Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Outside San Francisco

It is funny how different people can be important in our lives at the same time, yet never meet. A woman from outside San Francisco told me that one day her housekeeper, who was part of the family and had been for many years, took her aside and told her a man had been in the house while everyone was away. He had walked into the hallway from the bathroom, then went back in, then out again and into the family room. The housekeeper had seen him from the top of the stairs. When the woman asked her to describe the man, she described a tall man in a Pendleton shirt with suspenders, jeans, work boots and a hat. It was the exact description of the woman’s ex-father-in-law who had passed. Although the father-in-law and the housekeeper were both close to the family, they had never met.

Plattsburgh, New York

Some people have one ghost story to their name, while others have more than they can count. Recently I met a couple with a lot of stories to tell. They were from Plattsburgh, New York, close to Montreal. The first member of the woman’s family to come to the US from Poland was a great aunt. The family knew the graveyard where she was buried, but they could not find her grave. Three generations they had been looking for it until one night she was in bed, not really asleep, when a man in a turn of the century suit and a bowler hat appeared at the foot of her bed. He told her the grave was by a big tree, and pushed over and that was why no one had found it. Her husband went to the graveyard, following the instructions and sure enough, found the tomb stone.

Before the couple was married, he lived in an old house converted by a friend into apartments. He moved in, unpacked the TV and a few other things, but still had a room full of unopened boxes. One day he could not find the remote. He was sure that he had unpacked it, but it was nowhere to be found. Later he went into the room full of unopened boxes to look for something else. He found the remote at the bottom of an unopened box. Hey, he figured that he was mistaken and the remote had been there all the time. A few weeks later the remote was gone again. He found it at the bottom of a different box in that room.

On another occasion he had a vivid dream that there was a stairwell where his bedroom closet was and there where workmen building the house. One of them turned directly to him and called him by name. The workman said that if the guy ever needed help to call his name, Paul M…?? and he would help. The workmen were stuffing hay and mud into the walls. Much later the couple was vacationing with the friend who renovated the house. The man shared this dream over dinner. His friend was befuddled. When he renovated the house he closed up the stairway and removed the hay and mud, never mentioning any of those things to his friend.

Bubbles in Milwaukee

I have seen a lot of orbs in my time, most in photos, a few live and in person, but recently a woman shared something about orbs that was new to me. She was from outside Milwaukee and had a seven year old daughter. Her daughter would often talk about seeing "bubbles." Sometimes they showed up in her closet and she would talk to them; other times she would come into her parents’ bed, complaining she couldn't sleep because the bubbles were keeping her up. The mother never saw a thing. 

Until a recently, when she was in a room with her daughter and thought she saw a ball of light by a ceiling fan. She decided to go into her daughter's room to take a picture and see if anything showed up. The room was empty and there was nothing. Later she took a photo with her daughter in the room and the orb showed up.

The part of this story that I have never heard before is that her daughter plays with the "bubbles," moving them around in the air with her hands. Why not? I guess a childlike innocence goes a long way.