Being Sensitive

I’ve had several paranormal experiences starting in 2001. I’ve always had premonitions about things since I was around 13 years old, but I never could sense ghosts until after the trauma that I experienced from the 9/11 tragedy. A good friend died when the first plane hit and it profoundly affected me. I’ve heard that trauma will sometimes open you up to the spirit world, and it did for me.

After 9/11 my husband and I decided to move out of NYC. We moved from Queens to Las Vegas, Nevada in October 2001. We were excited to move west and start a new life, and despite what happened in Sept, we were pretty happy about our decision. We moved into an apartment home complex that was around 11 years old. Strange things started happening almost immediately. My husband took a picture of the living room before our furniture arrived and there was a strange white haze in one corner of the room. After we settled in, I started feeling this overwhelming sadness that was not related to 9/11. It was a very heavy feeling that is hard to describe. I know it was not related to 9/11 because it took a month for me to start feeling that way. I felt the worst when I was sitting on our couch in the living room. When we would leave the apartment, the feeling would lift. When we came back home and I sat in the living room it would start again.

Other odd things started happening. Our cats would not sleep in the living room or our bedroom. They always slept with us in the bedroom of our former apartment in NY. When we started to get ready for bed, all 4 of them would get up and go into the dining room and sleep together. They had never done that before and we had moved before with them. At that time we figured they were comforting each other, but later on we found out that was probably not the reason. I also found a picture of our budgies one time, lying face down on the carpet in the bedroom. The nail was still in the wall and the hanger on the back of the frame was intact. There was no reason for the picture to fall. One night, we were sleeping and we heard a loud bang. The picture over our TV stand had fallen behind it. We decided to pick it up when we got up in the morning. When we did, again, the nail was still in the wall and the hanger on the back of the frame was intact.

In February, I went back to NY to visit my dad because he wasn’t feeling well. Since he had a heart condition, I had to move back to NY to take care of him. Also, we had been looking for jobs with no luck and our unemployment was running out. I knew my dad needed me and there was nothing keeping us in Las Vegas so we decided to move back. I got an apartment when I was back visiting him and I went back to Vegas and started packing. Before I packed up the bedroom, I took some pictures so that I could show the pictures to my friends back in NY. When we looked at the pictures, there were several orbs. The pictures were taken from several different angles on different days, but the orbs were still there. I wiped off the lens and took additional pictures; each time there were one or 2 orbs in different places. We had no explanation for this.

We saw my next door neighbor one day and told her that we were going back to NY because my dad was ill. I don’t know why, but she proceeded to tell us some things about the apartment that she hadn’t told us before. Apparently, a woman who was a teacher lived there for 5 years before we moved in. She had a friend who was a fellow teacher, in his 30’s. One night he came to visit and wasn’t feeling well. She told him to stay over and he slept on her couch. The next morning she got up and found he had died during the night. Later she found out that he had a congenital heart defect and had died of a heart attack on her couch. This made sense as that is where I kept feeling the sadness all the time. In addition, it now made sense that the cats wouldn’t sleep in the living room. Also, prior to us moving into this apartment, three guys in their 20’s had come from Buffalo, NY to find jobs in the casinos. They spent just 3 months
in the apartment and she heard that they slept in their sleeping bags in the dining room. They never did buy furniture and after the 3 months they packed up and went back to Buffalo. She wasn’t sure if it was because they couldn’t find jobs or something else.

We heard when we first got there that a gentleman had died a few doors down right after we moved in. We saw the yellow tape across his apartment door. What the neighbor told me was that she found out that this man did not just die; he shot himself when he found out that he had terminal cancer because he didn’t have health insurance. I don’t know if he had anything to do with our activity, but it was interesting that we saw 2 orbs, not one, in the pictures taken in our bedroom.

I had no paranormal experiences in the apartment that we moved into when we moved back to New York. Although when a friend who is also sensitive came to visit from Pennsylvania and spent the night in our living room, she said she woke up to see a spirit child sitting on our couch (she slept on an air mattress). She said he just sat there quietly and looked at her. I never sensed him there at all. However, we did have some paranormal experiences after my dad died.

You remember that we moved back to New York because my dad became ill. We moved back in May 2002 and he died in October 2003. My parents lived in the same 2 family house for 40 years and rented the top floor apartment. The job of cleaning out the apartment fell to me, an only child, and my husband, who helped me. We had one month to get everything out of the apartment, so we took off from work to get it done. My parents had a mahogany bedroom set that I intended to sell to an antique dealer, so I took pictures of it to take to his shop. Several orbs appeared on the pictures. Both my dad and my mom had died in that bedroom on that bed. They died in their sleep, so their deaths were peaceful, but I think that they their energy was still there because they had lived in that apartment for so many years. The landlord, his wife and his son, also died in the house, in the downstairs apartment, so that might explain the additional orbs (5 orbs appeared on some of the pictures). I also had a piano that I wanted to sell, and orbs appeared on those pictures also.

