We've Got Spirits, Yes We Do!

by Susan Griffin

Do you believe in ghosts? Would your answer change if you witnessed firsthand odd occurrences that you just couldn't explain?

I have always believed in ghosts because of the things I saw and heard firsthand when I was young. The following incidents really did happen to me between the ages of five and fifteen. I won't lie and say I miss the Spirits that used to pull these mischievous pranks. I am glad to be ghost-free now; it's just so much less scary that way!

My parents and I lived in a trailer until I was six. One night I woke up in the wee hours to a scraping noise. Now, we lived in a tiny metal trailer, so scraping wasn't so strange. I was used to the trees outside scraping against the roof and sides of the trailer when the wind blew. But this scraping was different.

It was coming from inside the house.

So I looked over to the door of my room, which we always left open at night for better air circulation. And as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I didn't see anything outside my door. But the scraping noise was coming from the small storage area to the right of my room. And it started getting louder.

Then I saw one end of a brown extension cord float by my open door. It was about as high up as if someone had thrown it over their shoulder and was dragging it along behind them.

Except that nobody was doing that.

It was floating in mid-air, moving along at a leisurely pace, toward the living room and the front door.

Then I heard the front door open and then the screen door. When I heard them both close, I waited as long as I could before I sprang from my bed and ran through the living room into my parents' bedroom. They were sound asleep and barely even woke up as I told them what happened as best as I could with my limited vocabulary.

I was somewhat put off that they wouldn't even get up to check things out.

So I went back to bed.

But I didn't sleep anymore that night.

The floating extension cord wasn't the only strange thing about life on that property. There was also the sinkhole. Nobody really knew what caused it; my dad just kept dumping truckload after truckload of dirt into it since we all played around there. Since my dad was helping build a new house for us on the property, he just put all the dirt from the grading they did on the lot. At first everyone suspected that maybe the sinkhole was an old well. But as the truckloads of dirt added up, we all kind of realized that nobody's well was that deep.

Except Satan's.

So my friends and I decided it was the gates to Hell. And even though years later my dad finally filled it up for the last time, it still seems that it could open right back up at any moment.

My dad had another theory about the sinkhole.

He blamed the Native Americans.

He was convinced that he had disturbed a burial ground somehow when he started cultivating the land we lived on. This was not too farfetched; we found lots of arrowheads and Native American implements in the yard all the time. And as he was building the house, he used rocks that he found out in the woods to build an amazing stone fireplace in the family room. A couple of these rocks had Indian markings on them. But since they were huge and cemented in to the wall already, he felt there was nothing he could do.

And he didn't make any changes to the house.

But the Spirits of the Native Americans did.

After my parents got divorced in early 1980, the Spirits started announcing their presence in bolder and bolder ways. Other than the sinkhole and electrical cord, things had been pretty normal. But after my mom and I moved out, things got a little out of control.

I heard recounts of the Spirits' shenanigans every other weekend when I visited my father: They stole my father's guns. He would open his wallet to find that everything was in it backward. Things would be left in one location only to end up in another location. The stories continued for years.

I didn't really believe in it all. I mean, my dad could have simply misplaced his stuff. I don't have an explanation for the wallet, but I am sure there was a rational one. I figured until I witnessed something firsthand, I would not believe the hype.

And so the Spirits said, "Okay. Let us show you what we've got."

Sometimes I would hear music playing out of nowhere. Which is odd if the Spirits were Native Americans because this sounded like harpsichord music. Sometimes it was like a string quartet. I don't know enough about music to know what particular piece of music it was. It was always very faint and would kind of come and go but was most common in the living room.

Once I woke up in the night to the sound of a man and woman screaming. The voices sounded like they were coming from outside my window, but when I got the courage to look nobody was there. It didn't help that by the time I got to the window the screams sounded like they were coming from the heat vent in the room. It was very common for a sound to change direction as I tried to pinpoint its location. This phenomenon was also very, very creepy to me and usually ended up with me in bed with the covers up over my head.

With me, the Spirits seemed to like the night. On another visit to Dad's, I woke up in the night to hear the kitchen cabinets opening and closing. Pans were clanging together; I thought my dad had decided to do a late-night banquet, but I couldn't see any lights on, which was unusual. So I crept to the door of my bedroom and looked down the hall toward the kitchen. It was pitch black. And the nanosecond I peeked out from my doorway, the noises stopped dead. I ran to my bed and dove under the covers. Fortunately nothing got me.

But the time that I really got scared was much more mundane than all those glitzy stories.

One night, my dad, my future stepmother, and I decided to put a puzzle together. We wanted to watch the football game while we did it, so we moved the breakfast table into the living room. Except for a couple of bathroom breaks, none of us left the living room that evening.

Yet when we finished the puzzle, one piece was missing.

The very last piece should have been right in the middle of the puzzle and its absence was glaringly obvious. We searched everywhere in the living room for the missing piece. We retraced our steps to the bathroom. We looked in our cuffs and pockets. We searched the kitchen.

When we went to bed, it was without the missing piece in the puzzle. But we left it set up in the living room on the table because it was late when we stopped searching for the missing piece.

As you can probably guess, the puzzle was finished the next morning.

I don't know where the piece came from. All three of us swore we didn't put it there after the others were asleep.

My dad laughed until he cried.

I didn't laugh or cry, but always made sure to sleep with my bathroom light on in that house from that moment forward. And while the Spirits seemed to calm down over the years, I suspect they are very much like that old sinkhole:

Ready to drop in on us at any moment...