Shots Across The Bow

A True Story for Halloween

This didn't happen to a friend, or a friend of a friend. I didn't read about it on the internet, and you won't find a debunking on Snopes. The following stories are real, and they happened to me and my family over the course of sevral years.

While I do believe in the possibility of all kinds of paranormal occurances, everything from ghosts to ESP to Bigfoot, I am a profound skeptic. I look for rational explanations for irrational events, and only after those have been exhausted will I consider other, less rigorous explanations.

As such, I make no claims or attributions about the causes of the events I am about to relate; I can only tell you that they actually happened, and that I personally witnessed several of them. Make of them what you will.

The Haunted Farm

The summer before my sophomore year in high school, we moved from a suburban house in West Knoxville out to an old farmhouse in Dandridge. The house predated the War Between the States, and at one time was the center of a large plantation. There were three barns, and an old log cabin on the property as well.

The place had been neglected terribly; the yard was overgrown; there were broken windows on most of the outbuildings, and the swimming pool outback looked more like a cow pond. The red paint on the extrerior brick walls was cracked and peeling, exposing a whitewash coat underneath. The windows of the house itself were glazed with about a decades dust, and the old glass distorted the view outside, adding hazy ripples to the flat front lawn.

Inside, the house showed its abused beauty. The hardwood floors gently sloped to the north, wrenched out of true as the earth had settled over the decades. There was a gorgeous staircase in the front of the house. Gorgeous that is, until some former owner decided to paint over the hard wood with an ugly gray color. They must not have liked the gray, because they began to cover it with an uglier green. Either they ran out of money, or realized they were just making things worse, because neither coat went all the way to the top, leaving the railing with three distinct colors.

In keeping with its origins, there was no central heat or air, but there were large fireplaces, 3 downstairs and 2 upstairs. A modern kitchen had been added on sometime much later, and was decorated in a horribly ugly 70s motif that even Mike Brady would scorn. In another nod to modernization, a small bathroom was added, just off the front hall.

Yep, 3 kids, two of them teenagers, 2 adults, and one bathroom.

My parents loved the place.

If I remember right, we moved in to the house in late July or early August, before school started. It was hot, and we worked hard getting the house in shape. Well, to be honest, Mom and Dad did most of the work; we helped when we couldn't get out of it. It was actually pretty cool, living in that house. It was built differently than modern houses; the ceilings were very high, there were register holes cut in the floor to allow the warmer air from the downstairs fireplaces to reach the upstairs; there were honest to goodness real wood crown and baseboard moldings; and the walls were plaster and lathe, not drywall. The rooms were large, and there were only a few of them. Upstairs was a landing for the staircase and two bedrooms. My brother and I shared the one on the right, and my sister had the one on the left.

It wasn't long after we moved in that my sister started talking about seeing faces in her room. She was 12 or 13 at the time, and prone to dramatic outbursts, so I'm embarrassed to say we all basically blew her off. We learned what a mistake that was later on.

Then my mom began to experience things in the house as well. She tells the story of standing in the kitchen, doing the dishes, when she felt someone behind her. She looked but there was nobady there. She went back to washing, and the feeling of being watched grew stronger. She turned again, and there was still nothing there. She was starting to get a little nervous, but went back to the dishes, and this time the feeling of being watched was unbearable. She whirled around, and this time, my dad was standing there, having just walked into the kitchen. Mom let out a shriek that nearly gave him a heart attack! Of course, he wanted to know what was going on, why she was so jumpy. When she told him, he dismissed it, just like we'd done with my sister. He's much too grounded in the real world to buy into ghosts.

Then, it was my turn.

One afternoon, I was upstairs in my bedroom, reading. I was laying on my bed, lost somewhere in another world when I was brought crashing back to this one. The foot of my bed, a wood framed twin, jumped about an inch or so off the floor like somebody had grabbed the end, lifted it, then dropped it. This happened three times in about a second or so, then stopped.

I performed my own supernatural feat, levitating off the bed, across the room, around the corner and down the stairs without ever a foot hitting the floor. My parents were downstairs wathcing TV, and I asked them if they'd heard the noise. They hadn't, and asked me what was going on. When I explained (and apologized to my sister) once again, my dad refused to even consider that there was a ghost.

