The Haunting

I spent hours tonight watching a new show called Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel,  first the feature length documentary, and then the new TV series. It's similar to Ghost Hunters on the Sci-Fi channel, only scarier. They have a lot more experiences during investigations, and seem to get a lot more "proof". I have my doubts about how much is legitimate on either show, however.

So, I've just watched 3 hours of Ghost Adventures, and I'm a little bit spooked, but decide to go to bed. I go out the kitchen door to find my kitty, and I'm only outside a minute. I'm also the only one home, my room mate has been at a sales party all night.

Missy comes running over to me, I pick her up, and we walk back in the kitchen. The light over the sink is now on. It's not something that I would not have noticed before because the way the room is lit with the light over the sink on is completely different than when it's off. Plus I know I did not turn it on tonight, I think I've turned it on maybe once the whole several months I've lived here.

I reach into the corner to turn the light off, and feel my hand pass through a thick spider web to reach the switch. 

It's gonna be a while before I can get to sleep.

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So I'll share a couple of my other ghost experiences. I was house sitting for my aunt & uncle several years ago (please don't get mad at me if you guys read this!) and I invited a close friend up one night. We decided to play hide-and-seek in the dark. It's a big, two story house with plenty of nooks to hide in. So we each take a flash light, turn off all the lights in the house, and proceed to stalk each other in the dark. It was SO much fun!

Through out the night, every time I passed through the front living room, I noticed one of the sofa pillows was on the floor. No big deal, the dogs jump up there all the time to look out the window, they probably knocked it onto the floor.

At the end of the evening, we're upstairs on the landing, which along with the stairs are open and overlooks the entry way and the front living room. We've turned the light on so we can see clearly into both areas. The pillow is still on the floor. I ask my friend if he put it on the floor, he says "No, I thought you did." I say "It was probably the dogs." We walk downstairs together, and stand in the entry way talking, with our backs to the living room. We turn around after a moment, and see that the pillow that had been on the floor just a moment before is now back on the sofa, neat as can be.

One other story I have involves the Queen Mary, which has a reputation for being haunted. (Side note: the Ghost Hunters got to do an investigation of the Queen Mary, and didn't get any evidence at all, except for a hoax. I was very disappointed.)

So, this story may or may not involve sneaking around the ship after hours, after dark. Let's pretend that my friend and I did stay on the ship after all tourists were supposed to have left, and only hotel guests were allowed to stay on board. We'll say we kept walking around so we wouldn't get caught. And the following may or may not have happened to us while we were hypothetically walking around the ship after hours:

We were standing with our backs to a pair of elevator shafts that were no longer in service. We'd peeked through the door of the same set of elevators in the lobby and seen empty boxes and mannequins stored inside the car. We were down a couple of levels from the lobby now, and the call buttons for this elevator had been removed from the wall. As we're standing against the elevator doors, we suddenly hear the clank of the elevator car moving and feel a hiss of cool air slip between the doors. But the elevator never actually came.

We found ourselves in an area of the hotel guest rooms that was closed due to renovation. The wall paper was half ripped off, there was broken molding all on the floor, and new materials stacked in places along the hallway. As we passed one side hall that led to some of the rooms, there was a speaker dangling from the ceiling by one wire, a gapping hole in the plaster where it would be fitted in. From this speaker, very softly, and almost with an echo, big band music was playing. No where else on the ship was there that type of music playing, and especially not in a hallway that was otherwise silent and abandoned. 

And finally, we may or may not have snuck into the Haunted Ghost & Legends Tour area. During the official tour, you are brought onto the upstairs walkway around the swimming pool for a short & spooky special effects show. It is suggested that at the back of the women's changing room (downstairs behind the pool) there is a vortex portal into the next world.   So, hypothetically, we have snuck into the swimming pool area. We decide we want to find this portal so we start going down the stairs. Half way down, I suddenly hear splashing in the pool, as if a single child were sitting on the edge, kicking her feet in the water. The pool is completely dry, hasn't had any water in it for 30 years. I freeze. "Do you hear that?" 

My friend replies, "Yes. Come on!" We continue down the stairs, and through the doorway into the changing rooms. We're walking down a narrow hallway with open shower stalls on either side, it's pitch black except for my friend's flashlight, and there is lighting equipment and stuff sticking out on the floor. But my heart is pounding and I can hardly breathe, because they have hallways just like this in the mazes at Knott's Scary Farm, and monsters jump out of them and scare the crap out of you, and all I can think is, if anything jumps out at me here, IT'S REAL. We get to the end of the shower stalls, and I'm about to pass out for lack of breathing, so I say "Let's go, I need to get out of here." 

So we turn around, I'm leading now because the hallway is too narrow to move around each other, we go back up the stairs and start to find our way back to the entrance we (hypothetically) snuck into. My friend starts to hurry, but I walk at a slower pace in an attempt to keep my footsteps as quiet as possible. Suddenly, I hear keys rattling in a room on the left in front of me. My friend has already passed this room. I think, "Crap, we're gonna get caught." But as I approach the doorway, I look in and there is no one in the room, and the only door into the room is the one i'm looking through. After we're out of the tour area and on the move again, I tell my friend about the keys, he says he heard them too, from the same room. And it occurs to me that if someone had been in the room, we would have been caught the moment my friend walked past the doorway.

So, phantom keys, phantom splashes in  a dry swimming pool, phantom elevator, phantom music... quite an eventful evening, that may or may not have actually happened.