Come the stories of haunted houses.
Hello all and sorry for the long break between posts. I've been out of town for a story about Cripple Creek, CO. Lovely town and I'll tell you about it in another post, for this one is about Halloween.
Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. That all changed three years ago when my mother died on Halloween. However, it being a favorite of my mother, I can't think of a better time to go. It is also on this day we received affirmation of life after death:
My oldest brother, Charlie, died in 1986 from cancer. He was 28 and it almost tore the family apart. I tell you this in order to tell you the rest... On the day my mother died, my sister had already had to have her revived following her heart stopping. Later in the day, much later, Mother kept trying to get out of bed, with my sister finally admonishing her to stay, given she had so many tubes coming out of her for various reasons. After a couple hours of this back and forth, my mother finally said to her, "Lynne, you don't understand. Charlie's here and he says it's time for me to go."
My mother was lucid when she said this, having paid her bills earlier in the day from her hospital bed. My mother was NEVER given to hallucinations or imagining things. If my mother said Charlie was there, then he was there, no question.
But this is a side story to my main intention for this post: Haunted houses.
I'm not talking about fake hunted houses, the ones that open each Halloween season. I'm talking about REAL haunted houses. I lived in one when my husband was stationed in Aurora, CO. We lived in the base housing associated with Lowry AFB and man was our unit haunted! I was locked out more than once when I would go to get the mail. And it wasn't a matter of accidentally closing the door with the lock engaged; I wouldn't even close the door but I would come back and not only was it closed, it was locked, both the door AND the deadbolt! The ghost didn't like me for some reason. There were other things like faucets turning on at night, the dog acting strangely, the front door standing wide open when my husband would be the first one home. To be honest, we were never afraid. The ghost never hurt us nor did it hurt any of our animals, but after we moved out we started hearing stories about our unit. See, after we left, no one moved in after us; Lowry AFB was closing. Our neighbors, though, stayed until the base closed since the wife was part of the base closure group. They had to call the MPs more than once due to noises from out unit; LOUD noises. I'm talking windows opening and closing, doors being slammed shut, feet trampling their way up and down the stairs (these were adjoining units, with just a firewall between them) and one night, the husband, awakened by all these noises, stood in disbelief as he watched out the back upstairs window, while our back door opened and closed, with no one there. Then, his back screen door opened and he heard "someone" trying to get through the locked back door.
Haunted Houses can be scary when you're the one living in it. When you tell others about it, they all have the same response, "I think it would be cool to live in a haunted house." No, it's not. I can look back on it now and think, "Okay, we lived in a haunted house." But at the time, well, it's the not knowing that gets to you. For a long time, we dismissed quite a bit of what was happening, living in denial I guess. It wasn't until we were close to leaving when we finally came to grips with it all. We never told the kids what was happening, but kids being kids, they did figure it out. The single, biggest thing the ghost did, regularly, was to lift the seat of the toilet so I would yell at my husband for it. We DID have an event that proved it wasn't my husband and I won't bore you with the story here. Suffice it to say, it was PROVEN!
I never got the chance to research the place in order to find out who died there. I did go to the MP station once to see records and they all acted like I was nuts. When we moved out, I mentioned it to the housing office woman and she didn't act like I was nuts so she might have heard it before. I was in Aurora a couple weeks ago and the house is no longer there, having fallen to the wrecking ball to make way for executive homes, so now no one will ever truly know what happened there.
Anyway, if you have a haunted house story, and I mean a real one, post it here in the comments of this post.
For a listing of REAL haunted locations, click the link for this article's title. This is a really good book which is part of a series.
For a listing of "fake" haunted locations, see here.
Oh, and Happy Halloween!
