Ghost Magnet

My earliest memory of anything ghostly was when I was about 3 or 4 years old. We’d just moved into a house with an “oddity” in the bathroom: the sink’s cold-water tap would turn on by itself. I remember it being the cold tap because I had just learned what the red and blue dots on the handles meant.

But here’s the thing – this weirdness only happened when I was in the bathroom by myself. I don’t remember being frightened, but I do remember how irritated my mom started getting when I kept bugging her about it. (“You’re telling stories again, Cindy!”)

The next instance happened several years later when I was in elementary school. We had moved yet again, and I’d finally had a room to myself—or so I thought. After about a week of settling into our new residence, “something” started sitting on the end of my bed at night.

On several occasions, I distinctly felt the end of my mattress dip down, as if an adult had come in to check on me and decided to have a seat on my bed. I got the nerve to open my eyes just enough to see who—or what—it was, but there was never anything there.

Once again, my mom brushed it off, claiming it was “just my imagination.”

After a few weeks, however, Mom abruptly moved me out of that small, dark room at the end of the hallway and into the loft bedroom with my sister. She never did tell me why. “I don’t like that room,” was all she would say. I’m pretty sure she saw or felt something as well, because that room was closed up and remained unused the rest of the time we lived there.

There have been quite a few other occurrences throughout my life, including an encounter with the angry ghost of a young girl killed in a car accident and being kept awake at night by the mischievous spirits of Wild West hookers in an old hotel, but my most memorable experience happened during my late twenties.

Shortly after I had my daughter, I lived in a very old house haunted by the ghost of a woman who had died falling down the narrow, treacherous attic stairway. I would hear her walking back and forth across the attic floorboards in her button-top boots, and she liked to follow me around as I did my housework. I always knew when she was around when I got an odd, chilly sensation on my skin that I can only describe as the feeling you get when sprayed with a spray bottle of cold water.

Over thirty years later, my daughter and I lived with an entity we called Blackie.

Blackie liked to move things, pester my cats, and manifests occasionally as a large, smoky shadow in the shape of a question mark. I could sense his/her/its presence in my room at night.

Blackie was with us pretty much since my daughter and I moved into that residence in 1994. He/she/it came and went, but we could pretty much count on a “happening” every few weeks or so. It was a little unsettling right at first, but Blackie never harmed us.

As far as any sort of ghost hunting or exploring, my late sister, who was also sensitive, did a sort of mini-investigation into the supposedly haunted bedroom of another relative. Not much happened, but the pendulum I was using to attempt contact did start swinging wildly at one point.

So I guess you could say I’m a bit of a ghost magnet, huh? Yeah, it makes life interesting, to say the least, but I rarely discuss these events unless I’m in the company of like-minded people.

As for what I’d say to someone experiencing their first haunting, my advice would be to educate yourself on the subject as much as possible, try to keep a level head and open mind, and remember that ghosts are rarely, if ever, dangerous.