I myself had not had any paranormal experiences before I met my boyfriend-other than the occasional family ghost story-but years after we started going out I found myself involved in his ghostly history.

To start with, his family was from San Francisco, and in his mother's mother's house many things happened:

when his mother was a child, as she lay in bed, she would hear footsteps approaching her bedroom, then the doorknob would rattle, and she would dive under the blankets. Moments later she would feel the soft depression of someone sitting down onto the bed and then light caresses on the top of her head. This would also happen to his mother's mother. Also the blinds used to fly up and down, the rusted, non-functional old fire alarm bell would go off and doors would open and shut mysteriously.

In his mother's sister's house there was a room in the house that was FREEZING cold, no matter how high the heat was turned on or if it was left open to the rest of the house. His mother's sister's poodle would always go to the same corner and continuously bark, the same corner in which an old rocking chair would spontaneously rock back and forth. At the other end of the house, his uncle would hear someone calling his name and yet when he went to the kitchen to ask his wife what she needed, she would reply that she had not called for him. Also on one rare terrifying occasion his aunt and his cousin were in the backyard gardening and when his cousin entered the house, someone had lit a fire in the fireplace.

His oldest sister has moved a number of times, and in apartments they have occupied she reports that on a rare occasion she will hear knocking on the bedroom door and when she gets up from bed to answer it there is no-one there. Once or twice his sister has told me that her son, 5, and her daughter, 8, have awakened her, screaming that they saw "something scary" in their bedroom.

Now his mother lives up in Northern California on a large property, by herself on the weekdays. She has told us good humoredly that her "casper" has followed her up there. The blinds still occasionally go up and down, and his other sister, while downstairs one night, looked up the stairs to see an older woman pass into her mother's room....but in the morning her mother refuted the claim that it could have possibly been her before her daughter even opened her mouth, saying, "I slept the best I've ever slept last night. Like a log." Also his mother reported that one day while taking a shower her sponge flew off the wall and hit her lightly on the back!

And as much as I want to deny my belief, when we went to visit his mother over there in April of `98, I had just put our daughter to sleep and was returning from the bathroom to the family room, which is usually such a toasty room because of the great fire stove that warms the house from here. I started up the steps into the room and was overcome by the freezing air I felt here. "Gosh!" I exclaimed, making my boyfriend, his two sisters, and his mother jump. "It is FREEZING right here!" They all looked at me wide- eyed and then his oldest sister rushed out of the room. I went to sit next to my boyfriend and was told that just before I had entered the room they had been talking about his grandparents and suddenly the lamp had flashed on and off, and then I had entered commenting on the subzero temperature of the room!

The very next time we visited in November `98, we slept, as we always do, on the fold out bed in the family room, a bed next to the table where the mysterious lamp from last time sat. In the middle of the first night I woke up suddenly, bleary eyed and astonished that the lamp was on next to me, brilliant and brighter than it had ever seemed before, at two o clock in the morning. Without thinking, because I was half asleep, I elbowed my boyfriend, asking if he had switched it on. He gave no answer and I just assumed our two year old daughter had woken up, got up and turned it on, and gone back to sleep, which in the morning I discovered was ridiculous because 1) she wouldn't have just gone back to sleep 2) she couldn't even reach the switch to turn on the light 3) even if she could reach it she would have had no idea how to twist the switch inside to turn it on!