First Encounters

It really all began when our mother was a little girl, about eight or nine years old. The house she lived in was set back off the road with a distance of about fifty yards from the porch to the street. There was a light on the porch that cast light to about twenty feet out onto the yard, just about where their well was located. Once you passed the well, the yard was pitch black until you reached the streetlight on the street.

There were times when our mother had to walk to the store after dark and she would be terrified once she passed the well and had to cross the pitch-dark yard. One night she was crossing the patch of blackness when all of a sudden she felt like she was being picked up by two people on either side of her and flown down to the street. She remembered it as being a great sensation, but never knew who or what it was that carried her across the yard. This was the first, but certainly not the last experience our mother would have with the paranormal.

Later, when our mother was still young, her father became sick and she and her family moved into her grandmother’s house. “Ginny,” our mother’s cousin, lived there as well and she had a room close to our mother’s room. Many times at night Ginny would cry out for our mother to come sleep with her and she would say:  “It’s sitting on the dresser,” “It’s over by the closet,” “It’s sitting on the cedar chest.” Our mother didn’t see what Ginny saw but she could feel the presence in the room. Other people who have slept in that same room have had similar experiences, even to the extent of feeling someone touch them.

We don’t know whether the presences our mother encountered when she was young are a part of the ghosts that started haunting us in the 1960’s, but it is clear to us that our curious events stem from our mother’s side of the family!