True Ghost Tales

I have submitted a story called, Wait For Me, which tells of paranormal things that happened while living in a house my parents bought in Orange,Texas. I want to add more events that took place in that house… that house is creepy. I wish I could get back there and take some psychic with me or something. These things were not as open as they are today with all the psychics and paranormal investigators that are available.

Just a brief summary of what took place before. My dad retired from the Army and bought a house in Orange, Texas, being closer to Louisiana where he began working, flying helicopters to oil rigs off shore, working 7 days on and 7 days off. My mother was a functioning alcoholic. We, her five children, were her life. Her marriage to my dad had been pretty much over for years but they stayed together for us. I would watch her as she sat at the table late at night while everyone else was asleep. I would be lying on the couch and she thought I’d be sleeping. But I watched her loneliness as she would eat something for the first time all day and have her can of beer beside her. She was sick. She had cirrhosis of the liver but it was not known at this time. You could just see that she was not healthy. I would become so sad knowing that one day she would be gone and how much I was going to miss her. She was my best friend.

I was there after moving from Florida after hearing that she had a stroke. I was married at the age of 15 and left home before they moved to Orange. So this was my first trip to their new home. They had been there for two years. Her stroke did not leave her incapacitated or anything, thank God, but I look back now and see how the family began falling apart even more so after they moved into that house.

My siblings and I, all except my youngest sister, Cathy, partied pretty hard and there was a lot of fighting that took place. I lived across town from them when I got the news from my oldest brother that my mom was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and was given three years to live. I was devastated! My brother, Jim, was different. He had many issues growing up. He has an IQ close to that of a genius and growing up always felt different than others which caused him to become very anti-social. My mother was the only one who really understood and accepted everything about him. For him, losing her would be too devastating so he did everything he could to save her life. He searched out for God, which we never were told about. Never went to church. I asked my mom one time who God was and she told me, “Anything you want Him to be”.

The next thing I knew, the Mormons were coming over to my mom’s house and both of my brothers had given up partying, even smoking cigarettes in an effort to save her life. But every time she would come home from the hospital, released because she was doing better, she would become deathly sick, even having to be carried by my brother into the emergency room. I’m talking just two days after getting home.

Three years turned to three months and she was dead. Devastation smothered us all. We came home from the hospital that last day and I cried myself to sleep, waking up to my grandmother wailing, her first sign of any emotion since we left the hospital. I ran into my mother’s bathroom, freaking out, not wanting to hear the scream of a suffering mother who just lost her daughter. All of the sudden all of the lights went out in the house and then came back on. Believe me, it was significant. We all felt “it”.

My husband and I ended up having to move into the house with my dad and siblings due to my wrecking the truck my husband needed to work out of so he was out of a job for awhile. After moving in, I began having these experiences of fear in certain rooms. The room at the very back of the house, down the hall to the left, right across from my mom and dad’s room, terrified me. My oldest brother, who was the “crazy” one in the family, lived in that room. He became very withdrawn and whenever he did come out of his room he was totally out of it and would sometimes just follow me around, standing or sitting beside me, breathing hard, not saying a word. I’d get up and he’d follow. I would end up locked in the bathroom until he would withdraw back into his room, turning the volume up to his music which would still blast through the hall.

My son, Kenny, who was only three at the time, came up to me one night and said, “Uncle Jim (my brother) has his mask on. He is going to kill me and he is going to kill you and he is going to kill grandpa and Patricia”, (my younger sister). I grabbed Kenny up and locked us into my sister’s room and told him to be very quiet, so terrified by what my three year old son was saying. Three year olds don’t say things like that. They cannot even imagine things like that! Although we never went to church, I always believed there was a God and I prayed to Him until we fell asleep. No one was killed. Thank God.

I would sleep on the couch and would hear my mother’s foot steps, her wearing her slippers, coming down the hall. It was a sound that became a norm in the home while she was alive. You know… those sounds that you just expect to hear because you hear them everyday. But, knowing she was dead made that sound not quite as welcome. But a sadness would engulf me, loving my mother, not understanding why she was still waiting. Trapped? Lost? Thoughts that were not comforting to the soul.

So, I’m sitting in the living room one day, alone. My husband and I had separated after we moved into that house. It was over and there was no remorse on my side… except for my mother’s last wish which was for me to make my marriage work. Anyway, I’m watching TV and I hear my mother’s footsteps coming down the hall, just faintly, when all the sudden the channels start flipping up and down, ending on a snowy channel. This was one of those TV’s that had the metal tabs that you touched and the channels would change. The channel was shown beside each button by digital illumination and so I was watching as the numbers were going down the way and then back up. I got up and had that eerie feeling that made the hairs on my body stand up and my heart rate speed up just a bit faster. Changing the channel, I went to sit back down but before I did I opened the back door that lead into the garage which had no garage doors so I felt it was a good escape should I need one. I sat down and right about the time that the footsteps began again, only this time a little louder, maybe because “she” was closer, the channels began flipping up and down. I was out that door and by the time I hit the road that ran east and west in front of the house, I felt/heard my mom say, “Don’t leave me here alone”, and that sadness that just over floods you came over me and I said, (aloud even), “Okay but I’m not coming inside”, and I went and sat on the steps leading in that door from the garage until my sister came home from school.

