My Experience with Ghosts

I think that I have always believed in ghosts, spirits, or whatever you would like to call them. It was always one of those things in life that I had just accepted as fact. The sky is blue, 2 + 2 = 4, the grass is green, and my paternal grandparents who died at least 5 years before my birth never visited me together because they hated each other. Or at least that’s what I told my mother at the age of 5 whenever our front door would randomly open and I would run to it and talk to one of them for a couple of minutes.

Let me clarify that I am not crazy. I feel weird having to state that because that is exactly what a crazy person would say. I’m not “psychic” or a “medium”, at least not I know of. I don’t do seances and I sure the hell don’t wander the graveyards looking for these ghosties.

They have no problem finding me on their own.

In this 5 part series of shorts I will describe different events that I personally have encountered and can remember without the help of my parents. I’m sure that they have “my weird child” stories of their own but lord knows that I can’t remember when I was 2-6 and what I said in detail that freaked them out. Perhaps if you like these stories I will include some of my mother’s later.

Part 1

I grew up in the small town pictured above. I don’t know what your idea of small is, but M is probably smaller. With a population of 1250, 2 gas stations, 5 Protestant/Baptist churches, and one lonely blinking red light serving as the only means to make sure people at least stopped while driving through, M takes up roughly a square mile of land in Central nowhere Oklahoma. The year was 1998 and I was somewhere between 14 and 15. My parents had separated two years before when my dad decided to chase a skirt to the Northeast. I wasn’t broken up about it, but my younger siblings were. My mom never complained but I knew that she missed the companionship, even what little he offered. We never heard much from him. He had hardly paid bills when he lived with us so my mom sure wasn’t getting anything from him when he wasn’t. So we thought that it was strange when we got a brown envelope from him one day in the mail postmarked Maryland. By this time mom had settled into the “eff that bastard” stage of separation so she had seen his name on it and tossed it at me. I shook it a couple of times and then opened it. Inside was a beautiful Native American necklace and a short letter. I was enamored with the necklace. It looked amazing with its rows of short horned beads leading to a center charm. The charm was the shape of a horseshoe made of delicate silver threads bent and wrapped delicately around a black stone. I loved it instantly and quickly put it on and of course had to admire it in the passenger seat mirror.

After turning my head left and right and admiring how it hung on me for the entire 5 minute drive home, my mom finally asked what the letter said. I had completely forgotten about the letter. So I pulled it off the dash and read it to her. This isn’t verbatim but it was a short letter and I hit the basics.

“Janice (my mom),

Inside this envelope is a necklace that belonged to friend of mine up here in DC. She was from Ada and after battling with cancer for several years she handed me this necklace last week, told me that she was about to die and asked me to get it as close to her hometown as possible since she knew that I was also from Oklahoma. I don’t plan on returning for the next couple of years so will you please take this to Ada and place it somewhere in the woods so that she can find her way home.

-CES”

My mom laughed. She, even with all of my weird kid stuff, still didn’t really believe in ghosts and superstitious stuff. She always chocked it all up to me being a creative with a wild imagination. She looked at the necklace and told me to keep it if I liked it because there’s no way in hell that she was driving 3 hours to Ada to drop off a necklace. He wouldn’t know if we did or not. So of course I kept it! It was gorgeous and I’m Native American so it wasn’t any type of appropriation for me to wear it around.

It didn’t start immediately. In fact, the first couple of weeks was just a bunch of weird dreams of some lady standing over my bed. I took that as a form of guilt manifesting into my dreams. It was when my bedroom door started to push half way open that it started freaking me out. Our house was old, but we had thick carpet and good heavy doors. There wasn’t a door in that house that the wind could blow open. When you opened the doors in this house they drug across the carpet and would make that distinctive carpet whoosh.

I was a light sleeper so when I heard my door knob release after being turned I would sit up in bed to my door being pushed half open. My bedroom was at the end of the hall and my mother left the bathroom light on for my younger brother and sister so there was always light in the hallway. I watched my door open and could see that there was nothing there acting on it. I didn’t feel threatened, it just startled me and I sure the hell wasn’t going to walk up and close it again. This happened practically every night for the next couple of weeks if I closed my door before going to bed. I had told my mom the first couple of time. Again, “wild imagination”, “it was probably your sister”, “you probably forgot to close it”, etc.

By this time I had stopped wearing necklace and had relegated it to my walkthrough closet where I kept it on a nail. I just didn’t feel comfortable wearing it anymore. It had been more than a month since we had gotten the package and my mom was getting pretty tired of me “trying to scare my brother and sister with ghost stories”. I hadn’t told them anything. They were telling her that they heard footsteps in the hallway that all of our doors were connected to.

I guess that our not doing anything had really started to piss the lady ghost off because after two weeks of my door opening and me not seeing anybody in the hall or doorway suddenly my door was opening to a short black figure standing there. I say black, but it was like their features were shadowed since the light was behind them. Waking up to a black figure staring in at you while you sleep is pretty scary and where it hadn’t felt threatening before now it was. You could feel the anger rolling off of it as it stood in my doorway and glared at me.

I screamed for my mom and she came running down the hallway but it disappeared. She thought that I was having a nightmare and told me that it’s be fine just to go back to sleep. Needless to say that I didn’t sleep well that night or the next. I remember that the night I first saw her was a Wednesday because by time I saw her for the third night in a row my mother had had enough.

It was Saturday morning when my mother rushed into the room and asked where the damn necklace was. I told her and she fetched it and put it in her pocket. She said “Get dressed. We are dropping your brother and sister off at granny’s house and going to the city. We are getting rid of this damn thing today.” I asked her what made her finally believe me and my siblings. She said that she had fallen asleep on the couch and had been shaken awake by a short Native woman leaning over her.

Like I said earlier, mom was never superstitious until that day.

We drove it to just outside Ada and pulled beside the highway. It was a lovely day with big blue skies, I walked to the tree line and hung it in the woods. I know that it wasn’t in Ada but it was as close as we were going to get. I hope that her spirit found peace at being brought home, even if it did take us awhile to get her there.