Paranormal

There was a ghost in my house when I was a little kid. I know this because I saw it more than once - one time it was just a shapeless blob, but another time it was quite visible as a baby that turned over as it floated by at my legs under the piano. I was 4 or 5 when I saw it the second time, and I got the distinct feeling that it just wanted someone to know it was there.

Two years later, when we pulled up the nasty old carpeting in the living room and put down new stuff, we found a cement slab with a 1930s date carved in it and a baby footprint. The house in which we lived had once been known as the "hunter's cabin" and my parents learned that a family had once lived in the house and had a baby die of scarlet fever.

We moved to another house when I was 10, and about two years later the poltergeist showed up. It was a joke, really, that my family told to explain the weird things that happened, particularly to me when I was alone. More than once I had the chair pulled out from under me as I sat reading or eating at the kitchen table, and never when other people were around. Once my mom had cooked up a big batch of homemade soup, and my dad was serving it and sat a bowl in front of me. Halfway through the bowl I found a curtain rod hook - a rusty, metal curtain rod hook that looked decades old - and we didn't have any of those in our house, nor had my dad had anything to do with the hook. And then in my birthday cake when I was 12 there was a pushpin in my piece. I guess the poltergeist lived in the kitchen, because every weird thing happened there.

Apparently, the stories say that poltergeists are attracted to adolescent girls - and after me came each of my sisters in turn, so the poltergeist stuck around for several years, though it never did things quite as extreme to my sisters as it did to me.

In high school, I once had an extraordinarily vivid dream about my mom's mother, who died long before I was even concieved, let alone born (I think she died in 1971). Anyhow, in my dream she was coming for a visit, and wore a particular outfit and said certain things to me. My mom's mother was particularly interested in seeing me in a dance recital, and she loved Lissa, and somehow Laurel was very young though Lissa and I were our current (at the time) ages. I kept telling her to wait, that my mom would be home any minute, and would love to see her. But she left, saying that she'd be back someday.

When I woke up and told my mom about the dream, she told me that the outfit her mother was wearing was one she liked a lot toward the end of her life (and it was an outfit I'd never seen being worn in pictures or anything). She also said that of the 3 of us, Lissa was the most like her mother in temperament. My mom's mother has yet to visit me again, but I'm ready if she decides to do so.

And then there have been the prophetic dreams. They're always somewhat mundane in terms of what they foresee - in 6th grade I had a dream that I was eating lunch with a cousin I'd never met and I was telling her that I had two boyfriends, and 3 years later the exact situation happened at a family reunion (she turned out to be a second cousin). I dreamed that I won first place at the science fair and then I did. You know, silly stuff like that. My sense of deja vu usually comes when I realize I've had a dream about a particular situation months or years before the situation comes to pass - but it's never all that important.

The most significant prophetic dream I ever had happened when I was living with QIR and her cat (indoor only) disappeared a day or two before she was scheduled to go on a long trip. We all looked for the kitty and QIR looked in shelters and put up signs but she had to leave, and our other roommate and I kept a lookout. Two weeks later, I had a dream early one morning that I woke up, went into the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and out came QIR's very skinny kitty. After the dream, I *did* wake up and go into the kitchen. Of course, I looked in the cabinet, and of course, no kitty. But then I got the feeling I should look out the back window - and there she was, very skinny, having been out of the house fending for herself for over two weeks (pampered, declawed and all). QIR got home a day or two later and was very happy her kitty had returned.

So, all in all, nothing particularly impressive, and my boyfriend is the biggest skeptic there is when it comes to stuff like ghosts and astrology and whatnot. But I can't discount the experiences I've had, and I can't explain them away. I choose to keep an open mind, and listen to my gut about people and places and situations, because as far as I can tell it's never been wrong.