At the end of the month, the only thing left to clean out was the basement. We had a cleanup company come to do that since a lot of the stuff my dad had saved was very heavy. For some reason, I could not bring myself to go back to the house that day. I felt a very ominous feeling. My husband said he would go by himself. This is what he told me happened.

The men finished cleaning out the basement and he went down one more time to make sure everything was gone. He went back upstairs to the side door that exited onto a driveway that separated the house from the house next to it. The driveway was very narrow as the houses were built in 1923. He met a neighbor in the driveway and as he talked to her, he felt something very cold pass through him. He said it made his teeth chatter. He said goodbye and went to his car. At first he could not start the car, he was shaking so hard. Finally, he started the car and drove home, feeling very cold the entire time. When he got home, he told me what happened, and got into bed. He piled the covers on himself and he said he still felt cold. This went on for a few hours; he finally started feeling better about 12 hours later. One of my cats jumped on the bed and stayed with him. The cat was very healthy. A week later she started acting sick. We took her to the vet and she was diagnosed with a kidney tumor. We left her at the vet. Two days later she died at the vet. This is a cat that a week earlier showed no signs of illness at all and had sat on the bed after my husband experienced the coldness. We think that something evil must have followed him up from the basement, passed into him, and he took it home with him. We also suspect that cats, being very psychic, might have been open to this evil spirit, and it is what caused the tumor to develop. It was almost like she was trying to protect my husband from whatever it was, and it got her instead.

My (hopefully) final paranormal experience began in 2005 when my husband and I purchased a townhouse on Long Island in New York. He found the complex on the internet and contacted the real estate agent and we made an appointment to meet with her to look at 6 different townhouses. The first one we saw really resonated with us, but we went along and saw the others too. However, we told her that we wanted to go back to the first one and see it again. It had really
drawn me to it, and I found out later why it did. Not only did we go back and feel the place was for us, but we made an offer on it right then and there. The owners weren’t home when we saw the place, so we went back to the real estate office to wait for them to get home. Not only did we make an offer that day, but the owners immediately accepted it. Within 6 weeks we closed on the townhouse in September 2005 and a month later we moved in.

Some strange things happened after we closed on the house. When we did the walk-through the morning of the closing, the inspector had checked all the faucets in the bathroom and everything was fine’?so was the exhaust fan. When we back to the house after the closing, we went upstairs to use the bathroom and the faucets started leaking. In addition, the exhaust fan blew out right after we turned it on. We chalked it up to old wiring, and didn’t think much about it since we were planning on having an electrician check all the wiring and change the switches and outlets before we moved in. We were also going to have new windows put in and paint the place.

That all went off without a hitch. We had the electrician come and put in a new fan and check everything for us. Then we noticed that the lights blinked whenever the refrigerator went on. He said he could find nothing wrong. After we moved in, the refrigerator, which had worked fine up until then, suddenly stopped working.

We had a plumber come in and check the faucets. It was going to be expensive to fix all the leaks, so we decided to redo the bathroom while we were at it, since it was from the 1970’s anyway. We had moved in by this time, and things started to get worse. As we ripped out the bathroom fixtures, I started to get sick. I ended up with walking pneumonia. I had to go to the doctor and be put on a nebulizer because it was so difficult to breathe. I had never had this type of illness or experienced problems breathing. At night pictures would fall off the walls downstairs in the living room and the nails would still be in the walls. One night my husband and I were having dinner and suddenly we both smelled cigarette smoke. Neither one of us smokes, and neither do my neighbors. The smell was gone as quickly as it came.

I also want to note that after I was there a month I started to feel like there was something not quite right about the place. My husband worked nights for a few weeks because he had started a new job when we moved and they had the training on the 3-11 pm shift. I would come home from work and be alone and just got an uncomfortable feeling. Then I started feeling sad, the same as I had when I was in Las Vegas. I couldn’t figure that out since we were both so thrilled upon buying our first house. When I went to work I was fine, but as soon as I got home and was home for about a half hour, that sad feeling started again. He said he didn’t feel anything and told me I was imagining things. I also started feeling like something didn’t want me to be there. I kept getting a feeling that I should sell the house and move, that we were not wanted there. I couldn’t figure out why I felt that way. I was so happy when we bought the place. I didn’t want to move.

