Haunted Happenings at the House

Of late, the House of the Burning Prairie has been a veritable hotbed of ghostly activity. OK, not exactly a hotbed, but it has been rather active. And in some new areas.

The master bedroom has been the site of some paranormal goings-on. A bit of background-I can’t sleep in a bed right now on a account of something went wrong with my hip (bursitis, meh) and because, apparently, I snore like a buzz-saw. Of course I’ve never heard this snoring of which Hubby speaks, so I’ll just have to take his word for it. But the result is I sleep on the chaise in the den so I can remain in a partially upright position to take the pressure off the ol’ hip and to not disturb anyone else with the snoring. Eventually I want to get one of those Tempurpedic mattresses, but I digress.

In the past several weeks, Hubby has seen some apparitions in there. Once he woke from a dream convinced that Pumpkin, our 3-yr old, was standing by the side of the bed. He lurched up out of bed and stumbled over to her, thinking something was wrong, but she wasn’t there and was, in fact, still sleeping soundly in her crib. Then one restless night, he glanced over to the same area of the room (right in front of the master bath door) only to see a man-tall solid black presence just standing. Right. There.

He was completely spooked both times and came to tell me about it. As some of you may or may not know, I have seen the little apparition with my own eyes. While I was fully awake and standing up, and folding laundry, the toddler-size form floated into the room, “stood” in front of me and then slowly disappeared. It is about the height of Pumpkin, so I think this is what Hubby saw the first time, as for the dark thing, I don’t know.

And we have seen some things that others would call poltergeist activity. We had an infant car seat for Pumpkin, the kind with the pull-out infant carrier and since we’re lame, we left it in the den when she out-grew it. She’s quite the naughty little toddler, and we used it to block off one of her escape routes. We are also so lame that we left one of those little hanging baby toys hanging from the handle. One evening, Hubby and I were sitting on the couch when he said, “Oh my god!” I looked over at him and he was pointing at the infant carrier. Then I looked over at the carrier, the little toy was swinging back and forth by itself. What Hubby “OMG”-ed over? He saw it start, he was looking right at the thing when he saw it pulled forward, as if by an invisible hand, and released to start swinging. Just in case you were wondering, Hubby absolutely does not believe in the paranormal. Not that I do, or anything, mind you.

Small objects also tend to be found in unlikely places, places where we don’t put them. I suppose some of that could be blamed on two very naughty and inventive kids. But I saw something yesterday that cannot be explained away.

After dinner (hummus and tabouli), Pumpkin decided she’d seen enough of me for a while and went off to bother, I mean play with, her daddy. Hubby was in the bedroom playing with his computer, I mean working on stuff, when she went in there. I followed her and she told me, “Mama, you need to get out of here.” So summarily dismissed by a baby, I left. That was o.k., Monkey wanted to talk about his day at school.

It seems that there is a rather troublesome kid in his class. Yesterday Troublesome Kid, or T.K., told Monkey that the teacher said he (Monkey) was supposed to go to time-out. So Monkey dutifully asked the teacher and she said No, she didn’t want him in time-out. Guess who I think belongs in time-out? Anyway, I was telling Monkey about my own experiences with a T.K. when I was a kid. Monkey was sitting right in front of me the whole time, I didn’t take my eyes off him until I saw a slight movement out of the corner of my eye.

Pumpkin has a play kitchen, complete with pots and pans and six thousand (I exaggerate) little plastic pieces of play food, including play sushi! Well, as Monkey and I were talking, one of those little pieces of play food rolled into the room from out in the hall. It was the little tomato, which is not perfectly round, though it did roll as if it were. It looked as if someone had rolled it into the room from the front hall.

I picked it up, expecting it to feel too cold or too hot or have a slight electrical charge, but it felt perfectly normal. I could still hear Hubby and Pumpkin back off in the bedroom playing. I walked back and asked Hubby if either of them had left. They’d both been back there the whole time. We tried to come up with a logical explanation. Hubby, security-minded as always, checked all the doors and windows. Then we asked Monkey if he had seen what happened. He told us that he saw the little tomato under the couch when he was looking for another toy earlier. Hubby asked him if he could’ve kicked the thing out from under the couch, but that isn’t possible because I was sitting on the couch in question and hadn’t seen him do anything like that. And even if he had accidentally kicked it, how then did it roll in from the other room?

I also find it very interesting that something manifested itself when Monkey and I were talking about bullies. I was telling him that there will always be a T.K., I even had one of my own. And I told him about one of the times when my T.K. made me feel so scared that I didn’t want to go back to school. I could still feel an echo of that fear as I told the story. Then the tomato rolled in.

While I don’t have a personal theory about poltergeist activity, I do have one about hauntings. As I’ve said before, after someone passes away, surely he or she has better things to do than hang around in my kitchen. I do not for one minute think that the earth is populated not just with living people, but also with the spirits of the dead. That could get crowded.

There is speculation that hauntings are simply tears in the space-time continuum. This sounds reasonable. If some kind of traumatic event occurs-suicide, murder, battle-the violence inherent in the event rips at space-time. Then what we see are not spirits, but actual glimpses of the past. Or the future. But what about the non-traumas, the ghosts that haunt houses for no discernible reason? Place memory goes a long way towards an explanation.

How can a place have a memory you might ask. Well, I think, to a certain degree, some buildings are alive. Have you ever loved a house and then lavished that love, and time, and effort, on that house? Did that house seem happy? Have you ever seen a well-cared for, but empty, house? Did it seem sad, even though the yard was mowed and there was fresh paint on the outside? Maybe houses, and other buildings, are alive with spirits we invest in them. If a house or office building serves its purpose well, keeping people and possessions safe and comfortable, then it will be happy. But what of run-down buildings? I’ve often wondered which comes first–do people stop loving a building because it falls into disrepair or does the building fall into disrepair because people have stopped loving it?

And since something has to be alive to have a memory, that explains why hospitals don’t report a rash of hauntings even though lots of people die in them. Nobody loves a hospital, even when it’s doing its job, so hospitals never get invested with a spirit.

What if my silly, repairs-in-progress house remembers the other people who loved it? And it’s just showing us its memories, like someone playing slides from his latest vacation? I like that.

But that still doesn’t explain the tomato.