Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

In May of 2000, my fiancé and I were soon to be married. After quite a search, we found an old former farm house (built in 1918), located in what was once a rural area but now is in the center of our small town. Family members helped us fix the interior, removing paneling from the walls, which revealed hidden windows and even an old front door not visible from the exterior of the home.

We had moved most of our possessions into the house a few days before our wedding, so I decided to stay there with my dachshund at night until we were married. Remember, it was May, in California, in the San Juaqin Valley, where things get warm very quick in the season. The nights I spent there, sleeping in the bedroom alone with my dog in the house, were fiercely cold. I would wake up, and my dog would be sleeping on top of my head, in an attempt to stay warm. A week later, I came home to find my dog dead in the back yard, having choked himself on his chain.

Shortly after getting married, I purchased a handgun from a friend of mine. I didn’t realize it until everything was in the past, but I believe the arrival of this gun into our home started a series of odd events.

It began when I was lying on the couch, watching TV. The old house didn’t have a hallway; each room had two doors, so you could travel from one room to the next, with the bathroom being in the center of the house.I noticed peripherally that something was in the bedroom, whose ajar door connected with the front room. I looked, and saw a Hispanic woman, maybe in her late 20s, with shoulder-length hair and clothing from the 1970s, watching me with her hand on her waist. She was only half visible, as she was peeking around the open door at me. I jumped up and ran at the door, opened it, and began searching through the house. But inside, I knew that she hadn’t been real.

A key bit of geography of the interior is necessary to know. If you opened this bedroom door, and looked to your left, behind the door, you would see the entrance to a walk-in closet. The closet had a high ceiling, in which was the entrance to the attic, and at the far end of this closet was a painted-over brick wall, which, if you went outside, revealed a smoke stack where the old oven used to be (long closed up and concealed). What was always unnerving about this closet was that, in order to turn the light on in the closet, you had to open the door and reach inside to flip the switch. Someone could be hiding in there, and for at least a few seconds, you would have to be vulnerable. The apparition I saw was placed behind the bedroom door, basically in front of the closet entrance.

In the following three years, odd things would happen, spaced enough apart so that I would grow alarmed and then forget about it. I would come home from work and enter the bedroom and smell cookies from the oven, and then step out of the room and there would be no smell. There would be noises in the laundry room, as someone would be messing with the dryer hatch. Dishes in the sink would also clink around. Once, even our gas stove got in the act, repeatedly turning on when my wife was alone.

Late one night I was in the bathroom, my wife asleep. Immediately to my right, on the other side of the wall, was the walk-in closet. I suddenly heard a series of sounds, like someone was messing with the shoes and clothing. I VERY nervously (I thought there was an intruder)snuck up to the closet, opened the door and reached in to flip the switch… and everything was totally normal. Something I didn’t put together at the time was that the handgun was in its case on the shelf, next to all the shoes.

Even though I was a newlywed, and should have been having a happy time, I instead began to suffer from severe depression, and I often contemplated suicide.

One afternoon, I was cleaning the gun, and after reassembling it, something odd happened. I went in front of a mirror, and felt the need to lift the gun up to my head and look at myself.  Of course, it wasn’t loaded, but just the feeling shook me back awake, and I decided to lock it up and put it back in the closet. The slider had been pulled back, and so I aimed it away from me and pulled the trigger. I had unknowingly pointed it at the closet. Locking it up, I put it away, back on the shelf in the closet.

As I left the room and entered our dining room, the bedroom door slammed shut, on its own. It then actually opened slightly due to the hard slam. Honestly, at this point, I was so mentally fatigued by everything that I let out an audible groan and went on with my day.

It wasn’t until soon before we were to move to our new house that I believe I found some insight into what this was all about. It was late, my wife was asleep, and I was lying next to her on the bed, wide awake. Our bed faced the closet, whose door was open. In the dark I noticed a sudden flash coming from deep inside the closet. The flash was positioned at about the height of a human’s head. I then seemed to understand that someone was either shot in there, or had committed suicide in that closet, and that the presence of the gun in the closet had started some kind of reaction.

I sold the gun, moved to a new home, and have had no such experiences since. I have often wanted to look into what might have happened in that house in the 1970s, to possibly confirm my suspicions. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling that the lady’s name was something like “Corrina.” I wonder if previous/subsequent tenants have similar experiences, but part of me thinks it’s best to leave it all alone. I no longer feel suicidal or depressed.

This is not fictional.  It really did happen.

Written by Jeffrey Arnold, Copyright 2009