A Lil' Halloween Fun

Well, I don't post on here very often anymore. I don't have the time. I used to enjoy it but ya know, with school and work and all that jazz, there just aren't enough hours in the day to sit down and type something up. Plus my life isn't really all that interesting at the moment. But in the spirit of Halloween, I thought I would share a few "true tales of terror".

Back when I had a Myspace, one Halloween I ran a contest where I wrote scary/creepy stories and people got to guess if they were true or not. The person who guessed correctly most often won a $25 gift card to Wal-Mart. A lot of the tales were true and based on serial killers (I probably have a weird and unhealthy obsession with serial killers) and Tabitha Sams was eventually declared the winner. It was actually a bigger success than I figured it would be,  but since then, I've not posted any more tales. So I thought I would share some with ya'll from now until Halloween.

I have to admit, I'm stealing this idea from another blogger (who has a much better blog than mine...complete with cool music and great photos) but it was such a neat idea I couldn't help but to steal it. I hope she can forgive me (and I hope you all check out her blog too. This is the link to her Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/thefreespiritchronicles?sk=wall ).

Now I will put in a little caveat here: The stories I will tell are all true. Meaning, either I experienced them personally or they were told to me by people I trust to tell me the truth about such things. I'd like to tell you that I'm "not at all superstitious" because that just sounds so darn mature, but that would be a lie. And I'm honest to a fault (it gets me in trouble sometimes in fact). I'm like Pinocchio, if I lie, you know it. Plus, I'm a believer in most things paranormal and metaphysical (I blame this on my Mother, who used to lovingly dress like a witch at different times throughout the year and chase me around the house, told me scary stories for bedtime stories, and would let me stay up until midnight to watch horror movies on late-night tv with her when I was a child). I believe in life after death...whatever that may be. For lack of a better word, we'll call these "ghost" stories, although I'm not sure that "ghost" is a really good definition of some of the spooky things I'll post, but we'll leave it at that.

Now you are more than welcome not to believe anything I say. In fact, you can think I'm foolish or childish and I'll be the first to admit I have always had a big imagination. You can even offer me scientific explanations of the things I've seen, heard, and felt or that others have told me about their experiences. Its all fine and good. But please be respectful, these are my beliefs and experiences and I would be respectful if it were you.

P.S. I realize that I work full-time and pull nine hours of Grad school and this could possibly make me a little crazy, but I assure you, I am not crazy. (Isn't that what all the crazy people say?) Weird, maybe, but not crazy.

Now, lets get started...

My Home Sweet Home:

First in line for the "boogery" tales treatment is the house I grew up in. Technically, its NOT the house I grew up in. When I was born my parents lived in a trailer behind my Mamaw Mae's old white farm house, but pretty soon after my Mom pooped me out, Mamaw decided to switch homes with us, so we packed up our few belongings and moved into the white house. I don't remember moving in (I was an infant after  all) but I have fond memories of the white house as I was growing up. Things being as they are, the house soon began to show its age and started falling apart on us, so we briefly moved into a two room "shack" across the road,\ while we had a new house built in the same spot as the white house. That's the house I lived in from around age five until I moved into my Mamaw Mae's other house...this one beside my parents' home. Now there are plenty of stories around the white house, but we'll get to those later...maybe. For now, we'll concentrate on the house I grew up in and the one my parents and brother currently live in.

The Lady in White:

My first "experience" with the otherworldly came courtesy of "The Lady in White" (as she will forever be called). I was about nine and it was a bright, beautiful Saturday morning in the summer. I was sitting in the living room watching cartoons while Mom fixed breakfast. At the time, the kitchen and the living room were side by side, separated only by a wall that had a nice little counter cut out in it. To the left was the front door, to the right was a small hallway where the bedrooms were located. From my perch on the couch I could see both my bedroom door and my parents' bedroom door. Both doors were closed because a.) Dad was still asleep and b.) I've always had this weird habit of closing doors, it bugs me when they are open.

While I watched Bugs Bunny something caught my eye and I turned to look down the hall. While I watched, this woman came out of my bedroom, looked at me, and then went into my Dad's bedroom. It took a second to register in my nine year old brain what had just happened. Mom was in the kitchen. Dad was asleep (and obviously not a woman). And we were the only people in the house. So who was that lady?! I clearly remember what she looked like. She was all white and semi-transparent...not that I could see through her exactly, but she wasn't quite solid like normal people. She had long hair that was hanging loosely down her back and she was wearing a long dress that came to her ankles. I don't really remember seeing feet at all and she didn't walk...she floated. Needless to say, I was pretty darn upset! I jumped off the couch, ran into the kitchen and glued myself to my mothers leg while I cried and rambled on and on about "the lady in white".

I've not seen her since. That doesn't mean she's gone though.

Mom saw her once not too long ago. At the time I had a long white gown and if you know me well enough, you know I wear my p.j.s to do just about everything in when I'm at home. So I had gone outside one Saturday morning to feed the critters. I was wearing that white gown. Mom was in the kitchen on the phone. While she was talking to her sister, I came back in the front door and walked back into the hall and into my bedroom. Realizing she had something important to ask me, she yelled out my name. When I didn't answer she got mad and walked into the dining room (which used to be the living room before we built onto the house) to hunt me down. Just as she was walking to the bedroom, I came in the front door.

That's right. I had been outside the whole time. She had seen the lady in white come into the house and only thought it was me.

Now Mom and I have a good hearty love of all things scary, so you may think we are just suffering from a good old fashioned case of over-active imagination syndrome, but my Dad is a very practical man. Its not that he doesn't believe in such things, its just that he chooses to ignore the things that go bump in the night. That doesn't mean they ignore him.

Years after my first encounter with our lady, he was talking to Mom about it and she had commented on how she had never really believed my story from when I was nine until she had seen the woman for herself. Dad told her, "Well, I always believed her, because I've seen that woman too." See, when I was younger, I would sometimes get creeped out in the middle of the night (for obvious reasons) and was afraid to sleep in my bedroom by myself. So on occasion, my Mom would pull a mattress into my bedroom floor and sleep in my floor until I could get to sleep (one of the benefits of being at only child at the time, was that I was extremely spoiled when it came to extra attention). Dad told her that on several occasions on those nights, he would wake up to see a woman standing at his bedroom door looking at him. He thought it was Mom and he would call out her name, but she never answered. He would get afraid that something was wrong and get out of bed to go find out what the problem was. Only, when he opened my bedroom door, there Mom would be deep asleep on her mattress. So on the nights when Mom wasn't in the bed, the lady in white would pay Dad a visit. He said it never really scared him, just made him mad that she had woke him up. ;-)

Since then, I don't think anyone has seen her much. She's still there though. From time to time you will hear her walking through the house at night. True, it could just be the house settling, but its a different sound from that. Its especially apparent when you sleep up stairs and you can hear her walking up the steps...something I do NOT miss about living in that house, since my bedroom was the only room upstairs. One morning while I was in high school, Mom and I were in the bathroom getting ready for work and school. The bathroom door was shut and Mom and I were idly chit-chatting about whatever was on our minds, when we heard the floor squeak in the hall. We thought Dad had gotten up early and needed in the bathroom (a really annoying habit the males in our household seem to have whenever we are trying to get ready to go somewhere - go figure). But we quickly realized it wasn't Dad when we heard what sounded like a full skirt go swishing by the door and towards the front door. We just gave each other a look and a shrug and went on about our business. We figured maybe the lady in white needed to go somewhere too.

That's enough for this one. I'll post a few more about my house later tonight. Until then, enjoy this one. :-)