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What A Strange House!

Cindy Lawn, IL, USA
October 2002

Some of my earliest memories are of things that just didn't belong. When I was very small, I would hear a noise like dice rolling on our kitchen table in the middle of the night, and see floating lights in the hallway outside of our bedrooms. When we had moved from that house, we moved to a house that was built on an Indian burial ground. My whole family had experiences that are too numerous to try to cover them all here! I am always willing to share my experiences with any one who is interested and intelligent enough to believe in the possibility of the afterlife!

I am writing about the house I now live in. We (my oldest son and I) have lived here for four years now and my husband has lived here for seven years all together. We know from the neighbors that a family I will call the "Brink's" (for privacy sake) with five children lived here for many years. One of the children died here of brain cancer and both of the parents eventually passed away here too. Mr. "Brink" was politically employed and Mrs "Brink" was a nurse who loved small children. The only other thing we know about the land here is that the major company nearby which builds train engines used to dump old batteries here, beyond that we don't anything else.

Among the things we are experiencing are that we often see people that don't live here anymore. Sometimes it is only out of the corner of your eye, sometimes it is more. I have seen strange firey outlines and a dark shadow that don't go away when you blink or look back to it - both in the shape of a woman quite often in our hallway. My husband and 9 year old son both have seen people various times in the hall way who disappear when you look a way. The hallway is pretty different, it runs on a 45 degree angle starting just past our bedroom to three more bedrooms on a NW to SE angle, but the rest of the house sits on a square N - S plot with a Western face to the street. I have often wondered if the angle of the hallway has anything to do with the frequent sightings in it. We also hear things fall , slamming into the floor with a thud, never to discover anything affset. We also put things down, have them disappear, and find 'em later exactly where we thought we left 'em. The hot water runs ice cold for no reason in the shower, and we have cold spots that travel.

I was not aware of any abnormalities when we first moved here. It took some time, probably six to eight months before anything happened. Things started out small. I sneezed one morning in the bathroom, and heard someone call out "God Bless You!" very faintly and from very far away. I heard a heavy foot fall in our kitchen after my husband left for work, I thought he had come back. I got up and rushed out to the kitchen only to find no one was there. I saw my husband's old dog sit down at my feet one morning and toss his head like he wanted to play, only he had died 6 months before I met my husband. I have seen a very old man rush by our bedroom three different times. Each time, I saw him clearly, solidly looking like a real live person. He had on a wind breaker type of jogging suit, he was bald on top and the white hair on the sides was very thin. His skin is spotted with age, leathery and very thin, and you can easily see his blue veins through it. The muscles on the back of his neck stick out, and I can see the curve of the base of his skull clearly through his very thin hair. Each time I saw him, I felt grateful to only see his back as he walking by. I was a little afraid to have seen his face. The last time I saw him, my 9 year old son followed him by no more than two or three seconds and didn't see him at all. Since our youngest was created over two years ago, I have not seen the man at all. I can only speculate that the old man was Mr "Brink" at the very end of his life.

We have a sensor light in our driveway that goes off - by a fault - when the furnace comes on and when some one or some thing activates the trigger. The light is some times tripped by a neighborhood cat or various suburban wild life, which you can usually see if you look outside right away. Three years ago this November, my husband and I gradually became aware that the light was going on several times a night for no apparent reason what so ever. We had discussed the light's activity and agreed it was probably being caused by one of house's other occupants. We came to soon find out that it was not. About a week after the light started coming on, I awoke in the middle of the night to hear some one walk into our room. At first I lay there just listening because I thought it was most likely our oldest son, who was 6 years old at the time, coming in from a bad dream. Then, the source of the noise walked to the foot of the bed and ran a hand up the back of my leg, from my ankle to the very top of my thigh. I froze with fear. I could not have summoned my husband if I wanted to. I tried and found that fear choked the voice out of my throat. I closed my eyes and lay still only being able to listen as the intruder walked around from the foot of the bed to my side of the bed towards my head. When it stopped, and had been still a while, I opened my eyes. Right there in front of me, not more than a foot a way, was some thing very short, dark gray and very like granite looking in texture, and where the face should have been was only a single, round bright white light. I shut my eyes tight and quickly rolled away to snuggle in next to my husband as closely and as tightly as I possibly could have. I told him what had happened to me the next morning. I was rather surprised to hear that he had seen it too, gliding around the bed from my side of the bed to the foot as it disappeared and faded in to the darkness. I am happy to report that we have not seen that creature since then. I don't know what it was, and I am not sure I ever will. If you should happen to know what it was or what it could be, please let me know.

