This will probably be a bit long, so I do apologize in advance. I've had a few experiences with the paranormal, so I thought I'd write three of them down for you. I'll try to make each experience short, for brevity's sake, and still get across my experiences in detail. My first encounter with the paranormal was when I was 11. It happened with, what else, a Ouija board. My mom had gotten one, and we were in the habit of playing with it after school or on the weekends. We always contacted the same "spirit", supposedly my guardian angel, who would answer any questions. This was all in good fun, and we would joke around with the spirit, who, by the way, had an excellent sense of humor. Then my mom started dating a man whom I did not like at all. My father had died while I was an infant, and mom dated a few men, but this one I just did not care for. Being a pre-pubescent with all the typical hang-ups and selfishness, (ie: the world revolves around me), I became angry and withdrawn. One day after school mom asked me if I wanted to play with the board. I was surly but agreed to do it anyway. We placed our fingers on the planchette and waited. She asked if my guardian angel was there. Yes. We started asking questions, and the planchette kept spelling "stop" and "danger". My mom asked what the danger was, and then I blacked out. When I came too, I was on the floor with my mom kneeling beside me, shaking and calling my name. According to her, the planchette started to fly over the letters, spelling foreign words that I was deciphering. The only language I knew was English, but she swears to this day I was speaking German and another language she couldn't figure out. She had removed her fingers from the planchette to break contact, but it continued to move, faster and faster, with me laughing and deciphering as fast as it was spelling. The room became very cold, and mom grabbed me and started to shake me. The planchette then flew off the board, breaking a glass on the table, yet I continued to talk gibberish, staring straight at her. Then I went limp and fell off the chair. This experience shook us both up pretty bad. All we can think is that in my adolescent stage, with all the hormones and emotions, my anger made me susceptible to a more dangerous spirit. Or maybe it was my subconscious trying to get more attention from my mother. Whatever the case, neither of us has touched a Ouija board since. My next experience happened when I moved in with my boyfriend and his mom when I was 19. They lived in a rather large house in Vienna, ME. They warned me when I moved in that there was a ghost in the house. Yeah, right. First, the layout of the house. There was a large porch you walked onto, then when you went through the front door you entered a rather large kitchen. The kitchen had open rafters and was quite spacious. You walked through the kitchen into the living room which connected to a bathroom and two bedrooms. Turn the corner, and you came to a door that led upstairs to two huge bedrooms, both with giant walk-in closets. The one to the left was used as a storage room and was situated over the two downstairs bedrooms. The one to the right was our bedroom and was located over most of the living room and all of the kitchen. Like I said, it was huge. There was a walk-in closet to the far right of the room. This is where "Joe" lived. My boyfriend and his mom loved to regale me with stories of Joe's antics (she named him...saying the name just "felt" right). Being a somewhat non-believer, though lord knows by that time I should have been, I just scoffed at them. But I couldn't explain why that closet was always so cold. Even in the height of summer that closet was so cold you could see you breath. When I first moved in, my intentions were to keep all of my clothes in that closet since it was so huge. Despite the cold and the warnings, I hung up all my clothes in there. We then went to bed and slept soundly. The next morning when we woke up, all my clothes were in a huge pile right outside the closet door. I accused my boyfriend of removing my clothes in the middle of the night. He assured me he did no such thing, and wouldn't I have heard the clothes hangers banging around? I proceeded to hang all the clothes back up, we got dressed, he went to work, and I went downstairs to get ready for class. Forgetting my glasses, I ran back upstairs (I had only been downstairs for 10 minutes), and all my clothes were again on the floor outside the closet door. I was spooked, but took the hint. Joe also had a habit of changing the radio station on us. We would be upstairs in the bedroom, chatting away, when the radio station would change. Back then the stereos weren't digital, but had the big dial. We could watch the dial turn from up at 105 all the way down to the end. It was our cue that we were up past our bedtime and it was time to go to sleep. I never felt any animosity from Joe, but he did tend to frighten me at times. One afternoon, after class, I decided to lay down to take a quick nap before heading off to my night job. My cat was wide awake and wanted to play, so I locked her out of the room so I could sleep. I had just settled in and was almost dozing when I felt my cat walk across the bed, over my legs, and curl up behind my knees. Wondering how she got back in the room, I glanced over at her, only to see an indentation behind my legs, but no cat. The strange thing was that I could still feel a cat there...the warmth behind my knees. This really frightened me so I got up and ran downstairs to tell his mom about it. She told me she has had many experiences with phantom cats, as did one of my boyfriends friends. Mostly, he was just a prankster. You would set something down, turn around, and it would be on the other side of the room when you went to reach for it again. Silly stuff like that. Before we moved out, we decided to research the house. We dug into the records of the town, and found out that the house had been built in the late 1800's. In the 1940's, a man had bought the house from the original family. He was considered odd, a recluse. He owned my cats and suffered from depression and paranoia. He eventually hung himself from a rafter in the kitchen, a rafter that was directly below the walk-in closet. His name? Joe Duboise... This last encounter happened a few years ago, right after my grandmother died. I had moved back home, was 23, and we lived right beside my grandmother. Mom, grammy, and I were very close. My father was her only son, I, the only child from him, and my mom was his first and last love. Grammy got very sick in the year 1994 due to a doctors negligence. After surgery, she was home recuperating. Mom was getting ready to go to Florida for the winter, and I was to watch the house. We went next door to talk to gram for a while, and then I took mom to Gray, ME, where she was meeting her aunt. They were then going to grab a flight south to Florida. As mom and I were saying goodbye, we were both overcome with a sadness so deep we couldn't stop crying. We held onto each other, clinging as though we were never going to see each other again. We finally tore ourselves apart, I jumped into the truck, and headed back home. I cried for the whole 45 minutes, unable to stop. When I got home, I was met by my aunt, who told me that gram had suffered a fatal heart attack in the bathroom. She died at the same time mom and I were saying goodbye. Mom was unable to come to the funeral, which she was feeling very guilty about. Approximately a month after grams death, I had a strange experience. It was in the middle of the night, and mother nature had woken me. After coming back from my nocturnal trip to the bathroom, I happened to look out the window that showed my back yard. In the back yard was a picnic table that we used to sit around in the summer, drinking and talking. The moon was full, and I could see the picnic table clearly. Sitting at that table was my mom and grammy, conversing, drinking, and laughing. I thought to myself that I should feel afraid, but I didn't. I just sat on the bed and watched for awhile, feeling at peace. The image faded after a while, and I went back to sleep. The next day I called mom. We chatted for a while, then she mentioned the strangest dream she had the night before. She dreamt that she was sitting at that picnic table talking with grammy, drinking and laughing. She described the scene that I saw perfectly, right down to the drinks and what they were wearing. We both get goose bumps thinking of that night. It doesn't end there. A few months later, mom came home. We were in grams house with her daughter, cleaning it out and sorting through her stuff. We were taking a break, the three of us sitting at the table, reminiscing, when all three of us heard the toilet flush. We stared at each other, knowing full well we were the only ones in the house, then we felt a breeze pass through the kitchen, and heard the front door open and shut. We knew then that grammy was gone... Like I said, I knew this was going to be long, so I thank you for having patience and reading this. I've had quite a few other experiences, but these were the major ones, and all true. Thanks again, and take care.

Submitted From: Maine, USA

{Back to March 1999 stories}
{Back to the Storypage}