My back yard on a foggy morning. No filter, no editing, no photoshop. Spooky, right?
Do you believe in ghosts? When I was a little girl, I did. I was convinced my house was inhabited by the ghost of a Native American Chief. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was because my grandmother, who lived with us when I was young, was always telling me stories about the Cherokee Indian tribe (her mother was half Cherokee). Maybe it was because I watched Poltergeist one too many times and was convinced there was an ancient Indian burial ground under our house. Or maybe it was just because I had a VERY overactive imagination as a child.
Whatever the case, I can’t tell you how many nights I laid awake in bed, staring through the open crack in my bedroom door, waiting to catch a glimpse of our ghost. It never happened, though. And as I grew up, I stopped believing in ghosts. I stopped being afraid of the dark. Until…..
Until last year, when my family moved into an old farmhouse that was built in the late 1920s and still possesses much of its “original charm.” I remember joking with my husband before we moved in that the reason the rent was so cheap and the house had been vacant so long was probably because it was haunted. I remember promising my best friend that I wouldn’t freak out every time I heard floor boards shift in the middle of the night, or pipes rattle, or doors creak open. Old houses do things like that, after all. (Side note: Why is it just widely accepted that old houses “do things like that?” Ever stop to wonder if the reason is because the more history a house has, the more likely it is to be haunted?)
In reality, I didn’t actually believe the house was haunted. I stopped believing in ghosts about the same time I stopped sleeping with my blankie. (Which, admittedly, wasn’t until I was 18. But still.) So when, on our first night there, three different smoke detectors went off at three different times (9pm, 3am, 6am), I figured there had to be a logical explanation. Maybe they were combination detectors and also picked up radon or carbon monoxide. Nope. My landlord confirmed that they weren’t. Maybe the batteries just went bad. On three different detectors. All within a few hours of each other. Even though they were all different brands. Nope. If that were the case, changing the batteries would have fixed the problem. It didn’t. Not even changing the detectors themselves stopped them from going off at all hours of the day and night. To this day, we cannot keep a smoke detector in the master bedroom of our house.
For months, I tried to ignore the heaviness that seemed to settle over our home at night like a thick fog, starting right around midnight. I laughed off the eerie feeling that someone was always watching me, especially when I was outside or in the bathroom. (Talk about stage fright- can we say bladder infection?!) I promised my dogs that there was nothing there every time one of them would become fixated on something, barking and growling with their hair standing on end. I stayed out of the basement at all costs for fear of giving myself a heart attack, because my adrenaline would kick into overdrive not even halfway down the stairs, as soon as the incinerator came into view. (Seriously….we have an incinerator.) So sure, our house was creepy. Most old houses are, right? But it wasn’t haunted.
The first time I found myself truly at a complete loss for any rational explanation for it all was last fall, when I woke up to footprints at the end of my bed. I remember blinking several times, sure they were a figment of my imagination that would disappear before I could obtain a witness to their existence. But as it turned out, I was able to take several pictures of said footprints. I was able to wait for my kids to wake up, and make sure that they saw them, too. We were able to compare our footprints to those on the floor. (None were a match.) And it actually took a little bit of elbow grease to clean them up. That was the day I accepted that there was a good chance we were not alone in our house, that maybe ghosts are real.
The footprints at the end of my bed. They appear to have an oily or sticky texture, but they were dry to the touch ans somewhat difficult to clean up.
I submitted the footprint photos to a local radio station that hosts a yearly paranormal investigation around Halloween last year. As some of you may remember, our house was selected. In the days and weeks leading up to the investigation, things got a little crazy at home. For one thing, there was lots of promoting for the event going on, so of course I was fielding all sorts of questions and working out the logistics and cleaning like a mad woman to get my house ready for public viewing. For another, it almost seemed as if our “others” sensed something was going on, because the “activity” picked up tremendously, right down to me winding up with a broken nose caused by a self-propelled, flying cellphone. (Long story.)
But when the investigation actually began, I was a little worried that it was going to be a big let-down for everyone, that the investigators wouldn’t find anything and everyone would just go back to thinking I was bonkers. Fortunately (?), that was not the case. It was a crazy night. It seemed like every single device the ghost hunters brought with them, our spirits were receptive to. They appeared to be grasping at any opportunity to make contact with the other side, our side. Things were flying off the walls (okay, maybe just one thing off one wall), an apparition was caught on camera, dozens of EVPs were recorded. The consensus, by the end of the night, was that our house was not only haunted, but extremely active and teeming with multiple spirits, both inside and outside.
Two photos of our backyard taken by paranormal investigators in immediate succesion. In the first, there is a very defined mist surrounding the tire swing. In the second, the mist is gone.
In the following days, things got crazier. Strangers started showing up at my door, asking if ours was “the house from the radio.” I got tons of requests from people wanting to come investigate the premises. And our spirits…it seemed that once they knew they could make contact, it was all they wanted to do. Our encounters with our ghosts became more and more like the stuff movies are made of. But eventually, things died down. The outside interest in our house dissipated. The spirits calmed down, to an extent. And I was able to start sleeping with the lights off again.
We simply went about living our lives, albeit a little unconventionally. We have had multiple paranormal investigations since our first one almost a year ago, and continue to research the history of our home and the land it was built on. (No answers yet, unfortunately.) We are currently working with one of the longest-running, most highly regarded paranormal investigation firms in the state of Michigan, Grimstone Inc. We continue to have “incidents”- voices, footsteps, things being moved, electronics being turned on (and off…and then back on) when nobody’s around, even a couple of sightings of apparitions in recent weeks, which is new. There was the time the light in the middle room started turning itself on and off (which I caught on video), even though the only two people home were in the living room. And then there was the time my 14-year-old got up in the middle of the night and started running around in his sleep, talking gibberish, at the exact same moment that his step-brother sat up in bed, almost in a trance-like state, and started slamming his head into his pillow. (Okay, yes. That one was freaky. Looked like something out of a scary movie.)
I document the incidents as they occur on my blog A Haunting in Grand Ledge. We capture evidence when we can. We continue to seek answers. But we also do normal stuff, too. We have get-togethers with our friends and let our kids have sleepovers. I always love having new company over. First-time visitors who know the history of our house tend to be a little cautious, to say the least. They come in all wide-eyed and hesitant, not knowing what to expect. At some point during their visit, they remark that our house is “actually a really nice house.” It never fails. I guess they expect apparitions to be hiding in the shadows, books to come flying at their heads, and ectoplasm to be oozing from the walls or something. I don’t know.
Since taking our story public, I’ve probably been asked at least a thousand times how we live and raise our family in a haunted house. The answer’s easy. We just do. Yes, our house is haunted. But it’s our house. They’re our ghosts. And this is our haunting.
We continue to search for answers as to why our house is haunted. Does the house itself hold the key?
Read the rest of my Loving a Soldier posts about living in a haunted house HERE:
