Who Is The Watcher?

I moved from Kentucky back to Anchorage Alaska in March of 2004, now 6 months ago..

When I first came, I stayed, along with my 10 year old daughter, Whitney, with an older daughter, Kim. Her family consists of herself, her husband, her 3 children, an 11 year old and 8 month old daughter and an 8 year old son. Since the apartment isn't very large, Whitney, and I slept on a futon in the living room.This futon was very comfortable so that was no problem and I was only going to be here until I found a place of our own.

Soon after we came, I began to notice that Kim and Alex kept the TV on in their bedroom and the door open all night. Now, that is really unusual for Kim, who, like me, is a very light sleeper, and cannot sleep in a room unless it's dark. Living here in Alaska this is not possible since the summer sun does shine until midnight ( it isn't called "The land of the midnight sun" for nothing), and about 1 am it starts getting a little dusky as it does in any other state in the lower 48, only down there it gets to be dusk at 5 or 6 pm, here it stays that way for a couple of hours and then it is daylight again.
This is very annoying to me and to Kim, so we would always cover our bedroom windows with heavy drapes or, like most people do, cover them with tin foil. Another daughter says this is really ghetto, but still it serves it's purpose. At this time, however there was nothing heavy covering the window in the bedroom but blinds and a light colored curtain, similar to the ones in the kitchen and living room, as well as the kids' room.

In May, Kim and family decided to return to Kentucky, and I made arrangement with the landlord to continue to live there since the school that Whitney attends, is but a stone's throw away, less than a block, from the apartment.

After they left, I moved into Kim's bedroom and Whitney moved into the kids' bedroom and thats when I found out why they kept the TV on. The room is pitch black at night and not very light in the daytime. Now the kitchen is on the same side of the house as the bedroom, and the light comes through that window just fine, all of the other windows let the light come through, except for this one bedroom window. It seems as though the street lights and even auto lights reach the glass but can't penetrate it. I can see those outside lights through the curtain, yet the room stays dark.

I have never felt comfortable sleeping in that room, from day one. When I sleep there I have really bad and often sickening dreams. I won't go into the dreams but believe me they weren't at all pleasant. At the time I never thought about this, but before Kim left I noticed her baby, who had a crib in her parents room, would wake up screaming, in the middle of the night. If she was in bed with her mom and dad this never happened. Her 8 year old brother would also wake up from a bad dream he could never remember, but knew it scared him. I stopped sleeping in the room after a couple weeks of this and went back to the futon for a short time.

Whitney hates her bedroom and won't sleep there. She will sleep on the futon as long as I'm nearby, or in my room but not alone. If I were busy online and bedtime came for her, she refused to go to bed, she was that scared. She'd fall asleep on the sofa or futon until I got ready to go to bed. I have never told her any of the things I have been experiencing so this wasn't the power of suggestion. Soon "things" started to happen.

I would be online typing (with webtv we can sit across the room instead of close in front of it) and I would get a creepy feeling that someone was at the kitchen window looking in at me. I could plainly see that no one was standing outside as it was light out, even late at night. This kept on until it made me so uncomfortable I couldn't concentrate. I rearranged the furniture in the living room and since I can't see the kitchen windows I am no longer bothered by the feeling someone is outside looking in at me. Now I sit in a little niche much closer to the TV and the kitchen is now behind me and to the right. When the kitchen light is on I often get a glimpse of a shadow between me and the light, its just sort of flashes by like what you see when someone walks between you and a light, but when I turn around it's gone.
OK, maybe that is my imagination or possibly the fact that I wear glasses, but other things are not so easy to explain away.

At night I hear something fall in the kitchen similar to the sound a plastic glass makes when dropped. It seems to bounce on the floor. Also in there, we hear the plastic grocery sacks I keep in a cabinet, start to rustle, as they do when I put them away, one inside the other, then we hear a cabinet door close although none were left open. I know what you all are likely thinking, that maybe there's a mouse in the plastic bags. We don't have mice in Alaska, so far as I know anyway, I was told they can't exist in the area.

Quite often,the cold water in the bath tub starts running, sometimes when I'm home alone. Once I started to wash dishes, and Whitney had returned to school after lunch. We hadn't run any at all but when I turned the hot tap on there was no hot water. It was barely warm. After about half an hour it was hot again. That just happened the one time.

