Halloween and Ghosts and Stuff
It’s that season again where we spend a bunch of money to get dressed up in costume and eat candy. I love this time of year. The colors change, the grass pollen is gone and the sun is down early so I don’t feel guilty about nodding off at 7pm. The best part though is the fun my family has when we dress up in our costumes. We’re “that family” that likes to overdo it.
But let us not forget the reason for the season: Candy Corn. No, that isn’t it, though I do enjoy a handful now and then. It’s a time for us all to celebrate the great Satan, or Lucifer to his friends. No, that isn’t it either. It originated as a Christian feasting holiday based on Celtic Harvest festivals from when Pagans and Christians joined forces to crush an alien invasion in the middle-ages that has been widely forgotten and/or covered up by the illuminati. That’s as close to a history lesson you’re going to get out of me, if you want to know the real story, go to a library. I’m not here to teach everyone the histories of every day of the year, sheesh!
This year, Halloween falls on October 31st which happens to be a Thursday, meaning there will be fewer drunk-driving fatalities. That’s good, but it also means Friday at school is going to be pretty tough for students and teachers alike. So I have elected to do my part and make sure my Halloween stories aren’t scary in the slightest, ensuring a good night sleep for all who only use my blog as Halloween entertainment, which would be both odd and sad.
I am about to tell you some ghost stories. REAL events that have happened to me, personally that have led me to believe ghosts were involved. These very well could be my weak grasp of reality mixed with a child-like understanding of logical reasoning mixed with an over-active imagination and lower-than-average intelligence. I will allow you to be the judges of whether or not I have encountered an actual spirit from beyond, or created a psychological construct to avoid blame, shame or ownership of my mental deficiencies.
My wife, Wendy, and I purchased a cute little farmhouse from the original owning family about twelve years ago. We’ve since sold it, but we lived there for eleven years. It was built in 1931 by a man for a woman that he wanted to marry. Upon seeing the house completed, the woman told him that the house was too small, so he added a large room at the front and that seemed to satisfy her so they got married and lived there for years, tending the farmland and fruit trees around them.
They died. People do that after a certain number of years go by, and left the home to their niece, who moved in and started a family. But after a while, they received an offer they couldn’t refuse from a developer that wanted the surrounding land to build houses and they made the decision to sell their home to us and the land to a builder. We got to know the family a little bit and they were excited for us to move in, even surprising us by arranging some furniture for us that we had left after our honeymoon. They were nice folks.
The first sign of supernatural activity occurred when Wendy and I were unpacking the kitchen. There was a special drawer next to our stove that rolled out on rails and had a cutting board built into the top which also rolled out. It was unique to that side of the room. No other drawer was fashioned like it near there. It’s where I decided to put the cutlery and I arranged our new knives neatly in the drawer. After that, I turned around and helped my wife unload another box.
Only minutes later I needed one of the knives for something. I went to the drawer to retrieve one, but when I slid the drawer out, it was empty. I figured Wendy had switched them to another drawer as when I organize our home, I am incapable of doing anything correctly. So I asked my new bride where she moved the knives to.
Wendy looked at me strangely and pointed to the empty drawer I had just shut. I opened it again to indicate they weren’t there. Then we both searched all four of the drawers in that area, even rolling out the cutting board a couple of times. The knives weren’t there. So we figured we were just disoriented in the new kitchen with the move and looked in other drawers but the knives were gone, and it was my fault.
Needing to move on with our unpacking, I put some other dishes away and then found a box of other kitchen utensils that I figured I would put in the same row of drawers that I had wanted to put the knives. After filling that drawer, Wendy asked if I had come across the knives yet, but since we had completed a thoroughly redundant search of every drawer there, I figured I would be dramatic and slide the top drawer out again to reveal its empty nature. To my horror, the knives slid out with it.
“How did you do that?” Wendy asked, unimpressed with what she thought was a practical joke.
“I didn’t.” I said, “they literally just re-appeared, seconds after I had this drawer open before.”
“So what?” asked Wendy, “I just looked in that drawer too and there’s no way that those knives got in there without you putting them there.”
I was flabbergasted, we both were. There was no physical way for those knives to have moved without one of us doing so and neither of us were unattended long enough to create such an illusion. We simply opened an empty drawer, closed it for a few seconds and then opened it again and there was a drawer full of knives that could not have slid on their own to a place that was out of sight. The drawer was full of cutlery.
Later that week when I was downstairs attempting to reconnect the washing machine to new pipes my father had installed in a different area of the basement, I had run into a jam. The older hoses wouldn’t tighten correctly to the nozzles of the water pipes and when I would turn the water on, it would spray all over from the hose. I needed a tool that I didn’t have, which were vice-grip pliers. That was one of the only things I didn’t have and I needed it them very much at that moment in time.
Resolving to have to wait until morning to go pick up a pair from the hardware store, and putting off a load of laundry that needed doing, I looked up into the bare bones of the unfinished basement walls. Propped up against a framing stud, in a one foot square area between foundation and basement ceiling was precisely the tool I needed. It was old, well used, but still in excellent shape. Etched into one of the metal handles was the name “Kyle.”
Strange things like that happened around the house from time to time. They weren’t bad, in fact, I’m convinced that I have been helped by the spirit on several occasions and at least once it may have saved my life.
