A background history

Ghosts. Apparitions. Spirits. Entities. They all say the same thing to us - "We are not alone". I have often wondered (like many of you I am sure) what happens to us when we die. In thinking realistically about this, I have come to the conclusion that it would really be stupid of me to think that when we die, that's it. We just turn to dust. I think just the opposite. I think that we are only here on Earth for a short time, but that we probably go SOMEWHERE. Or at least our souls or spirits (or whatever) go on somewhere. If not, how come there are so many worldwide who have experiences with 'the supernatural'? People have had experienced the supernatural for centuries. Why is that?

For whatever reason, I think sometimes people's spirits can't leave this realm, or choose not too for various reasons. Maybe they liked it here. Perhaps they can't come to grips with dying and are therefore 'stuck' here. Maybe they want to visit loved ones or even just come back to try and communicate with the living that something DOES happen to us when we die; that we move on to live in another realm.

Whatever the case, I have personally never seen or experienced a ghost or apparition with my own eyes and ears. Until now that is. We have what we have come to deem 'the little girl' that we believe is living with us here in our rental house and follows our daughter Allie around our house. This blog is being created for one purpose and one purpose only; to document the occurrences that we have had while living in this house.

I need to get you up to speed first. This will be a long post so grab yourself a beer and sit down with the intention of getting caught up to speed. I promise this will be the only post this long, but I want you to understand the history and be able to follow us from the beginning. From here on out, I can just document happenings and dates as they happen, like I should have been doing since the start. But first a little history.

We have rented an older house in Mesa for the past 4 years. The houses in this neighborhood were built in 1975. We have many elderly neighbors on this street that have lived here for 20+ years. I think the longest resident on this street moved here in 1981 to be exact. I have not talked to these neighbors about our 'incidents' except for one lady who has lived in her house across the street from us for 26 years. But I'll go into that another time.

The Plumeria are on the left

I guess one of the first times that we actually noticed something amiss started with a plant. We have an island in the kitchen attached to the wall, sort of in a T figure. On the left side of the T is the door to go out back and some bar stools and on the right, the kitchen sink and counter space. At the top of the T is a window over the sink with a nice window sill of brick where I grow some of my indoor plants and clippings. One of them was a Hawaiian plumeria that had grown to almost touch the top of the window. If you know this plant, it has a very thick stock and fairly large leaves that come right off of it, almost like a mini palm tree of sorts. It can not bend like the branches on other plants.  Any way, my husband was standing on the door side and I was standing on the sink side and we were talking about things when suddenly, we BOTH saw the plant bounce up and down about two times, like if you pushed it down really hard. Boink, boink! We both looked at each other and at the same time exclaimed "DID YOU SEE THAT?". As we continued talking and trying to figure out how it had just happened, we were looking directly at the plant when we saw it bounce like that a second time! We simply could not believe what we had just seen. We tried to debunk it - no, the fan did not do it, the window did not have an air leak, the air conditioning vent was in the living room. This was no fly on a leaf as it had bounced way to hard to be that. There was simply no explanation for that type of movement.

Looking down the hall

Then my husband started seeing shadow figures. He and I spent a lot of time on the couch, and his seat faces directly down our hallway. On one occasion, he thought he saw someone follow our daughter into the bathroom. After she had been in there for a half an hour, he had to ask himself  "who's in there with her?". He got up and went and banged on the bathroom door. "Allie, who do you have in the bathroom with you?" to which he heard "No one Papa." "Allie, I know you have someone in there with you." "No I don't Papa!" "Allie, open this door right now!" She opened the door and said "See, I told you no one is in here with me!" He left the bathroom door scratching his head.