In bed at night I can hear a tapping at the window, it sounds more like when you just use your fingertips instead of knuckles. I would get up and go look out but nothing or nobody is ever there. The phone rings every few days but when I answer there is no one there, just a hollow sound and there is no number on the caller Id. There is no background sound or breathing or anything. Once when Whitney answered the phone she said "hello?" and there was no answer, but she said "Mommy, listen to this" and you could hear the sound of a voice whispering but we couldn't tell what the voice was saying or if it was a male or female voice. I hung up and hit redial and the phone rang once and then a recording came on to say "You must first dial a 1 to reach this number" or something similar.

Now things are starting to vanish and later be found in the oddest places, if at all. I have a blue pearl and I keep it in a bottle in my purse, don't ask me why, It's just always been kept there wrapped in cotton since I got it 5 years ago straight from an oyster. I have found it in a cup in the kitchen cabinet, although there would be nobody home but me. I also have 2 rings, both are made of Black Hills gold, and precious to me. One is an angel with one green and one pink wing. My daughter gave it to me for mother's day several years ago. The other was from a really close male friend and is a pale pink rose with pale green leaves. These 2 rings are the only jewelry I wear and the one with the rose had broken on one part of the band and I had put this away in my overnight case which I keep locked as it holds some very important papers. I was wearing the other, until I took a shower one day, when I placed it on the cabinet beside the basin in the bathroom. After I got dressed I went to get the ring and it was gone. I was home alone as Whitney was going to summer school. I searched the entire bathroom, and was very upset, thinking I must have knocked it off and it went down the drain. Finally I gave up and went into the kitchen, and there on the table in an empty coffee mug was my angel ring. That cup had been in the dish cabinet before. I don't drink coffee and never use the cups unless we have company who wants some, which is very seldom. Now that was freaky enough but when I opened a prescription bottle of pain meds that was tightly closed and kept inside a zipped plastic makeup bag, there inside the bottle with the pills, was my rose ring! I have no idea how it could have gotten out of the bag, since I kept it locked and keep the key well hidden on a high closet shelf that even I have a hard time reaching, located in my bedroom.

My social security card and Whitney's have vanished from my wallet, inside my purse. Nothing else. I have searched the entire house and never found either. I have had Whitney's card for ten years and never lost it, then suddenly, they are both gone.

Then there is the TV and fan, which shut off by themselves. I sleep under a fan, summer or winter. When it goes off it wakes me up, and I turn it back on, which is really irritating. The television will be on in the living room and suddenly it goes off. I have checked to see if it came unplugged but it hasn't. Other times I might be reading and suddenly the TV comes on.

I had a friend visiting one evening, and we were just sitting, talking and suddenly the set came on. She nearly freaked, wanting to go home. I had a hard time talking her into not going out in the rain.

Next door to us on the side where my bedroom is, there is a building with 2 large apartments both of which are empty and have been since before I came here. There was a for sale sign out front and one day I saw the realtor had placed a sold sign over the other one. For some reason I was attracted to that apartment downstairs. I have had the strongest urge to go inside it. The building is pretty close to ours, separated by just a small fence. I walk by the building everyday and had noticed what was once a small garden plot between the fence and house. A few small flowers were growing among the short rows. I picked one and smelled it, then took it home and placed it on a small stand in my bedroom. A few days later that entire yard was overgrown with these strange flowers and the yard is beautiful even though the flowers grow amidst weeds waist deep.

There have been a few men who came every day for a week who worked on the roof. Several times while walking by I see what looks like a shadow flit past the window directly across from my window. I thought the workmen had come back but they hadn't. Their work truck wasn't there and the doors and windows were closed. I have never seen anyone inside except once right after it was sold. I took the man to be the new owner but found out later he wasn't, after meeting the couple who bought it. But that man has never returned.

