Souls Around The World October Blog Hop

Today is the first day of October and one of my favorite times of year!  My family loves Halloween and fall.  We decorate the house and yard.  The kids get to wear their costumes- that they have been excited about for months!  My husband gets to "inspect" the Halloween candy (meaning he eats more of it than the kids do).  It's honestly kind of funny that we love Halloween so much considering that the kids and I are afraid of the dark and I can't handle horror movies at all.  We do enjoy a good ghost story though.  Our DVR is full of Paranormal Witness, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Mine, Weird or What, and of course, Dead Files.  I re-read my Haunted Ohio books every fall (the best ghost stories EVER, go buy them).

Ghosts are something that we just accept as fact because to our family- they are.  I saw my first ghost when I was six or so years old.  My great grandma Wheeler had just passed away, literally, it was the middle of the night and we hadn't gotten the call yet but there she was sitting on my bed.  My nephew James had similar experiences when he was younger.  He was about five when his godfather died and my grandpa Baker passed.  James would see them everywhere and talk to them.  After his mom left his dad and moved on, he saw less of them which makes me believe that they were protective spirits, keeping him from harm.  I don't know if he still sees them now that he is ten.  My great Grandma Wheeler is a similar case for me.  When my eldest was very small (still a baby), I had a number of experiences that made me feel like she was still with me.  One Sunday, I had been up working on class work late the night before and just did not feel like going to church.  I was dressing the baby for the day and thinking about what to make for lunch when my husband came home from church.  All of the sudden, the mobile in the baby's room began to play.  It was an old style one that needed to be wound and no one had been near it for at least an hour.  It didn't just play a few notes either, it played the whole song.  It scared the crap out of me so I grabbed my keys and the diaper bag and we headed to church late.  Later, when we got home, we found out that the neighbors had had a knock down drag out fight and that the police had been called when one of them had stabbed the other- right outside our building's front door.  We could have walked right into it when I went to the store to get the groceries to make lunch.  A few months later, we moved across town to a townhouse in a better neighborhood with lots of kids.  I had a dream one night that my Great Grandma showed me her rosary on Eli's bedroom wall.  She didn't speak but kept pointing to where it hung on the wall.  It was black bead with a large chunky crucifix at the bottom.  I didn't recognize it as the rosary that my grandma kept by her bed that had been her mother's.  It nagged at me so the next time I saw my grandma, I told her about the dream.  She brought out a black beaded rosary with a heavy crucifix at the bottom.  The same one from my dream.  My great grandma had had two rosaries.  She had one that she used every day and one that she was given as a child by her mother.  The one that I saw in the dream was the one she had had as a child.  Grandma was sure that her mother wanted Eli to have it as a protection from something.  It hung on his bedroom wall until he was six and we moved into our current house.  It went missing in the move.  No one could find it as we packed the boxes.  I cried thinking that it was gone forever.  A year later, I emptied the very last box from the move and there was the rosary, at the very bottom of a box of books.  The night before I found it, I had prayed that it would turn up and that it wasn't lost forever.  Now, it hangs over my desk as a reminder of my great grandma and her love.  I know that she would love my husband and my kids and that she would appreciate all the work that I put into being a mom.  She was a wonderful woman who meant the world to me.

Our family also has had to deal with the other type of ghost.  The kind who comes with a home.  We live in a house that was built in 1878 as the main house on a farm.  The town grew up around the farm to the point that there is a barn behind the house and a large yard but no actual farm.  Our house itself has been sided so from the street it doesn't look its age but the foundation is all local sand stone that had been cut and laid by hand.  The basement is really more of a root cellar with a dirt floor.  Many of our floors tilt one way or another.  When we first moved in, we had a number of nights where I would have to get up and go wandering through the house to see which kid was out of bed only to find that the footsteps on the stairs hadn't been any of them since they were all still asleep.  One night I was writing blog posts late while the kids slept in their rooms.  I heard what sounded like marbles being dropped to the floor, the sound of bouncing and rolling.  I thought Cady was playing with the marbles from her dad's Chinese Checkers set so I called out to her to go back to bed.  Later, when I went to check that she really had gone back to bed and there were no marbles in the hall or on the floor in her room.  Confused, I asked my husband the next morning if he had seen the marbles recently.  He looked confused himself because he'd thrown them out weeks ago!  I felt like whoever was in the house just wanted to know that it was being cared for and that a family had been moved in.  So, one night, I told ... whoever... that they could stay as long as they stopped scaring me and the kids.  Since then, we haven't had nearly as many weird noises and the house still feels light and welcoming.

Do you believe in ghosts?  In other things that go bump in the night?  Are you like my husband who is a psychic null and can't see ghosts?  Do you have a ghostly story of your own?  Share in the comments and I will randomly pick one winner for a haunted prize pack!  Make sure to enter to win this hop's grand prize as well as check out all the other participating blogs!

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