Over the past two years, we did some work on two of the bathrooms in our house. If you could see an overview, the three bathrooms are all in the very center of the house, side by side and back to back. We took one bathroom and turned it into a laundry room/powder room. We cut a unused bathroom into a back bedroom, and completely gutted and remodeled both of those rooms. Since we converted the bedroom with the bathroom into our office, I spend a lot of time in that room. I often have a feeling that someone is watching me from that reconstructed bathroom. One morning I came into the office while my husband was sitting at the desk and opened the pocket door to the bathroom in search of something. As I was about to step into the room, a strong and cold breeze blew out and pushed me back. My husband was seated no more than 6 feet directly behind me did not feel a stitch of the strange breeze. I apologized for obviously disturbing someone, closed the door and came back later. I have not felt uncomfortable in the office or in that bathroom since then.

For several months last year, my now 9 year old complained of seeing a very tall woman in white robes with a thick gold necklace on in his room. He said that she had long black curly hair, and she always had a man with her who would whisper in her ear, and he thought the man was her assistant. He said they glowed and that they kept him up at night. He never said how they kept him up, just being in there I guess. I finally moved his furniture around so that he could not readily see where they were and the problem stopped.

Towards the end of this past summer, our youngest son (now 17 months old) was learning to say "Hi!" and wave at people who were paying attention to him. During the last three weeks of August, he would wake up from his naptimes laughing in his crib and saying "Hi!" When I would go in to get him up, he would continue the behavior, only he was never looking at me, rather at someone who was across the room - behind me, and that I could not see. I, of course can't be sure, but I would venture to say he was waving and saying "Hi!" to Mrs. "Brink", a former resident of the house. I feel quite sure that it was Mrs. "Brink" because I saw her, in firey outline or in solid shadow form several times during those weeks. She is always near the kids, and I have never been frightened by her appearances. She was a kind woman in life and she is still kind and is still here.

I am currently pregnant and I will admit I have some hormone fluctuations which flood right through to my mood and the things I let bother me. One particular evening when she was here recently was after a heated discussion between my husband and my self over some silly topic. He retired to a different room, and I retired to our room. Most of the night, the lamp in the ceiling fan over our bed rattled, it never did that before and it has not done so since. I was woken up around 3:00 AM by someone walking, no more like pacing, nervously from our bedroom door out into the family room and back repeatedly. I got up and walked quietly over to the door. I could hear some one sobbing softly outside the door. Thinking it was my husband, and that something must be wrong, I opened the door. Of course no one was there. I looked up and down the hall way, and even went looking for my husband who I found sleeping peacefully in the office on the sleeper sofa. I was glad it was Mrs "Brink" and not my husband, the argument was petty and pretty rank, but not enough to do that to him. Maybe she didn't like him sleeping in her room, he can snore pretty loudly.

I am glad to say that since our youngest was born, I have only seen the lady who I believe to be Mrs "Brink". As our neighbors have said, she had five children of her own, and was fond of small children. I like to think that she has been protecting us and keeping the bad spirits away. Maybe that is why we haven't seen anything but her over the past 1 & a 1/2 years since his birth.

Thanks for reading my tales. Write if you like, but please don't sign me up for anything. Who knows, maybe I'll send Mrs. "Brink" after you if you do!

Cindy Lawn, IL, USA
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