Category — Spiritual & Supernatural

Am I a cynic? Just fiercely independent? Do I need empirical evidence to have faith in something? That hardly makes it faith, now does it?

I think there is a little truth to the former two and little truth to the latter. I’ve never been much of an evidence kind of person. Logic isn’t really my friend. I’m much more prone to flights of fancy and imaginative dalliances than to realism and logic.

I actually believe in just about everything. Unless it has been proven false, I always stay open to the fact that it might be true. (Except for Scientology. That’s just whack).

But there are days when I wish I wasn’t just open to the possibility. There are days when I wish that I was staunch in my belief that there is something better beyond all of this, that there is some great force to fall back on. Some days, people who blindly believe in some God’s awesome power, and a complementary purpose for their lives, seem nonsensical to me. Other days, these people just seem enviably more content.

Okay, not really. But I do like the idea of prayer, which I really think of more as meditation than as an actual shout out to some distant deity. I guess I don’t really take enough time in my life for this kind of internal silence. I should. I like silence. I crave silence. I should seek the silence that prayer (i.e. meditation) can offer. I do yearn for answers too, though, and I fear going internal, I guess, because I fear being denied answers, and then feeling more lost than I was before.

I think I may be my own roadblock to inner peace.

Most Haunted is still on. New episodes still air on the Travel Channel on Friday nights. But I never watch it anymore. Because it’s never scary anymore.

Why isn’t Most Haunted scary anymore?

See, I don’t want to believe that Most Haunted is staged. I want to believe that some shit happens, because I believe that some shit happens, but I don’t believe that some shit happens on Most Haunted. Not anymore.

They are failing to frighten, and that makes me very sad.

It used to be, on Friday nights, at ten p.m., I could curl up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn that would at some point go flying into the air. Now, I see the commercials for it and I want to throw kernels at the TV screen.

The world is so unfair.

And now back to the regularly scheduled ghost talk.

When we lived in Florida, I worked second shift from 3 pm to 1:30 am four days a week, also known as ‘the heavenly schedule’.

One night, as I was driving home from work, a car was riding right on my back bumper. It stayed on my back bumper for a few miles down the interstate, got off at my exit with me, followed me all the way down my road. The entire time that this car was there, they were close enough to me that I couldn’t see their headlights, just the light from them reflecting off the back of my car and making it impossible to see anything behind me. When I finally turned into my apartment complex, I looked in the rearview to make sure the car didn’t continue to follow me into the complex, only to find… there was no car. The lights that were behind me were gone and there was no car to be found.

Now, that would have been enough. But, when I finally pulled into my parking space, and got ready to get out of my car, I looked up toward the building first, just to be safe. It was, after all, the middle of the night. There was a young guy, wearing all white with light blonde hair standing in the breezeway. As I looked up at him, he stepped behind one of the pillars and disappeared from view. I was actually afraid to get out of my car, because I had to walk right past said pillar to go up to my apartment. When I did get out, I had my key firmly in fist, ready to take out someone’s eye if necessary. I approached the pillar slowly and peeped around it.

No one. There wasn’t a soul. And there was nowhere that a person could have disappeared to.

Now, that schedule did lend to sleep deprivation, so it’s possible I was seventy-five percent asleep when this all occurred, but I remember it vividly to this day.

Real or the hallucinations of an over-tired mind? Who’s to say?

It seemed real enough at the time.

Fuckhead, the bad Tennessee ghost, did things like making truly frightening noises and lurking in the doorway at night when we were trying to sleep.

Michael, on the other hand, was merely a prankster. Like the day that I was talking to Shawna in the kitchen while doing dishes, turned around to say something to her, turned back to the sink, and walked directly into the, now opened, cabinet door. That was a hoot and holler.

Then, there was the day that Michael played hero. Here’s how.

Shawna was home alone, upstairs, working diligently at her computer. She had put something into the toaster oven to heat up for her lunch and taken the timer upstairs. There was plenty of time left on it.

It had been a few minutes since she’d left the kitchen when the noises started. Loud noises, like slamming and banging, so loud and so frequent that she actually got up and went to check, thinking that someone might have come inside or was trying to.

When she got to the kitchen, the foil covering the toaster tray had caught fire. The kitchen was filled with smoke.

Would the place have caught fire in earnest, burned down? Who knows?

Michael didn’t let it.