Now, I'm not normally a foolish person. While I make my share of mistakes, it's rarely the result of some rash action. But my next encounter provedthe exception to this rule.

Late one evening, my mother and I had the bright idea to try and contact whatever seemed to be sharing the house with us. I brought home a Ouija board from a friend at school, and we started to mess around with it. I don't claim to be an expert in psychic phenomena, and I don't know how the planchette is supposed to move, but every time we put our hands on the silly thing, it would sit perfectly still for several minutes, then would jump several inches. We would both yank our hands off the thing, laughing nervously at the shock, then try again. After about the fourth time we went through this cycle, I heard a loud scraping sound coming from the front porch. I went out there to see what was going on.

I looked around on the porch to see what could have made the noise. The only things there were a couple of wrought iron benches that weighed at least 100 lbs apiece. When I went over to check them, I found fresh scratches where one of the benches had been pushed across the brick for about 4 inches.

That's the last time I've touched a Ouija board.

Shortly afterwards, I moved out of the house into the old cabin about 75 yards from the main house. We ran electricity and a phone line, but there was no plumbing, there were gaps between the roof and walls that a cat could climb through, and no heat, except for a woodburning stove we installed, but it was mine, and I wasn't sharing it with anyone, natural or otherwise.

Well, except for a few spiders, and the aforementioned cats.

Everyone continued to encounter our housemate, except for my father, who grew ever more adamant that there was no such thing as ghosts.

Until his turn came.

He was very quiet one morning, which if you know my father, would tell you just how profoundly he was affected by what he'd seen. It took him quite awhile to admit to us what had happened, although he told my mom immediately. Apparently, he woke up to see a woman standing by the door of their room, looking at him. I never got many of the details, because he really didn't like talking about it, but he stopped giving the rest of us a hard time after that.

A couple of years later, I had one more encounter with something odd in that house. I was home alone watching TV downstairs when I heard a loud crash, and heavy footsteps walking across the floor upstairs. The crash was pretty big, and it seemed like it would take a major piece of furntiture to make that kind of noise.

Now, I've watched a lot of horror movies, and I know how the script goes. The hero grabs a poker from the fireplace and goes up stairs, holding the poker in front of him, looking for the cause of the noise. What happens next depends on the movie's rating, but it's rarely good for our hero. He winds up pinned to a door by a monster knife, eaten by some scabrous thing from a crypt, or sucked into an alternate univers inside a haunted TV. None of those fates really appealed to me; neither did the more prosaic possibility of surprising a burlar in mid burgle.

So, I went to the fireplace, grabbed the poker, and carefully held it in front of me as I went to close the damn door leading to the upstairs. I waited there behind the closed door for about 15 minutes, giving whatever it was plenty of time to go about its business. After that, I went back into the living room, and started watching TV again. If it was a burglar, he had time to get out. If it wasn't, well what could I do about it?

The last episode I know about came a couple of years later. One Sunday morning, my family was sitting on the sun porch eating breakfast, when they heard me coming through the living room. My dad called out to me to come eat before it got cold. They waited about 10 seconds or so for me to come in and sit down before they remembered that I had gone into the Navy, and was in Illinois going through training. Dad went into the living room to check, and there was nobody there.

There are other stories of things people saw or experienced in the house, like the time my mom woke up and the entire bedroom was shaking. She thought it was an earthquake or tremor at first, but there was nothing on the news about it, and it was significant enough that it should have been recorded. In all the time we lived there, we never got the feeling of hostility, or danger, just a solid jolt of fear of the unknown from time to time.

The folks who moved into the house after we left told us that things were still happening there. The lady had done some research, and found out that one of the past residents was a nosy spinster, who spent the last years of her life in the house. They think she might still be there, keeping tabs on what goes on.

Like I said at the start, I don't know. I can explain away the sightings, the thuds and thumps, the footsteps, and the paranoia. I can even believe that maybe a large dog pushed up against the wrought iron bench, at the precise moment we were experimenting with the Ouija board, then running off when I opened the front door. But I cannot explain away the bed.

Happy Halloween!

Posted by Rich at October 31, 2003 2:45 PM | TrackBack