If I hadn’t experienced this for myself, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. My life started in Mundelein, IL. My parents had moved in after getting married in November of 1980. I was born September of 1981, so I don’t remember living there. However, my mother and father both remember something strange happening there. In the kitchen, pictures of a couple they hadn’t seen before kept seeming to appear out of the wall (or literally the woodwork), and at first they were puzzled. One day, my mother approached one of the neighbors about it with the pictures in hand, and the person had told her the tenants just before them had a sad story. The man had killed his wife in that apartment. Three years later they moved to our house in northern Illinois, Cook County (aka Crooked County).
I distinctly remember mother with a floor sander when I was three years old, and how big the house was compared to the apartment. I had a big blue room with a huge closet with doors made of mirrors. My first experience with the paranormal happened in this room. I was laying in bed, and everyone was asleep. I remember there was a nightlight, and six or seven tall shadow figures stood over me. I looked in the mirrors on the other side of the room, and they were in the reflection as well. No noise was made, nothing was moved, and I wasn’t really frightened. I was wondering what they were doing there and what they wanted.
Years went by and these sort of things kept on trying to get my attention. Because of my hearing loss and speech impairment, I had to see a speech therapist. I also had a tutor. Neither one of these people ever noted any kind of mental problems such as delusions or any sort of hyperactivity disorder. The next incident I recall was being alone in the house, taking a shower. This bathroom was off my bedroom, so I could close my bedroom door and leave the other door open. The door slammed shut, and everything got cold. I struggled to get the door open, but eventually I got out.
Later on that year, another strange incident happened. It was night and everyone was asleep. I heard this piano out in the living room, playing Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. We did not own a piano, and I had yelled for my parents who were upstairs in a loft-style bedroom. My voice should have carried, but they wouldn’t wake up. Only after the song was done did the piano noise stop. As a sidenote, when I was 15-year-old and in Honor’s Chorus, a random band student happened to be playing the same song, and I had this strange feeling hearing it after all those years. I was about to sing in front of a couple hundred people, so that could have something to do with it.
My parents had a marriage wrecked by alcoholism, infidelity, and resentment. I had to stay with my grandmother for a month or so, and staying with her was so peaceful. We played card games and watched birds from her kitchen window while mom was in rehab. This was one of the few times I felt comfortable and safe.
Mother made a recovery, and when she came out I was hoping things would be different. We moved into a tiny farm house that I hated, because she didn’t have much money. Father was refusing to pay child support because he resented us being so far from him that he couldn’t see me. In this house, I had disturbing dreams and a feeling an old man was standing at the end of my bedroom (it was shaped like a rectangle, with windows on both ends). I talked to the home owner years later, and she had relayed to me her father died in that house an old man. We moved after we found snakes in the basement and other events occurred.
The next place we moved to is a place I consider home, a 4-bedroom farmhouse 15 miles away from your typical Wisconsin rural town (population under 5,000). The house was old and had a rich history. It was built around 1910, and the first and original house served as a shed. According to my research and interviews, 9 people had either died in the house or on the property. Two had been suicides, two died of diphtheria, four died in a car crash on the property, and one man of old age. It was located on the knoll of a huge hill, overlooking the valley. The house was white with black shudders, a decent porch. It had been abandoned for seven years, which added to the rumors it was haunted. I was eleven, it was July of 1993. Mother and I walked through the house, and I didn’t like the upstairs hallway right away. We found a cow upstairs (the landlord, myself, and my mother), and we just freaked out and started laughing.
I looked around the property a little further. I was keen on the two horses that were standing in wait at the fence, as if saying; “come on over.” After all the upheaval and hell, I felt like I was finally home.
During my first few months there, I noticed my precognitive dreams increased dramatically. I felt like someone was always watching me go up the stairs, so mother would wait at the bottom of the stairs and wait for me to give the “ok” to shut off the light. I noticed scratching in the wall, which at first we attributed to vermin. We set up traps and poison, and of course after the time it was abandoned, we found mice and voles. After 11 years of setting traps, searching the attic, and ripping apart a heating duct, no trace of vermin or birds were found where the noise emanated from.
I had witnesses to my plight later in life. A friend was staying over one night, when around 3:00a.m. in the morning, a ceramic unicorn flew about 7-8 feet across the room and shattered when it smashed on the wall. I turned on the bedside lamp immediately and there were no animals in the room, and my friend was deeply startled. The most positive thing to come out of that experience was that I was validation. Many children/teenagers/adults that have these experiences crave validation, witnesses. Nothing is worse than feeling like you are completely and utterly alone in a fight.
All these things said, around that time I started to study various religions, starting with Paganism and Abrahamic religions. At some point, a friend and I discussed occult practice and came to the conclusion it would be interesting to study. During this time things got worse. Could have been hormones, could have been timing. One day, I was cleaning and packing to go to Illinois. I looked at the desk and there was a spoon on it, I was reminding myself to take it downstairs. I turned around and a split second later, it flew off the desk and to the other side of the room.
That same year, I made my first art sale. My room was meticulous, and I set the check out to celebrate my success with friends. I went to get ready to go out, and the check disappeared. No one else was living on the second floor of the house at the time, and no one else was home. I stood in my room alone, thankful I had money saved from my job to go out. Before I left, I made an announcement out loud. “Whatever or whomever took my check off the bed, I want it returned there before I get back.” When I returned a day later, the check was on the bed. I checked with my mother and future stepfather, neither one of them had seen the check or had been upstairs.
Tragedy struck in 1999, when two family friends died of a drug overdoses within 30 days of each other. Both deaths were accidental and my mother had a difficult time dealing with the loss of her best friend. So, she asked me to engage in a practice called automatic writing. This was very easy to do, almost too easy. She asked questions and I wrote the answers with my less dominant hand, while in a trance-like state. Nothing incredibly spectacular occurred, aside from confirming both our thoughts. What happened two weeks later is something I’ll never forget.
I have an addiction to candles, so I had one lit on the dresser one night. Generally I’m careful, however this night I forgot to blow it out. There was a poster hanging by the dresser, and the tape came off the wall. As I was falling asleep, I heard my friend’s voice loudly say “dammit”. I opened my eyes and no one else was around or up. I got up and before I blew out the candle, I looked at what I had done. To my horror, I realized I could have burnt down the house. I told this story to my mother the next day, and she was shocked. Jill (the friend)had a dream the house burned down because someone left a candle lit.
After high school, I went to trade school and worked for a while. My new profession was boring, so I decided to move away and attended Job Corps. I moved to one of the oldest centers in the United States, in the middle of nowhere. That was a great experience. I think it deserves its own post.
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