Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I am surrounded by ghosts, the older I grow the more their numbers increase. The most fearsome of these are the ghosts of what may have been but the most memorable are the ghosts of my youth for they are a part of my being.

I met the first ghost of my life in a two-story farm house near a large town in Kansas. The home was built in 1878 but that is not to say we had dirt floors and a sod roof. The first extensive remodeling of the home had taken place shortly before my family moved in and consisted of a general modernization and converting the front downstairs bedroom into a living room. In addition the lower floor held a dining room, kitchen and bathroom. Up a centrally located stairway were three bedrooms in a reverse L pattern.

The house, although near a large city was surrounded by farmland with the nearest neighbor a quarter mile away. The road leading to the house was gravel and largely impassable in heavy snow or rain. There was no air conditioning and the furnace was old, unreliable and noisy and our water came from a well. The only original, untouched part of the house was the basement. The natural rock and mortar collected moisture and shadows with possibilities both fearsome and magical to a small boy.

The first few years at the house passed quietly for me. Perhaps things happened that meant nothing to me or maybe the spirits of the house were busy concentrating on my parents or my brother and sister. Neither of my siblings ever told of seeing or hearing anything strange in the four years they lived in the home but things were different for my Mother and Father.

It seems my poor dad spent many a sleepless night being roused from his bed by my mom to investigate some unexplained bump in the night or light that refused to stay off or door that opened or closed itself loudly enough to raise the dead but these were nothing compared to the visitor my Father received late one night after working overtime at work. Dad had come home around eleven one night and fixed himself a late night snack before heading up to bed. Sitting at the breakfast table he suddenly felt a chill. Looking up from his ham and cheese sandwich he saw ”a mist formed like a man” standing in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. Being a man of great wit and agility, much like his younger son, he jumped up and shouted the first word to come to him,”HEY.”  With that, the uninvited melted down and became a mist above the floor and escaped out the front door. What my dad did to recover from his visitor was never told to me but I am sure it involved a few more cigarettes.

The family agreement was that Dad’s visitor was the plasmic remains of a man killed by a bull shortly before we moved in. The man had been moving the animal from one pen to another when it attacked him. Badly injured, he was carried into the house and died before help arrived. My mom was the next to meet him. She was hanging laundry in the back yard when she heard someone moaning in pain. She promptly dropped everything and ran into the house. Funny, I was always running out of the house because of strange noises.

To my knowledge there were three ghost sharing our home with us. The bull-man, a pioneer lady I will mention later and the one that still gives me chills today, Chester. Chester must have been a handful when he was alive because he certainly kept me jumping when he was dead. To be honest, I never saw Chester in the form of a mist or a shadow to my left when the lights are dim and the imagination is awake. No he preferred to come to me in my dreams. He took several forms but usually he came to me in human form. It has been forty years since the dreams but they are still fresh in my memory.

One dream I remember, I was sitting in the living room watching TV when I thought I heard someone enter through the kitchen. I called to whoever it was and heard their approaching footsteps stop just short of the living room entrance. I called again with growing apprehension only to be attacked by an invisible force that launched itself on me with all the fury of a Kansas tornado. ”He” bit, scratched, kicked and punched me while I both fought back and tried to wake up from this nightmare. Once I awoke the fear and darkness still surrounded and I lay still in my bed for fear of re-attracting Chester’s anger. Only when the first rays of dawn light and bird songs came to me could I relax and again sleep in safety.

Another favorite form of Chester’s was to invade my dreams in the form of spiders. On countless nights I would lay in my be bed as first the floor then the door and walls would be covered by the palm sized, hair coated eight legged creatures. I was never bitten but the terror was real and again after waking I would wait in a cold sweat for the dawn light. I never told my parents about my spider dreams. “Gee mom and dad, I know it sounds strange but could you please check me into a hospital, I keep having dreams I’m being attacked by spiders.”

I did ask for help from a higher power and one night my prayers were answered. Just as before the dream started with the hairy little beasts covering the four walls of my room and heading slowly but surely towards me.  Just as I was about to be enveloped there appeared in my doorway what can only be described as a white tornado. Just as with a real twister the arachnids were sucked in whole and thrown out in pieces, little claws and legs sailing through the air. The tornado stayed until the last spider was gone and then it disappeared as quickly as it came. I never had the spider dream again.

I said earlier that I never actually saw Chester when I was awake but I did hear him. Hot summer afternoons were often spent with my dog, Bimbo, watching TV downstairs. The ghost spent hot afternoons walking around upstairs, running up and down the stairs, opening doors and in general scaring the heck out of young boys.  Bimbo and I would go upstairs to investigate and of course find nothing, then go back downstairs to our shows only to be interrupted again. Again we would go up to check things out find nothing and finally, at Bimbos urging, go outside to wait for mom and dad to come home. I am sure these goings on gave quite a chuckle to Chester and his friends.

The third member of the ghost we shared our home with was the pioneer lady. I call her this because on the separate occasions my Mom and I saw her she was wearing a flowing dress and a bonnet. My Mom saw her first. She said she saw her in the hallway where she appeared briefly and appeared to be crying. The time I saw her it was late at night and I was in the backyard collecting fireflies when I thought I saw my Mom walking in the yard and heading away from the home toward one of the fields which then surrounded the our place. I called to her but she kept on going so I decided to catch up with and go with her. Just as I was about to touch the hem of her dress my real Mother called my name. I turned to see her standing on the house porch when I turned again the lady in the field was gone.

Life went on as normally as possible in a house occupied by six people, half of whom had been dead for some time. My years there were a mixture of baseball, ghosts, fishing, apparitions, hiking and bumps in the night. Things opening and closing and turning on or off by themselves became a part of life.  Chester made occasional visits, and the pioneer lady screamed one night and woke us all up.

The good and bad news in life is that nothing last forever. One day my parents informed me the time had come to move into a house of our own farther out in the country away from the ever encroaching city. After we left the house was given a more extensive remodeling and modernization with city water and sewer and air conditioning.  Despite these improvements no renters ever stayed in the home for more than a few months and two years after we left a young girl, tormented by unseen demons and voices only she could hear, attempted suicide.

Today I live in the same metropolitan area and my work often takes me past my childhood home. The house is still a rental and is always for rent. I am often tempted to stop and look around the place. Maybe, if I am sure its empty I’d gather the courage to peer in a window but I am afraid of what I might see or what might see me. Maybe I’d see a young boy sitting in a chair, nervous dog by his side, and they look like they just heard a noise from upstairs.

Written by Mark Wallock, Copyright 2009