I’m publishing this again, this time with a title change.  I quickly realized “Visitors” might mean actual “visitors” to this site…and nooooo, that’s not the topic!

I love mystical things, the obscure and spiritually symbolic bits that come to us on occasion.  These unexplained occurrences often remain mysterious, even when using common sense or a logical process of elimination.  Twisting the possibilities this way and that, still doesn’t fully render an understanding of just how something happened.  I like to insert little unexplainable instances into some of my writing, like I did in the second book.  The suggestive sort of incident a reader can perhaps relate to, because they’ve seen or experienced something similar.

We live in a old house.  How old?  We’re not one hundred percent sure.  There have been questions about it’s age since we moved in, by delivery folks, neighbors who haven’t been here as long as us, and just about anyone who comes to the house for the first time.   We’ve pinpointed the date of when we think it was built at somewhere around 1906.  We have a couple of pictures of when it was first built as well as an old postcard with a picture of it, postmarked 1908.  All of these show the house completely constructed, with various trees in the yard – we still have one of them, a huge magnolia.  All that helps in determining the date, and so we estimate it to be around 107 years old.

Why am I talking about our house?  Because…, like with many old houses, we always get questions like, “is it haunted?”  or, “have you heard any strange noises, seen anything?”, or “aren’t you afraid of being here by yourself?  The answers to those questions are, “I’m not sure,”, “yes” and “no.”

I’ll share what’s happened since we’ve been here.  We moved into the house in January of 1998.  I immediately felt warm and “at home.”  There was a certain smell all around, an old house smell, but not unpleasant, like the smell of mold or mildew.  It was the smell of living, of the families who’d been here before us, the ones who’d worked, played, cooked, cleaned, celebrated, entertained and yes, died in this house.    Many of them long before we were even born.

One night, around 2005, my husband and I were watching a “scary” movie – except for me, it wasn’t scary.  Our daughter had recommended it to us, and it was apparent about half way through that what she’d thought as “really good” and “really scary” was, in our opinion, predictable, and more about making one jump from the sudden loud noises than being actually scary.  (I’ve tried to explain to my kids there’s a huge difference in scary and nerve wracking).  So, I was having myself a bit of a rant in the middle of the living room floor, as I stood with the remote in hand, hitting Stop, because we’d both decided it wasn’t worth watching all the way through.)

I was in the middle of my tirade that went something like this; “This isn’t one bit scary!  This is stupid!  I’m through with movie recommendations, our tastes are too different.  I can’t imagine why she thought a cat being thrown across camera while it’s screeching it’s head off is our idea of a scary movie!”  And then?  I heard a loud and consistent noise suddenly, from the direction of the kitchen.  I stopped ranting, and turned to my husband, and I whispered, “What in the hell is that??”  He was staring at me bug eyed as well, and he just shook his head and said, “I don’t know…”  I put the remote down, and start towards the noise, all along I’m hearing “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”  I crept closer to the noise, my head turning this way and that, it sounded so familiar, but I couldn’t place it. (and by crept, yes, I mean, like on my tip toes, slow walking, heart in my throat kind of thing – just like in a scary movie!)  The closer I got to the kitchen?  The louder.  What was it????

The blender.

The blender had come on and was sitting on the counter running happily, as if I’d just ordered up a smoothie.  Can we explain it due to old house, faulty wiring?  Maybe…, but we’d been here for seven years at that point, and it has been the first and only time we’ve ever had an appliance just come on, by itself before and since.  Because of my tirade about the movie, it was as if a “ghost” thought, huh, lets see if she thinks this is scary.  Was it?  Um, yeah, but I was curious too.  We stood and puzzled over it and to this day, who knows?  Of course if it had been unplugged… we probably wouldn’t be here today.  🙂

And then, there’s this picture of my grandson, who was about twenty months old at the time.  This “orb” showed up, but in the very next one, there was nothing.  The pictures were taken seconds apart.  I couldn’t find the “orbless” one, but IMHO, it doesn’t look like a dust spot or water spot – not compared to ones I’ve seen

And yes, that’s the house, and little Miss Kiwi in the background.

Then came the time we were, again, sitting in the living room watching TV – not a scary movie, just the news maybe, or the history channel, something like that.  We both heard a noise coming from my husband’s office.  Again, we both turned to each other and said, “what’s that?”  I went to investigate, and my husband’s glasses were on the floor, about three feet away from his desk.  I called him in there and pointed, “Look.”  He said, “They were on my desk.”  Me…and my analytical mind…I had to try and simulate how they could have come to be where they were, if they’d simply dropped off the desk.  Not wanting to repeat the process too much (they were his glasses after all and breakable) I propped them at the edge and sort of “helped” them fall about three times.  Every time…they landed directly below the edge of the desk, no farther than an inch or two, and definitely not three feet away.  It was like they’d been swiped off.

The last thing I’ll talk about is what happened last night.  I went upstairs, like I usually do, and got ready for bed.  (I’m still wearing the night splint, and so once I’m in bed, I don’t usually want to get up and walk around.)  There I was, perched on the edge of the bed, and “plink! rmrrm, rmrrm, rmrrm….” came a very distinctive sound behind me.  I turned and looked.  On my dresser was a blown out light bulb.  It had been there for about a week (I don’t know why I hadn’t thrown it out…I guess it just hadn’t seemed too “cluttery.”)  It was rolling back and forth, back and forth.  Maybe it could have been me walking across the floor?  True…, but it hadn’t moved before now and I walk across the floor every night.  Besides…the noise it made, that distinctive “plink” could only be duplicated when hitting some other item on the dresser – and everything near it meant it would have had to roll in a complete 360, before it began doing the 9:00/3:00 pendulum sort of rolling it was doing.  Odd indeed.

I mean, I don’t know.  Maybe all of these incidents can be rationalized, but I’ve tried with each one to figure out, now, just how did this happen?  And honestly, I’m not sure what to believe…did we glimpse a slip of “some thing” into the realm of the living, or just coincidences?  Sometimes I think you just can’t think too much about what you’ll never figure out.  We’ll leave it at that.