My dad was not a believer of anything paranormal until after my mom had died. That’s when he began asking me questions regarding my belief, if I believed, in life after death and sharing some experiences he was having, which made me very uncomfortable and I did not want to hear about it, talk about it, nothing. Too many things were changing and now my dad was speaking of things that he so strongly opposed at one time.

My sister and I would put our make up on in what we called the stereo room. I guess it would be an extra living room or what they call a great room. The mirror we used was my mom’s and we had it sitting on the window sill, leaning on the window. One day my dad is calling for me and my sister and there was urgency in his voice. He was in the “stereo room”, standing in front of that mirror pointing to something on it and asking, “Did any of you put that here?” We get close enough to see what he is talking about and it is an image of a face that looked like my mom. We shook our heads no and he demands that we do not touch it… which again was weird for my dad to be acting that way. That image stayed in the mirror for maybe about a month and then just faded away. My dad had even ran his finger over it to see if it would smudge as if it were make up or something. That’s kind of what it looked like but in the form of my mother’s face.

At some time, my dad called for a bug exterminator to spray the house. I was the only one home when he got there so I walked out into the garage to throw darts. A few minutes after I started throwing the darts, the dart board hanging on the garage wall, the door opened and that man poked his head out of the door. He looked totally freaked out and then relieved and said, “Oh, that’s you”… I wonder to this day why the sound of the darts spooked him so bad. I mean, I understand that he probably heard the sound of the darts and did not know what they were but to look so freaked out, there was something that spooked him to the point of being afraid when he heard those sounds.

One night while sleeping on the couch I began having a dream about my sister who was sleeping in that room that night. I dreamed that my son came and told me that a monster was after aunt Patricia and he wanted me to go help her. I ran into that room to get her and this force grabbed hold of my legs and pull me down. I grabbed my son and struggled to crawl with his arm in one of my hands and each time I pulled myself forward with my elbows I was able to push him closer to the door until I pushed him out. I was being pulled back into the dark room when I woke up, totally freaked out and ran back to the room, waking my sister up and telling her to get out of there. She jumped up which was unusual because it is like waking the dead when trying to get her up. She grabbed her pillow and said, “Thank God you woke me up because I was having a nightmare that something was trying to get me in that room.”

After my dad was killed in the car wreck, I went to Orange, visiting some friends and that night I drove to the house and parked in the driveway. I was crying, grieving the loss of what seemed to be everything when all of the sudden I felt like someone was watching me from the “stereo room”. I looked into the dark windows and the fear became so great like there was nothing but evil peering at me from behind the shadows and if I didn’t get out of there like right then I was going to see something that would probably lead to the death of me just from the fear. I took off and never went back.

Everyone in that house went a little loony after my mother’s death. Everyone fell apart. Even the neighbors next door suffered the death of their son by suicide. My brother who was next to the oldest committed suicide himself.

I would really like to have that house checked. It’s been since 1984 since any of us last lived there. But, I can bet that whoever moved in and whoever is there now, unless someone has had it “cleansed”, has and is experiencing paranormal activity that includes demonic entities.

It was after the death of my mother and in that house that I began experiencing what I am finding out to be called sleep paralysis. That describes the feeling but what it really is, I believe, is the spirit using all of our energy to absorb into itself, leaving us helpless and captive to it. And, it cannot take over until we are in a very vulnerable and weak state which is right between being awake and falling to sleep. But, I have also experienced the same feeling/paralysis, becoming terrified but then being “told” to “Let go of the fear”, and having a visitation from who I believe to be an angel of the Lord. The experience left me with an assurance and a peace that God will never leave us nor forsake us. It is an experience that happened in 1991 and to this day, reassures me when doubt seems to enter in. But, as far as the process that you go through when a demonic entity seems to take over all your strength and leaves you disabled, the same process takes place when a Heavenly Spirit visits us too. But the Heavenly Spirit will lead you into peace and acceptance, allowing Him to come in. Although I have to admit that the experience lasted for about 45 minutes and I would have to continue being reassured because it is so not the normal experience of life that it still kind of freaks you out. But I did not want that experience to end. The mission was accomplished though because on the night that that happened, I was a baby Christian and I really felt that God had left me and I told Him that I was never going to trust Him again… Well, He let me know that He never did and I will never NOT trust Him.

Written by Anna Bales, Copyright 2009