Last week Whitney told me this girl she was playing with had told her a man had been shot in our apartment. I had never heard anything about this happening so didn't think too much about it at the time, but I spoke with Kim a few days ago on the phone and I told her what had been going on and asked her about her keeping the TV on in her bedroom. She claims the darkness didn't bother her but that she, also, had bad dreams when she slept in that bedroom, and I'm sure that's what was wrong with the baby and little boy. I told her what the girl had told Whitney about a man having been shot in our apartment and she said, "Oh No, that wasn't in OUR apartment, it was the building next door. It was a boy and he committed suicide" she went on to say that a relative of the dead boy came and told them what had happened and that there would be a lot of people going in and out. He didn't want to bother anyone but it is their custom to celebrate a family member's death for 2 days.!
This happened just shortly before we arrived and we hadn't heard anything about the suicide.

It was told to me later the boy was 13 and he didn't have good clothes and the kids would constantly make fun of him. They say he took it as long as he could, then went home and shot himself in the head. That's when I found out that his death room, and the room in which the family celebrated, is the one with the window that directly faces my bedroom window.

Now few family members want to come to my house. I don't blame them. My 19 year old son came here once and stayed while I went to the store. He won't come back but he won't tell me why or what happened while I was away.

There have been days when nothing happened but suddenly the creepy things start again. Many times I have heard someone call my name. One day I clearly heard my nephew say "Hey Betty" sounding just as he always calls me, but he doesn't live here in Alaska.

When I am alone in the living room, or even in the kitchen cooking, I hear someone whisper my name, closely by my ear. I often feel as though someone is standing behind me reading over my shoulder. I have long hair and sometimes feel as though something brushes it softly.

Whitney has seen a dark shadow on her bedroom wall, that moved around the room. She had a friend over that night and the other little girl agreed. They were both scared. One night when my granddaughter, Kita, and one of their friends spent the night with Whitney they all decided to sleep in my room. They made a bed down on the floor at the foot of my bed and settled in so I could tell them stories before they fell asleep. This is standard procedure in my home when the kids have sleepovers, something I have done for years with all my kids. Well they fell asleep and I had gone online and cleared some email from my mailbox, I went to bed. I'm not sure how long I slept, when something suddenly woke me up. I have no idea what it was but I raised my head off the pillow thinking maybe one of the girls gotten up, maybe Whitney, sleep walking. As I raised up I could see a man standing over the kids looking down at them. I yelled something like "Hey, get away from them" and he turned to look at me, then vanished...I didn't think about it at the moment but later realised that the room was light enough that I could clearly see the man and he was transparent, sort of gray. I turned on the light, as it was now dark, and checked the kids but they were fine so I didn't wake them up. Strangely they didn't even wake up when I yelled at the man. I wasn't scared after I realised it wasn't a man intending to do the kids harm, but seeing him startled me. If the ghost of the boy who died next door is haunting my apartment , I know for sure this was not him but another ghost.

Recently another daughter and her husband came up to Alaska and they are staying with me. Several times she has heard me call her and she would come to my room and ask what I had wanted. I hadn't called her.

One night, I was sitting up in bed and my back was against the wall. As I sat there I became aware that there was a sound and a vibration inside the wall directly behind me. I could feel it buzzing against my back. It sounded like a small saw or something like that, not loud but just enough to get my attention... This went on for about half an hour, then just stopped.. I had never had this happen before and never afterwards.

I met the owners of the apartment building next door and they are very nice people, and Christians. The first day we met the wife told me they were going to live in the bottom apartment which is larger, and rent the upper one out. I spoke with her again on Saturday and she said they had changed their plans to live there. As she told me this she kept looking at the lower apartment as though she was afraid something was going to jump out the window. She told me she had very bad vibes about that place and didn't know why. They turn the lights off when they leave after cleaning up and I know the lights are off but sometimes late at night the light in the one bedroom is on. I never told her about what happened there and since they had just moved to Alaska, I doubt they know.

I have seen the lights come on at night and would think maybe it might be a homeless person who decided to try to sleep there, except for the fact that they had changed the locks and the doors haven't been broken into.

I often wonder, if this is the boy who committed suicide, why is he haunting my apartment? Is he drawn to us for some reason? Is he maybe searching for his mother and looks into my apartment lost and hoping she might be there? If so, who is calling my name? And why are all the other strange things happening?.. I guess there is no way to find out but I surely would like to know...