Fast forward to Memorial Day weekend, May 2006. I happened to see my neighbor outside that day and we sat down to chat. She started talking about the people who had owned the townhouse before my husband and I bought it. The people we bought it from had only owned it for 9 years, and because they were snowbirds, they decided to sell this townhouse and live in Florida all year long. I asked her who had owned it before them and why had they sold it. She told me that it was a couple in their 40’s and the wife had died of lung cancer. She had gotten divorced, so after she died her kids were in a hurry to sell the place and sold it to the couple that sold it to us. Next she asked me if I still had that ‘monstrosity’? in the dining room. She referred to a china cabinet that was bolted to the wall and 2 side cabinets that had been added by the previous owners. I told her yes, and she told me that the china cabinet had belonged to the woman who died and that the couple who had sold us the place had added the other cabinets for more storage space. I told her that I liked it because I had a porcelain doll figurine collection and they looked really nice in the china cabinet. Also, the tiled floor only came up to the cabinet, and we didn’t have the money to fix the wall and the floor if we had it removed. Remember this cabinet later.

She told me more about the woman who had died of lung cancer. She said that she was around my age when she died (in her 40's). She also said that I reminded her of the woman, same height, weight and hair color. It made me feel kind of creepy, but I didn’t say anything.

I continued to get upper respiratory infections and have breathing problems. I couldn’t get the fact that the woman had died of lung cancer out of my mind. A friend’s sister-in-law was a sensitive, so she suggested that she bring her to my house. She told her nothing of what had been going on. My friend told me that her sister-in-law often went with people when they were buying houses to let them know if it was a good choice or not. It was too late for us, but I thought she might be able to tell me something.

Her sister-in-law came over one night and at first she sat in my living room. My living room and dining room are open to each other and you can see the china cabinet from the living room. As she looked at the china cabinet she said that she was having trouble breathing. Then she said she sensed a woman and a man and the woman had trouble breathing. She said that the woman was connected with the china cabinet and that I should get rid of it. I told her that was not possible since it was bolted to the wall and that the floor tile only came up to the cabinet. Then she said, I should take out the figurines and give both the figurines and the cabinet a good cleaning. I told her that I did that once every 2 weeks. She said again that she really felt like I should get rid of the cabinet since this woman was attached to it.

Then she went upstairs to the second floor. She said that the master bedroom was clear, but that the second bedroom that we used as a computer room was not. She could see a sick woman sitting in a wheel chair looking out the window at the garden. She wasn’t sure if she had died in the house, but she was definitely sick while she was living there. She also told me to get rid of the blue blinds (they had come with the house and matched the carpet in the room), because they had belonged to her. She also told me to get rid of the burgundy curtains because that color gives spirits energy. I took the curtains down that night and by the next week I had replaced the blue blinds with neutral color verticals.

She also recommended that I ‘smudge’? the house to rid it of the spirits. I ordered a bunch of sage from an online store in Taos, New Mexico because I couldn’t find it locally. When I got it, I lit it and started to smudge the house. No sooner had I lit it, than it would go out. I tried it several times and each time it would go out. I called the store in New Mexico and told them they had sold me faulty sage. The woman gave me goose bumps when she told me that the reason the sage was going out is because the spirit I was trying to get rid of is attached to me and is blowing out the flame. She told me to have my husband light it and do the smudging. This time he lit it and it stayed lit. After we were done, things seemed to quiet down a bit. We continued to have issues with the electricity however.

Finally in April of 2009, a friend directed me to an intuitive who she said could clear my house over the phone. I had tried to get someone to do it a year earlier but they told me they were very busy and never got back to me. In the beginning of April, we had 4 doors replaced in our house. There were two closet doors in the bedroom, the bedroom door, and the upstairs bathroom door. That evening a large picture that was in between the two closet doors in the bedroom came crashing down for no reason, and the frame broke into 4 pieces. At this point I’d had enough. Every time we did some renovations, this spirit would get mad and knock my pictures off the walls. That’s when I called the intuitive and had him do the clearing. I didn’t tell him who I thought was in my house’?but he said there were 6 souls, an older man, an older woman, a young girl, a middle aged man, and a couple in their 40’s. He did his clearing thing, and the atmosphere in the house started to feel lighter. Since then we had the last three closet doors done and everything was quiet afterwards. We also had a flood from my neighbor’s water heater which damaged a wall in our kitchen, and nothing happened when the wall was opened and the sheet rock was replaced.

We are finally all clear. We now have 5 new cats and they are not spooked like our previous 4 cats were in Las Vegas. They sleep all over the house. The lights don’t blink anymore. I don’t feel that sense of dread and I don’t feel like someone wants us to move. After four years in the townhouse, I finally feel that it’s ours and we can be happy to live there.