reminding me its there on occasion!

My daughter spent most of her formative years with her father (a skeptic) while my son lived with me from age 12. My son appears the more sensitive of the two, but they do both experience entities – just in different ways.

I avoided the paranormal on purpose for many years between 20 and 30. I did …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 18 Astral Travel

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

Having grown up ‘open minded’ I came to accept the physical world we know, isn’t quite as constrained and orderly as skeptics need to believe. I had seen things that can’t be explained by traditional science – so in theory anything was possible… wasn’t it?

The first hint I could astral travel had happened spontaneously during high school when I thought I had dreamed of going to a friend’s place and seeing something specific going on with her dog. The dog seemed to be sick and my friend was crying and I seemed to watch this scene as if I was standing in it (like a dream) but I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, like a movie with the sound turned down – but you can still work out what’s going on in the scene.

The next morning when I told my friend …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 17

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

After our experiences growing up, being open minded about the paranormal meant my mother, sisters and I all researched what ever we could on the subject. We experimented with transcendental meditation, astral travel and mediumship. We find we tend to have what we call a bit of ‘gut instinct’ about things usually… which are usually found to be right.

After a serious work injury in 1980, I was taught self hypnosis as a method of pain control and ended up with a strange and unexpected side effect. I started to lucid dream and have pre-cognitive dreams. Lucid dreaming is when you are in a dream state but become conscious you are in a dream. So while in theory being fully conscious in a dream sound ludicrous – it is possible to be ‘awake’ and conscious inside a dream state. I have since researched and …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 15

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

Having already ‘grown up haunted’ soon it was my children’s turn. My son was around 5 or 6 when he gave the first indications he could see ‘things’. Coming home from school one day he announced cheerfully “I saw a ghost at school today mummy.” Given my history, I was well prepared that this day may come and I was determined not to handle it as badly.

“What did it look like?” I asked. “mmmmm a bit like white plastic in the wind all wobbly” he began starting on his cookie. Sensibly, I did wonder if he had just seen a discarded plastic bag caught up in the wind whip around the playground. “What was the ghost doing at you school?” I asked keeping it all very casual. “It was looking in all the windows” he said “it came along on my side of …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 14

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

Now a mother myself and aware children have a bit of a window into the other world we tend to close as we grow older, I did entertain an experiment with my son. Asking a question not many parents would put to a two year old – very casually over lunch one day I asked “who were you before I was your mummy?”

Unlike an adult who would process the question and reject it with their own reality as a silly question, my son took it as face value and answered me! “Oh, I was Mgumbo,” he said munching on his sandwich. The name always stuck in my mind, because while it sounded made up and like gibberish, yet it reminded me of that 50′s/ 60′s movie set in Africa with Clark Gable and Ava Gardener.

Instead of rejecting or projecting my own interpretation …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 13

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

My life with the paranormal went on the back burner when I married and moved into a lovely ‘normal’ house where I personally never saw/ heard or sensed anything much to my relief and I got busy raising my son and daughter.

The “gift” as we prefer to call it causes a lot of unusual coincidences in my family and appears to be hereditary. My two sisters and I now live literally at three cardinal points on the Australian continent, as far away as we could be from each other without getting wet. Yet, without fail every year – either Christmas, Birthday, Mothers Day – which ever – from three cardinal points on the compass – my mother has stopped counting the times she will get three identical cards from all three daughters or three identical presents.

When my middle sister had a car …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 12

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

I eventually married and had children myself and given my history I was very opened minded to the paranormal – though my then husband was a skeptic. This didn’t bother me, as I didn’t need any validation for my own experiences.

As far as my children were concerned I realized what a blank canvas they were ( as I had once been )and how open they are in their innocence to paranormal experiences – which they accept not as paranormal but as completely normal!

The first hint my son had any type of guides or spiritual friends came only days after his birth. I had had an extremely complicated delivery and had now developed a serious infection from which I was not recovering. My husband had already been given the ‘if she doesn’t improve in the next 48 hours we could loose her’ speech …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 11

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

My elder sister moved into a house only 10 minutes from my Mum and I used to go there and baby-sit her new baby daughter – but now I was an adult and a little more educated about what I had experienced growing up.

My elder sister had joked she thought she had a ghost in her house as well and given our history we had a good laugh….was there no escape?

I can admit I was privy to it once myself – I was in her main bedroom watching TV and it was night and I knew my sister was due home any moment.

I clearly heard the back door open and close and the floor boards creak under the body weight of someone crossing from the backdoor – the kitchen and across the house to the main bedroom where I was.

Instinctively …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 10

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

Having ‘grown up haunted’ with the full spectrum of experiences; full bodied apparitions, EVPs, apports, residual and seemingly intelligent hauntings, as a family we concede we are probably a little ‘sensitive’.

As a teenager I found I did have a receptive audience for my stories amongst my peers but as a result I don’t recall too many ‘sleep overs’ at my house. One friend who did decide she would sleep over had an experience I never witnessed and I only have her word for it. She was going to be sleeping in my bedroom with me, first on the right along the hall.

We were watching TV, when she got up to go to the toilet, first on the left along the hall and to hear her tell it every door in the hall (6 in total) were all wide open when she walked …

Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 9

Have you read the previous parts of this story? Growing up Haunted in Sydney Part 1

Growing up with a traditional haunting, poltergeist activity, Ouija Boards (yes we had one, but in the 60s and 70′s we were very naive about their inherent dangers) and EVPs, you can imagine we were fairly open minded but we had strange events in our family even before my father died… in fact before I was even thought of.

Firstly you must understand there is a 12/13 year age gap between my older sisters and myself hence why I was left out of a lot of things growing up. The event that unfolded involved my middle sister and the concept of reincarnation.

In 1957 my Dad was home from Korea and not long discharged from the army and we were getting used to having him home full time as a civilian. I was just a twinkle in his eye as Mum would later tell …