Hauntings

I love a good haunting story. I really do I cannot help myself where these sort of things are concerned. I do not like to be totally terrified though. I just like to sit on the edge of my seat, maybe become a bit uneasy about what i am reading or hearing but that is about it.

I found a new blog yesterday that I really like. It is called Diaspora South and it is written by a fascinating gentleman named Ari. One of the somewhat ongoing topics in his blog is the existance of presences within his home.

I do not know how many of you have ever experienced this sort of thing but it can often times be very creepy.

Over the years of my short life I have experienced this sort of thing either in places that I have lived or in homes of people I know.

One of the more recent examples of it was a house I lived in with some roommates shortly after my freshman year at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. It was a rather old house near the campus. I am not sure of its exact construction date but it was sometime in the early 1920's. There were a couple of "ghosts" if you will that lived in this particular house. The primary lease holder was a lady named Cindy, she claimed to be a medium and that we were all safe. According to her one of the "guests" was an old woman who had lived in the house when it was first built. Her name was Hazel and she had been unable to leave her beloved home behind. Hazel was harmless except that she liked to open doors and you might awaken to the front door being wide open on a hot morning. You could be sitting on the couch watching the tele and the deadbolt would turn and the front door would open. There would be absolutly no one there. We would just say hello Hazel and close the door.

The other guest in the house was a small boy who had lived in the house sometime later but I am not sure when. According to Cindy he had been hit by a car one day and killed instantly. He stayed in the front bedroom bothered no one except that the room was always cold. In the middle of summer with no a/c in the house you would get chills being in that room.

As a small child I was always terrified of such goings on. I grew up in a small town in Colorado called Florence. The entire area had once been a booming oil and mining area. There were several towns that had almost died out but there was also a town called Chandler that no longer existed. There was nothing but foundations left of it and my god it was creepy. Considering that people once came there trying to find their fortune it brought with its fair share of crazy people.

The local historic hotel is horribly haunted. Many murders happened there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and to this day I believe unwell spirits wander its halls. When I was a child there were all sorts of strange shadows that would appear on walls. Such as the outline of someone sitting in a rocker and the shadow moved. But there was no rocker in the room. There was a rather large old vistorian house that sat right next to it. It was a gorgeous old house. Rumor had it it was haunted by the ghost of a man and his daughter. He had raped and killed his daughter you see then he hung himself out the upstairs bedroom window.

One of the creepiest houses was the house my paternal grandparents lived in. It was a rather old house built around the turn of the 20th century. I don't know the story of the man who originally lived in the house but he hung himself in the grand old oak tree in the front yard. My grandmother said he had been a very disturbed man. I remember from the moment they moved in I never felt right in that house. As Ari has stated in his blog it often times felt like there was someone watching you, with in difference but watching you none the less. I also awoke many a night in that house ready to come out of my skin because I felt I was being watched and that what was watching me had no desire for anyone to be in that house.

Perhaps the strangest one I know about is the house my Uncle Phillip was paid to tear down. For years people had always felt very put off by the house some people had bought the house after the little old lady that lived there died. They wanted it torn down because they planned to build new. When they got to the basement portion they discovered a secret room. The man who had built the house had had a baby by his own daughter and suffocated it. he had buried it in the basement and inscribed that he could not live with himself on the tombstone for what he had done. I imagine it was his daughter and her baby that were so unwell and had always but off people.

I think i have rambled on enough for the day. i will do another installment soon and tell you about the Victorian house my aunt lived in that almost scared me to death.