For Lovers of the Supernatural, a Halloween Special

My Encounters with Ghosts and other Nasty Apparitions

Dear Friends, Fellow Writers and Readers,

I’m new here to Substack and still trying to figure out what all of you are interested in reading on this site. But I thought for Halloween you might enjoy this series of true life tales about the hauntings, ghosts, and demons I encountered growing up, and later when I had children of my own.

While I don’t ”intellectually” believe in ghosts and the supernatural, even while having experienced such, I cannot deny that the physical and psychic phenomena which I and others—indeed, all known cultures and societies—have laid claim to, are “real.” The reality they seem to have is unexplained, often unverifiable, and usually fleeting and ephemeral. And yet they persist in haunting humanity.

Throughout history, people whom we usually credit with intelligence and integrity have reported ghostly experiences, among them the psychologist Carl Jung, President Theodore Roosevelt, and Sir Winston Churchill, as well as a host of current well-known celebrities.

I can neither explain, verify, nor dismiss the reality of the experiences that I relate here. I can only state that these things occurred as I remember them, or as others I trust related them to me. And most were witnessed by more than one person.

I sent you the first in the series earlier this month which you can read at this link if you missed it, Growing Up in a Haunted House.

The second in the series is printed below. There are seven in all. If you enjoyed reading the first two, please let me know and I’ll publish the rest here. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll move on to another topic.

Thank you all for your support. I love being here and interacting with you, and reading your newsletters. My little stack is growing, slowly, and I am so grateful.

Happy Halloween!

True Ghost Stories, Part II - Attack of the Poltergeist

It’s a blessing I think now that I never knew as a child that the woman whose blood stained my bedroom floor had been murdered there, or that the man who murdered her, her husband, had hung himself from the rafters of our garage.

It’s a blessing I never knew when I covered my head at night to sleep, feeling that if I did so I would be safe, that someone or something lumbered across my bedroom floor, waking and terrifying my parents who slept in the room below mine.

It’s a blessing I never knew the power of the cold entity that inhabited the small room next to mine where I sometimes played.

Since starting this series, I’ve done some research on spooks and hauntings and all thing supernatural. I discovered that ghosts are entities that are attached to a particular place and can make appearances, can even be heard laughing or crying or running up and down stairs. But they cannot toss things about the room or physically touch and harm humans. The more physically violent supernatural beings are called poltergeists.

That’s what my mother encountered shortly before we fled from our home. We had already decided to move when my mother entered the small room upstairs that had been used for storage because it was “too cold” for human habitation. She was trying to move boxes out of the room when something unseen attacked her.  It threw her to the floor and pinned her down so she could not move. All she could do is scream for help.

Unfortunately, the only person at home at the time to help her was my three-year-old brother. But he came when she called him. She told him to grab her feet, which fortunately lay near the doorway, and to pull her out. Slowly, inch by inch, he was able to pull enough of her into the hallway so that whatever was holding her down lost its power, and she was able to get up. Never to enter that room again.

We never knew if it was the murdered woman that stalked my bedroom at night, or the ghost of her murderous husband who did so. Nor did we know who or what had knocked my mother to the floor and held her there.

But it wasn’t the last encounter my mother had with a ghostly being.

Many years later she was visited in the middle of the night by a crying woman, someone she knew and loved, but whom, unknown to her, had died that evening. Someone who tried desperately to enter into my mother’s body, because she was not ready to leave this world.

This grieving woman was her mother-in-law. When she could not inhabit my mother’s body, she found another relative more inclined to help her.

More about that next time.

This is Part II of an ongoing series of true life ghost stories, experienced either by me or by people I trusted. Part I can be read here.

If you would like to read the rest of the series, please let me know and I will publish them here. Otherwise, I’ll move on to a new topic.

If you’ve had any ghostly or supernatural encounters, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Hope you have a gloriously spooky Halloween!