I believe in ghosts. I've seen ghosts. I've shared homes with ghosts. I've felt ghosts pass me when I'm alone. I've had terrifying visions. I am not confined to a mental institution. Not at this time, anyway.

I often tell people, when they inquire as to why I'd believe in the existence of something so strange, that it's OK...I don't believe in anything silly like UFOs or vampires or such...Just real stuff...Like ghosts...I assume the reason that I believe ghosts exist is that I have seen what I believe to be ghosts. Did that make any sense? My dad claims to have seen a UFO. A large, cigar-shaped craft with a rough exterior that hovered and darted about like nothing he'd ever seen before. This would have been in the early 60s, maybe the late 50s while camping on Grand Mesa, which is on the western slope of Colorado. Maybe I have details wrong, hell, it's HIS story, not mine. Either way, he believes in UFOs because he's seen one. I haven't seen UFOs...But I've seen dead people.

My Mom forbade my sister and I to have a ouija board when we were young. I desperately wanted one, but she said 'no.' Her reasoning was that she had used a ouija board when she was younger and claims to have contacted the spirit of a person she had known who had died in a car accident. The experience scared her and she didn't want us to have similar, or even worse, experiences with the mystic Ouija. (weejee) My sister now owns multiple ouija boards. I, on the other hand, do not. I don't want to deliberately contact spirits anymore.

I used a ouija once. The proper way to use the ouija, I read, was to rest the board on the knees of two facing people, one male, one female. each should lightly touch the slidy thingy with their respective fingertips. Questions should be asked and energy from beyond should move the slidy-thingy (I apologize for not having the proper terminology at hand) to spell out answers. ANSWERS FROM BEYOND! Yeah. Anyway, the girl I was using the ouija with did not take the whole thing seriously and was goofing around, asking inane questions and moving the slider herself. In retrospect, she didn't take much of anything seriously...Hey, Ann...You're a jerk! Ha! There! I said it!

ok, I take it back. But, c'mon. At least try and wait for the spirits...

anyway, I don't need no stinking ouija to contact spirits. They seem to just come around. I saw a ghost in my room when I was 6 or 7. I was looking under my bed for something, I can't remember what...(my room was always a mess, so it could have been anything, even food.) Anyway, as I was under the bed, I looked out toward the door and saw someone walk by. Well, there was nowhere to go from where I saw the feet going where they were going, so I popped out and saw: nothing. no feet, no legs, nothing. Who says nothing can't be scary? Especially when it's nothing where something just was. This frightened me out of my skin. I ran like a little bat out of hell to the living room, jumped into my mother's lap and quivered.

When I was 8 or 9, we were living in a different house, much larger than the one I saw the ghost in the first time and also about 20 years newer...I was stoked! There weren't gonna be any ghosts here, I thought. For the most part, I liked that house. There was very little occasion to be scared and even the laundry room in the basement wasn't completely foreboding. The one exception during our stay in the house on Durasno Terrace came on a Saturday morning...I had risen from sleep as per normal, carrying my stuffed bunny (fuzzy was his name. Like Fuzzy Zoeller. Yeah, whatever) out towards the living room...My room was adjacent to my parents room upstairs. As you exited my room, to your right was a hallway leading toward the kitchen, to the left was the living room...I started, as I said, left. I stopped and glanced back right. From the direction of the kitchen, down the hall, past the bathroom and coming directly at me was a very large, very intricate wall of color and sound. The only way I could explain it to my Mom later was "flying colors! flying colors like a general or colonel would have!" it rushed at me AND THROUGH ME like a freight train, complete with wind and a wooshing sound. no form, no substance, just very bright and fast.

I stood motionless for a fraction of a second. I was uninjured, though completely surprised. I then leapt back toward the bed that I knew my Mom was in and attempted to burrow underneath her to escape whatever it was I had encountered. This, of course, startled her awake and I had to try and explain what happened. She was convinced that SOMETHING had happened...I was flushed and my heart was pounding...I later measured the distance I had to travel through the air, from a standing position, to get to my Mom's bed...14 feet. 14 frickin' feet at 8, maybe 9 years old, from a standing position with my back to the target. Adrenaline, baby.

I tried countless times to recreate the event...Maybe it was sunlight, maybe I had a headrush, maybe it was something other than what it seemed...Regardless of how many times I exited my room during my stay in that house, it never happened again. Ever. I have to chalk it up as a supernatural event. Not the only one I've had, but certainly the strangest. I have other ghost stories, which I'll share at a later date. If I ever see a UFO or sasquatch, I'll write about that, too.

the Mothman says hi, by the way.

Labels: 'de paranormal, lame stories, spooky shit