This is not the first time that this had happened, nor would it be the last. Shortly thereafter, another incident happened with Allie's boyfriend Max. Allie and Max had been watching a movie when Allie got up and went into the bathroom. At the time, we had a big doghouse in the dining room (behind the couch where he was sitting) and Max swears he saw Allie run out of the bathroom, dash into the dining room and into the doghouse. He thought she was hiding from him, so he got up, went over to the doghouse and was bent down looking into it when she came out of the bathroom. Allie saw him looking in the dog house and went up behind him and asked "Max, what are you doing?" Max replied that he thought she had just ran past him and was hiding from him in the dog house. I think she could not wait to tell us this when we got home because she knew about other instances of 'the little girl'. Max however, did not until she explained to him at that moment the shadow girl that her and Papa have seen.

Marley's hallway lookout perch

Since then, Will often insists that he sees a shadow figure peaking out from behind the wall that is down the hallway. To top it off, our little Yorkie/Maltese mix Marley will stand on the end of Will's side of the couch and growl and bark up the hallway for no apparent reason. Will has also seen Allie's 'shadow' following her into the bathroom on more than one occasion and has seen it going through the kitchen and up the hallway from where he sits sometimes out back. Always just out of your normal vision range, more like they say out of the corner of your eye. Drifting quickly, always around the same areas.

Our 3 kids :)

Another small 'background' fact that probably needs to be mentioned here is this: when we moved in to this house, we had 3 children living with us, my oldest daughter Jessi, my youngest daughter Allie and our 'adopted' son John. John and Jessi had the two front bedrooms in the house, just to the right down the haunted hallway and across from the bathroom. We lost John at the end of September of 2010 and I often wonder if he looks down upon us or has come back to visit on occasion.

One of my own personal experiences happened the third week of October, 2010, just a few weeks after losing our son. To this day, I wonder if this incident could have been him, or was indeed our 'little girl'. Any way, I was cleaning out our daughter Jessi's room for company to stay in since she had moved out and we had family coming into town from 3 state's to take a trip down to Tombstone (one of the most haunted towns in the US I assume). As I was cleaning, I was organizing some of her remaining clothes into a dresser in the closet that had no drawer handles on it and into two small dressers that were used as a TV stand and an art supply cabinet. I went to open the top drawer in the dresser in the closet to put some socks in there and it was stuck shut. No matter how much pulling and prying I tried to do with my fingers, the drawer just would not open. I remember thinking "Damn it, I will just have to get a screw driver and pry it open in a while".

One of the small dressers

A little later, I opened one of the 'skinny' drawers that ran along the top of one of the small dressers to put some small things in and to my amazement, I found a screw driver. Yes! Now I can open up that drawer and put the socks in it. But as I turned around to pry open the drawer, to my shock and awe, the drawer was open about 6 inches! I could not believe it and immediately called my husband Will on the phone to tell him what had happened.

I continued my cleaning of the room, and within an hour or so, another incident happened in that room. Jessi had bought this porthole mirror at a garage sale with the intentions of hanging it up but she never got it up on the wall. I decided it might make a nice quick glance mirror for my guests and decided to hang it up right over one of the small dressers. Just underneath where I was to hang it was a zebra striped mirrored box that John had given Jessi for Christmas (one of the only gifts that was not stolen on Christmas night when John's car got stolen with all of their Christmas items in it). This box is fairly large, say around 10" x 7". It sticks out aways from the wall. On top of that was a small 2" x 2" plastic photo frame with a picture of one of Jessi's girl friends picture in it that I had propped up on top of the jewelry box and leaning against the wall. Now, keep in mind that this porthole mirror was REALLY heavy. After mounting the mirror on the wall, about an hour later I got the shit scared out of me when the mirror fell off the wall, nailed (and broke) the small plastic picture frame but some how fell completely forward missing the mirrored box completely and was now hanging on the edge of the dresser. Neither the porthole mirror nor the mirrored zebra box had a crack or chip in it, nor were they broken. I was blown away. This was impossible! The mirror did not break and why was the box not broken? In addition, the nail that the mirror was hung on was not bent at all downward like the porthole was to heavy for it. There was simply no explanation for why it fell.

