My Ghost Story

Boo! Hear the ghosts and the goblins cry,
They get to wishin' for the days gone by
When the little kids were frightened, it is said,
Only by the ghouls who were dead.
                              - Heywood Banks

Albert Einstein once said that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another. I don't think this has been found to be invalid as of yet. Many say this is evidence that we go on in a different form after we shed our mortal coil.

Before I share my own tales of the paranormal, I offer you a little background. The wife and I watch several shows dealing with ghost hunting. While I enjoy them, I would never consider going on a ghost hunt of my own. I am much too chicken for that! The wife would be much more likely to partake of such things. As for me, watching haunted places and items on TV is as close as I wanted to get to the supernatural.

Some of the ghost hunting programs we watch prolong what little actual evidence they uncover in their allotted one hour time slot by inserting lots of background information, speculation, and other time fillers. This usually results in my falling asleep during those many long, dull segments. We have overcome this obstacle by recording them on the DVR and zipping through commercials, commentary and backstory. We can now watch a typical ghost hunting show in 20 minutes or less.

If you are bothering to read this, you are likely anxious to hear my own personal encounters with the paranormal. While not a tale of haunting (those are coming,.. be patient!), my first noteworthy odd experience was the evening the wife and I encountered a UFO while driving home. We were on a country highway when we saw off to our right a huge, bright stereotypical flying saucer, soundlessly suspended in midair! Both of us uttered exclamations, the adrenaline flowed, and we questioned if we really saw what we had seen.

Apparently the car in front of us confirmed our experience, because the driver slammed on his or her brakes and slowed from highway speed down to neighborhood speed. Our view of the object was blocked by trees for fifteen seconds or so, but then when we cleared those trees we discovered that the UFO had transformed. It now looked like the rising moon with some cloud cover in front of it. For the brief instant we had witnessed our UFO, we (and the people in the car ahead of us) had actually seen the full moon with clouds perfectly placed to create a very authentic looking flying saucer. We laughed, but then discussed how we felt disappointed that we hadn't really seen a UFO.

I haven't actually seen a ghost, nor do I ever wish to. I would hope ghostly encounters would be as easily explainable as our UFO. Still, my "ghost stories" aren't as readily dismissed.

The first occurred sometime around 2003. My father-in-law passed away in 1997 after a four month battle with cancer. It wasn't long before my wife started smelling his cherry pipe tobacco every now and then while we sat in our family room. Each time she mentioned smelling his pipe tobacco, I did not share her experience. Even though she swore she smelled it, I smelled nothing. I was very familiar with that aroma. Anytime I encountered her dad, from before we were married until a couple of months before his death, he was smoking the same cherry pipe tobacco.

The evening of my first paranormal experience, my wife mentioned that she was smelling her dad's tobacco, and that it was very strong. As soon as she had finished her sentence, I smelled it, too. It was the aroma of his pipe tobacco, strong enough to make you think he was in the room smoking it! The hairs on my arms stood straight up! That fragrance lasted for a couple of minutes, and then was gone. It has not returned since. I tried to rationalize it, and I tried to explain it logically. I could not offer a plausible explanation. It still gives me a chill to think about it!

My other paranormal experience was very different from the phantom pipe. The cherry tobacco incident was surprising, chilling (and a bit creepy), but not really frightening.  The next unrelated incidents were more disturbing.

I guess this all happened within the last eight years or so. I like to find bargains on Ebay, and went shopping for a belt. I found one that was a great bargain for a "genuine leather belt." The picture showed only the front of the belt, but it looked like an appropriate belt for jeans, which was why I purchased it. I remember that it was delivered very quickly. When I open the mailing bag, the belt didn't look anything like I was expecting. While it was finished on the front with a odd kind of flat western looking finish, the back of the belt was completely unfinished, and had a feel like rawhide. I had never seen a belt finished like that. I wasn't going for a western look, since that really isn't my style. The photo on eBay didn't give a western feel, either. The belt was thicker than I was expecting, too. While not ridiculously thick, it was still the thickest belt I had ever seen. Still, it fit and the price was right.

The first thing that told me that this belt was different was out cats' reaction to it. Anytime something new entered the house, our two cats usually checked it out. While I was inspecting the belt after removing it from the mailer, the first cat approached it, stopped in her tracks before she got to it, turned around and walked away. I don't think I ever saw the other cat examine it. Neither cat would enter the bedroom while the belt was hanging on the back of the bedroom door.

Within a week of getting the belt, odd occurrences began. Items you know you had put in a specific location, such as keys, cell phone, etc., when you went to bed were in a different location the next morning. At first, this did not seem unusual. Only in retrospect did it I connect it to the arrival of the belt and the other odd events.

The first creepy incident would happen a week or so later. We have two table lamps in the family room on opposite ends of the sofa. One is on a timer and comes on just before we get up and turns off around 8:00 AM, and then comes on again in the early evening and turns off at 11:30 PM. The other lamp is simply plugged into the outlet, and must be turned on at the lamp's switch. When waking up in the morning on one occasion, I found that the lamp on the timer was turned off at the lamp itself. Instead, the other lamp had been switched on!

As I mentioned, I like to watch shows about such things rather than be a actual participant. The lamp issue was disconcerting. However, the last straw for me came a week or so later when daylight savings time ended. We have many clocks in our house. I am a time fanatic, and I am very seldom late for anything. After turning all of the clocks in the house back an hour, we went to bed. In the morning, I discovered that the wall clock in our bedroom-turned-office had been turned ahead to daylight savings time! The alarm clock in the extra bedroom had also reverted to DST. I know I set those clocks. The wife and I discussed this on the way to church, and decided it was time for the belt to leave our home

I rolled up the belt, put it in a Walmart bag, and took it to school the next day. The idea was to determine if strange occurrences ceased with the belt being physically out of the house. Once at school, I locked the bagged belt in a drawer on our stage work area. The stage is just off of the band room.

The next day, I went to the teacher's lounge when I arrived at school to put my lunch in the fridge as I did every day. When I opened the refrigerator door, the light was out and the refrigerator was not running. Items in the fridge felt cold to the touch, and a check of the freezer compartment found everything there still frozen. Another teacher walked in at that time, and I mentioned that the refrigerator light was not working. He pulled fridge away from the wall, and we discovered that the plug had been pulled out of the outlet just enough to no longer make contact. After pushing the plug back into the outlet, the refrigerator began running, and of course, the light now worked. There was no logical explanation as to how the refrigerator's plug worked its way out of the outlet. There was no way to reach behind the refrigerator because of a wall on one side and a pop machine on the other side, directly next to the fridge. For a person to accomplish this, the fridge must be pulled away from the wall and clear of the pop machine. If a student had done this as a prank the night before, the items in the fridge would not have remained as cold as they were. Besides, a student would be much more likely to just unplug the refrigerator rather than taking the time to pull the plug out just enough to break contact with the outlet.

I left the teacher's lounge, went to the stage, removed the belt from the drawer, and tossed it in the dumpster behind school. There were no more odd occurrences at home, and none at school that I know of.

Why was the belt the source of seemingly explainable phenomena? I have no clue, though I think it is likely that there is a landfill somewhere experiencing odd occurrences to this day!