One evening, months later, I was again working on our washing machine in the basement. This time I was replacing a pump that had stopped working, so I needed to get underneath the heavy machine and reach up into its mechanical guts to remove the bad and install the good. It’s not as easy as it sounds and ultimately I was not successful. In order to get to where I needed to go, I had to first pull the machine away from the wall far enough for me to tip the machine back and lean it against said wall.
After I get the hefty white box balance against the wall, I begin digging in with a screw driver. I had to alternate between a Philips head and a small crescent wrench to get the piece out (I can hear some repairman reading this right now and remarking over his shoulder, “No wonder his machine didn’t work, he was pulling out the regulator and not the pump.”). It was frustrating work and the first time I set the screwdriver down on the cement floor of my basement, it started to roll away from me, so I set up two blocks of wood on either side for me to put the screwdriver between while I had my head completely under the edge of the washer in a corner just large enough for my skull.
The blocks worked as planned keeping the screwdriver from rolling away (I thought about patenting the idea briefly). However, on the fourth or fifth switch, I reached for the screwdriver and it wasn’t between the blocks where my sensitive and detail-oriented hands had last put it. I peeked out the v-shaped gap between the floor and the metal edge of the washing machine and saw that the screwdriver had neither rolled off where it had before, away from my left arm nor had it been magnetically attracted to my love-handles. This meant I actually had to shimmy out from under the washing machine to see where it went.
After dragging my head and neck out from under the machine, I looked around for the screwdriver I had been using. It was still lined up parallel to my body and between the blocks of wood, but was down by my ankle instead of my waist where the blocks were. I could not and would not have reached that far to place the screwdriver there and it was resting where it could not have rolled. It would have had to have been drug the additional two feet to be where it was. I had to sit all the way up to reach for it.
No sooner had I sat up to retrieve the tool than the washing machine came crashing down to the floor behind me, with enough force to sever a human head at the neck… Precisely how I had been situated not five seconds before hand. The sharp metal edge of the machine would have sliced right through my neck, jugular, spine and Adam’s Apple, killing me for sure. Even if my hands and arms were in the way, the least possible injury would have been fatal.
I was shocked, but aware that something strange had happened that made sure my head wouldn’t be under the machine at that time. I thought hard about where I had placed the screwdriver. I even tried to roll it a few different ways to attempt to make the screwdriver arc down toward my ankle. I couldn’t make it happen. That screwdriver was moved and I think it was to make sure my head wasn’t in the way when my incredibly unsafe working condition failed.
(The repairman from before is shaking his head, saying, “Well of course your machine stopped working. You can’t just slam a machine down on concrete like that.”)
A few weeks later we ran into the former owner at the grocery store and got to chatting about the house. Eventually Wendy and I were brave enough to ask the woman if anything strange ever happened to her there. She piped up immediately with a smile.
“Ohhhh yes, but it was always positive stuff. Why? What happened?”
We explained some of the things and when I mentioned the part about the pliers and the name on them, the former owner smiled and said that they belonged to her uncle. She explained that when you sell a house, you don’t really want to mention any freaky occurrences to perspective buyers because they’ll think you’re nuts. But she went on to tell us several fun tales about encounters she had in the house. All fun or funny tricks, but she was really impressed with the story I told her about my near death experience.
“Kyle must like you guys,” she said with a smile. “We just enjoyed the experiences when they happened and I think you will too.”
That’s the way it goes with ghost stories, when they happen to other people, they are completely batty, but when something happens to you, well, then its real and everyone should believe your story. Even if you have had a spooky experience like that and believe with all your heart that you had an encounter with a spirit or ghost or whatever, you’ll think anyone else is barking mad for telling an identical story.
From that time on, our ghost had a name and I would address it as such on occasion. “Kyle, thanks for fixing that light,” I would say, or “Hey Kyle we have company coming in five minutes, could you please help me unclog this toilet?” Kyle would always oblige. He was great. He would help us find stuff (seemingly), remind us of things (probably not), and fill our cupboards with food (this never happened).
Kyle only really scared me one time. Again, I was in the basement—I spent a lot of time there—but this time I was on the treadmill, really giving it a go. I had worked hard and this was one of the first times I had actually worked out to a point where calories were actually burned. As I stepped off the treadmill, I felt Wendy’s hand and fingers press firmly into the small of my back, the way she does when she’s telling me she’s proud of me or wants something that she knows I won’t be happy about. Out of breath, I turned to smile at her. She wasn’t there. Nobody was there and the feeling of the hand patting me on the back vanished.
I screamed in a manner and pitch that one would think improbable for my age and gender. Wendy, who was the only other person in the house was located upstairs in the kitchen and heard my shriek. Undoubtedly she was wondering why there was a strange girl in the basement and also how and why I was about to kill them. She came running to the aid of who she would find out was just me in my most frightened state. Kyle must have seen how upset I was because he never congratulated me on a workout again.
I could go on and on about these strange occurrences, but lest I divulge too much and you really think I’m coo-coo, I should probably cease this senseless typing and let you all prepare yourselves for a fun Halloween.
There’s an awful lot of fun out there for Halloween. Enjoy your evening, and remember: the likelihood of you getting poisoned while trick or treating is about ten times less likely than you winning the Powerball, so you should trick-or-treat and meet your neighbors. It’s a good way to socialize and that’s the Damm truth.