Notice there are a few orbs around that spot

Greg running the EMF scans

To top it off, my friend Greggy came over a few days later with his EMF meter and went walking around our house with it. It only went off down the hallway by the door going into our room and one other place - about a 2' x 2' piece of wall RIGHT where the porthole mirror had hung in that bedroom! It can not be due to electrical lines running through there, as the EMF meter does not go off when put directly touching a light switch or plug outlets nor did it go off going up and down and around the rest of that room or in any of the other rooms. Weird huh?

This thing was going off!

Okay, do you need another beer yet, because I am just getting started here. Sorry!

Other things have happened. Will has heard his name whispered in broad daylight when our mechanic was here. Pieces of wood in the very top of the laundry room outside on the shelves have been moved and put into a laundry basket below on the ground. Stuff disappears, never to be found again. Now I'm not saying that these things happen on a daily basis, but just that they happen with no apparent reason. These are simply mishaps that we can not explain.

It's definitely not a harmful ghost, if there is one. It does not tell us "GET OUT" cause believe you me, we would be GONE. I think it might be what's called a Companion ghost, which is defined by the Texas Society of Paranormal Investigators as "...ghosts that are usually deceased family members or the soul of a child that had lived on the property or near the vicinity."

The smoking chairs below the window

Anyway, back to the history. Another incident when both Will and I heard the same thing at the same time was a month or two back when we were sitting out front smoking. We have two chairs with a small table in between just out front and below Allie's window. This night we both could here muffled talking coming from behind us in Allie's room, like she was on the phone. We have heard her muffled talking while outside a million times before as this is where we sit and smoke most of the time. As he looked at me he said "I wonder who she is talking too now" to which I replied, "Will, Allie is not here. I let her go to Max's over an hour ago." He excitedly asked "You did here that didn't you?" and he could tell by the look on my face that yes, I had heard it too. He told me I must be wrong and that she was still here, but I insisted that she was gone. I told him to go in her room and look. We walked in the house, he flung open the door and saw that no one was in there and there was no radio or TV on (she does not have a TV in there). We were both shocked at what we heard because we BOTH had heard it.

Allie also has a habit of staying up late. I don't mean late as in midnight, I mean late as in 2, 3, 4am. Being in construction, Will works a lot of overnight shifts. One night more recently, he was taking a shower in our bathroom at about 2am getting ready to go to work and heard her talking on her phone in the other bathroom (our bathroom showers share a common wall as they are back to back). He got out thinking "Damn kid needs to get off that friggin phone and go to bed!". But when he stomped out of the room to have words with her, she was not there. Thinking she went into her room, he went in and found her...peacefully sleeping with drool on her face. He was blow away and told me this story the next day when we saw each other.

I had a similar experience just about a week ago now. I got out of the shower and was drying off and getting dressed. I had on my Miranda Lambert CD out in the living room as I had been cleaning. Will and Allie were not home, it was just little old me doing housework, listening to my music and occasionally singing along. All of a sudden, I heard Allie singing along with the CD. Allie loves to sing and we often times hear her singing along to CD's or songs on the radio. I remember thinking "Oh, Allie must have come home. Let's go ask her how her day was", but the minute I opened the bedroom door going in to the hall, I did not hear her any more. So I went looking for her to no avail - she was not home.

Point is, I don't know what is going on in this house nor does it happen on a daily basis. I only know that these things happen and have been happening for years now on a REGULAR basis.  For some reason, we have a feeling that our friend is a child and thus have named her 'the little girl'. Shadow figures, voices, EMF meters that go off, things being opened and moved. Seen and heard by more than one person, not all family members at that. I just can not think that our experiences are just misunderstandings or can be chalked up to us all dreaming these things up or trying to freak ourselves out. Truth is, she does not hurt us, does not scare us and does not seem to want anything other than for us to know that she is here, that she exists and wants to be heard.

I am sure there is more to tell, but quite frankly, I am tired and can not think anymore. I know this is long and it is time to hit the sack. My brain will go over what I have written here now tomorrow and will most likely add some more about our past experiences. I hope that you will stay with me on this journey and will check in for more as more events happen. Until then...sleep with the lights on :)