The Things I've Seen

This all happened years ago.

My family had to move around a lot, to follow my dad because he was the breadwinner of the house. He kept finding new jobs in different cities and different towns across multiple states. Most of the time it was smaller towns.

One of the small towns I lived in was called Boonville, Missouri. It's a nice little town, small when I lived there but from what I've heard it's gotten a little bigger in the past few years. I was laying on my bed in the early evening. It was quiet outside, getting rather dark as there was a light cloud cover blocking even more sunlight. I forgot exactly what I was watching, but I was laying on my bed, watching TV. The calmness of the outside was lulling me into an early sleep for the night.

Then my bed shook.

It shook slightly for a few seconds, but that was it.

When it was done, I jumped to my feet and burst down the hall, telling my mom about the situation. We couldn't find much info about what it could have been. It wasn't until the next morning when I found out there was an earthquake a full state over. The freakiness really comes into play when I find out nothing else shook in the house. No TVs or knick knacks falling off the shelf. Just my bed.

I hadn't been that freaked out since something I saw when I lived in Tennessee.

A few years prior to the earthquake incident, I lived in a small hick town called Centerville in Tennessee. It was not a nice little town; rather it was an awful little town. From what I’ve gathered, it’s stayed little, apparently. It was a school night so I, a younger teenager with a bedtime much like everyone else my age, I had to be asleep soon, as it was later in the evening. Because of that, there was no TV on this time. Much like the aforementioned earthquake event I was laying in my bed on a calm evening, this time staring into a mirror attached to my dresser.

As I stared into my mirror, with my door shut and everyone else on the far side of the house, I started to hear voices. They were very quiet at first but as the seconds went on they started to get louder. I kept staring at the mirror as they grew louder. Louder and louder, until I couldn’t hear my own thoughts over the disjointed, mumbling cacophony.

With the voices at their loudest, I see something: a figure walking by and wearing brown, ragged clothes from what I could gather. I didn’t see a face, I didn’t see any distinguishing features, I just saw something walking by me in my room.

Within the reflection of the mirror.

The moment the figure walked out of the reflection, the voices immediately stopped. Pants somehow still clean, I got up and walked with an intense pace to my parents’ room and explain what happened. After calming me down, my mom tells me if I put a bible in my room it I would keep ghosts away. To this day, my mom remembers when I told her what I saw. And since then I’ve always tried to keep a bible somewhere in my room.

After a few days, I found out that a wounded Confederate soldier had apparently died on the property. He traveled to the town after a battle and passed away while trying to get to a well that the house was eventually built over.