Gentle Spirit
Alena, CA, USA
April 2000
exist or if people are just making them up to scare you. I remembered all the ghost encounters my friends had experienced so that got me to thinking.
Well I'm 17 years old and been living in California my whole life. I use to live in Los Angeles for about 10 years before I moved to El Monte (30 minutes on the freeway from Los Angeles). When I was a kid probably about 11 or 12 years old, my mother and sister would visit a friend to have their fortune told from cards (this was the time I was still living in Los Angeles). Her friend's apartment was extremely old and small, only had 1 bedroom and bathroom both connected to the living room. The doorway separating between the living room and the bedroom was wide open so I usually sat there as I watch my mom and sister talking to the friend.
One moment I heard a man's voice coming from the bedroom, it was very dark and I didn't see anybody in there. The man's voice was very low like as if he was 60 or 70 years of age. While he was talking, I didn't understand what he was saying because he was speaking in Cambodian. I never understood that language since Cambodia was the country my family was from and was what my mom's friend's speak. My family's main language is Chiu Chow so that was the first language I learned to speak. Well, anyways thinking the man was my mom's friend's relative or friend sleeping over, I asked my mom who's the man in the bedroom. She asked her friend and she said that there's nobody in the room. After that I was just staring into the bedroom thinking, "Am I hearing things?". After that incident I never heard that man's voice again. On our way back home, I kept thinking about that incident and was very confused, but forgotten about it later on.
I'm a senior now. I had two more weird experiences living here in El Monte. About 2 years ago, I was doing homework in my room (I always do my homework on my bed mostly with the T.V. on). I usually look up to watch the T.V. once in a while as I'm doing my homework. All of the sudden the T.V. just turned off by itself. At first I thought it was a power outage so I checked all the clocks and other things in the house, but everything else worked fine so I thought there was something wrong with the plug from my T.V. Well I turned the T.V. back on again to watch it, then all of the sudden it turned off by itself again. I turned it back on, it turns back off, I turned it back on, it turns back off. Ok...this time I was sitting on my bed staring at the T.V. I figured somebody is messing with me so I talked aloud, "Hey stop messing with me!!". I went downstairs to tell my mom and sister about it, but they both were like "whatever", they didn't really care. I left the T.V. the way it was that whole day.
Wanting to use the T.V. again the night of that day thinking that weird incident might happen again, I was checking to see if it was going to turn off by itself again, but it didn't so I just forgot about it. About a month or 2 later, the similar incident happened again, except it took place with the T.V. in the living room. It was around 7:30 p.m. I was watching my baby niece and playing with her and I was next to the T.V. (of course it was on). My mother was in the kitchen cooking food and my sister was in the bathroom, only me and my niece was in the living room. All of the sudden, the T.V. went off by itself. I couldn't help but think it's that spirit again. I know nobody else would've turned it off because the remote control was like 20 feet away from me and my niece and there was no power outage since all the lights stayed on while the T.V. went off by itself. I wasn't really scared, but that was the last time it happened in my presence. I didn't bother to turn the T.V. back on that time. I brought up the subject about it to my sister again and she told me that the old friend back in L.A. (that they would go to to have their fortunes told from cards) mentioned about an old man at least 300 years old, a spirit of some kind is watching over us.
My whole family believes in all this stuff so they weren't surprised when I told them about what happened to me. That old man never messed with the T.V's in my presence again, but I remember my sister also mentioning to me about how he would usually turn on her T.V. in her room in the middle of the night sometimes or how she would see a dark figure of an old man in her bedroom while she was in bed. I just hope he respects what I like to do because he knows I leave the T.V. on A LOT sometimes not even when I'm not watching it. But I never asked anyone to turn it off.