A Few Happenings

I have enjoyed visiting your site for years now, but never really considered writing in until recently. I have always believed in ghosts and such, but I also feel I have a pretty healthy skepticism, especially when it comes to seeing things myself. I tend to doubt my own eyes and always try to explain things away. However there have been a few times in my life when I was not able to easily do this.

When I was in second or third grade, one of my good friends and I lived on opposite ends of a street that stretched about two blocks and stopped in fields on either side. I would often spend the night at her house and one particular night we had snuck into her brother’s room while he was away. We where laying on his bed, looking out the sky light centered above it and talking about all the meaningful things eight and nine years old talk about and we both suddenly saw an old man’s face peering at us from through the skylight. We looked at each other and then back up again and he was gone. We ran to get her mother, who went to search the yard and then came into to tell us it was just our imaginations. We both swore that he was there and ended up sleeping on the floor in her mom’s room that night.

I my own house at the other end of the block, I would often hear sharp rapping noises on the wall that the head of my bed rested against. Many nights I sent my father out to search for people he could never find. The sound always reminded me of my father's cane collection. It had the sound of a stick striking the side of the house, but there were no trees outside my room. He always told me I was imagining things or that I must have been dreaming, but we had a pointer at the time who slept in my bed and she almost always started barking at the wall when I would hear the rappings, so it wasn’t just me who was experiencing them.

I work for MHMR (Mental Health and Mental Retardation) in a couple of different group homes with mentally retarded adult individuals. I have worked in my primary group home on and off for about five years and work a mix of nights and days. I love this house; it has this wonderful feeling of home. Not to long after I began working there, I started to see the obligatory “dark figures” out of the corners of my eyes in this home a lot as well as some light colored ones as well. It usually happens when I am working nights. The first few times my distracted mind equated them with my dog, a blue merle (darkly colored) sheltie mix and my cat, a largely white calico. I would catch myself talking to Sky or Carly and realize that they were not there, so how could I have just “seen” them walk by.

When I had been there about four months, I was in the office one night concentrating on a painting I was working on (one of the best things about night jobs is you can often pursue other interests) and for some reason I happened to look up. The office was added after the house was already being used as an MHMR facility and as a result two of the walls are the bare brick of the houses exterior and there is window between it and the kitchen. It is situated over the kitchen sink. Anyway, the desk was placed where I looked at the window and when I glanced up, there was an older woman with short gray hair and flowered dress on standing in the kitchen. I looked down, then did a double take, and there was no one there. I immediately got up to go tell my client that it wasn’t time to get up and she needed to lay back down. We had a lady who would get up at all times of the night and get ready for the day. My first thought was that it was her and that when she saw me look up at her, she ducked away from the window in hopes I hadn’t noticed her. Then I remembered that she was our only consumer to attend the camping retreat that week and wasn’t even in the house. I went to check on our only other female client and she was fast asleep in her bed. I was a little disturbed by the whole thing, but I figured it was just me being tired and my mind playing tricks on me. I mentioned it to my mother in passing, but never told any of my co-workers or friends because I just knew they would laugh at me.

Not to long after this experience I got an offer to work at another MR facility’s group home and left MHMR for about seven months. When I returned, I once again took over a few of the “graveyards” and there was a new woman working on the morning shift with me. Out of the blue one day she asked me if I had even seen anything strange in the house. I reluctantly answered yes and asked her why. She proceeded to tell me that when she had returned from dropping off our clients at the sheltered workshop/adult daycare programs they attended during the day, she was doing her normal walk through to make sure that the lights were turned of, beds were made, things of that nature and that when she walked past the large open doorway between the dining room and the living room, she saw a woman sitting on the couch. She described the same woman I myself had seen. I then told her my own story. It did creep me out a bit as I can’t explain it.

I was actually sharing this story with another co-worker a few nights ago and she told me that recently when she ended up working a night shift, she was sitting in the living room and watching TV with the sound off. Most all of our bedrooms are located at one end of the house, but there is one all by itself placed off of the dining room/kitchen area. This used to be the supervisors office, but one of our managers decided to make it into a bedroom. The client who was the first to live in this room and was a favorite of most everyone he met, passed on right before Christmas in 2005. Anyway, she was sitting there and she said she heard the door open (it makes a very distinct sound) and footsteps walked across the dining room to the open doorway between it and the living room and then nothing. At the time there were no clients living in that room and when she got up to see what was going on, the door was closed (once opened, it stays open until pulled shut, it is a safety thing attached to the top of the door) and no one was there. We both said the same thing, it was just our guy coming back to check out what was going on. He was always did want to be involved in whatever was happening, and he was just making sure no one was having too much fun without him.

By: Day9Dream@aol.com