More Stories From the "Other Side"

I Am Not Alone Luckily, the people in my life are just as spirit prone as I am. The following stories I either witnessed or participated in or were told to me. On some, I'm sure I'm not 100% sure of all the details but I will try to be as accurate as possible. The Haint Yes, that is haint, not haunt. I refer to it as an ancient Appalachian word and possibly no one outside of Appalachia has heard this before. A haint is a banshee-like creature, mostly myth and folklore. Redneckin' Dictionary of Common Terms refers to it as an "archiac rural for spooks, ghosts." I stand by the opinion that it is more banshee like. My friend G.G. lived off a holler, off a holler, off a holler (that's hollow for you city folk) and before I ever came to know them, they had a haint. This haint would cry and wail at night time and stalk around their house. One night, her Uncle Jinks and her grandfather Tex rounded it up under the house and shut it up inside. She said the floorboards of their house rattled as it pitched and fought to get free. It raised quite a stink and she said every hair on her body stood at attention. It eventually fought its way free, how I'll never know, and eventually it left. Some folks believe a haint is actually your conscience. When you have a bad conscience the haint will follow you. I have a different theory of this particular haint, which I will relate next. The Indians One day I was sitting on G.G.'s porch enjoying whatever breeze would blow out of the mountains. Over a period of time, G.G's mom had been telling me about growing up in the area and how different it was now. She said G.G. should take me up past the old horse barn to where they had bulldozed to see if we could find any arrowheads as they had found a lot when it was first cut. That thought was far from my mind until I happen to look across the road and into the mountain. It wasn't the same mountain anymore. It was brushier, the road was gone and the creek ran differently. Coming down a small footpath was a tribe of indians. They walked single file carrying packs. I watched as long as I could and when I blinked the vision was gone. I realized then that the house was probably built on or very near an Indian burial ground. Certainly Indians had lived in that area as evidenced by finding all of the arrowheads. That would certainly explain, not just the haint, but the other odd occurrences that kept cropping up around there. Footsteps One night while at G.G.'s I left her bedroom and went to use the bathroom which was directly off the kitchen. G.G.'s house had wood floors that creaked so you knew when someone was up and about. I had just sat down to use the bathroom when I heard the footsteps come through the house. I figured G.G. was lying in wait to scare me. When I came out of the bathroom I looked quickly left and right. The front door was directly to my right and a countertop. Nothing. I stealthed my way through the rest of the house, checking darkened doorways to find, nothing. When I got back to the bedroom, G.G. was laying in the bed and I looked at her oddly. I asked if she had come through the house. She said no, that she thought it was me. Then we accused each other of playing a trick on the other one then decided, "We're not alone." She got her gun and we searched every corner of that house. Her mom was in the far back bedroom, fast asleep. Whoever it was had walked through the house behind me and then through the front door, well, without opening the door of course. That still gives me chills. I always suspected that it was Pa-Pa Tex, who had died the same year I was born. A friend helped in confirming this. The Walk-Through A girlfriend of mine in college could actually see ghosts and offered to come out to G.G.'s house to wander through and see what she could see and what energies she picked up. Needless to say, they weren't good. She described the feeling that she was not wanted there and that something very evil lurked about. She said "the man in the kitchen" kept watch over these spirits and kept them at bay. She described him in grey work pants, an old plaid red shirt with old black thick-framed glasses. There are no pictures of Pa-Pa Tex anywhere in that house, except photo albums, yet she described him perfectly from the pictures that I had seen. Further, Bek, had recurring dreams for most of her childhood and young adult life about the very road that we traveled and the house that G.G. lived in. She stopped having the dream about the time that G.G. and I became friends and I began traveling the road. Ivy Ivy was my big chocolate Lab who I tried to take everywhere with me. She and Bek made another trip to G.G.'s but this time they stayed in the car while I went in to get some things I had forgotten. G.G. was working out of town and happened to call while I was there. I went to stand at the kitchen door and waved to them then moved away to hang the phone up. I heard Ivy pitch a fit. She didn't normally do that when I left her sight as she was trained not to. (She was a Search and Rescue dog at the time.) When I went out to the car, Bek asked who had been there with me. I told her just me and G.G.'s mom. She asked if Uncle Jinks was there and I told her no. She said the reason Ivy started barking was because once I stepped away a man came to the door, looked out, waved and then walked away. Pa-Pa Tex again. AZ AZ knows what kind of beliefs I have as I have written him several times about my experiences. He's never offered much back until one day on the phone he said, "I had visitors last night." I asked who and he told me he had no idea but they wouldn't let him sleep. Oh, those kinds of visitors. He related that he had laid down to sleep and kept hearing thumps in his kitchen. When he got up and turned the light on they stopped. This went back and forth a few times until AZ got his gun and actually went into the kitchen. Now, the thought of AZ carrying a gun around looking for spirits in his underwear was just funny. I asked him what he thought he was going to do with the gun. He told me he didn't know but they shut up and left him alone. I told him it was probably because they were laughing so hard. I said, "next time, just let them know that you hear them, thank them for coming and tell them you need to get some sleep." The Bible and the Deer Before my grandparents died, I recieved signs that their time was near. This is my mother's parents, who I was closer to than my dad's parents. Before my Ma-Ma died, I had been to see her in the hospital when she had her dialysis shunt implanted. When I walked into the room, my Pa-Pa was sitting on the bed with her, holding her hand and they were both crying. I visited for a bit, talked to the nurses and left. I got turned around in the hospital and ended up in the chapel. I walked over to the Bible, moved all the change off of it, closed it, opened it and stuck my finger down while thinking about my grandmother. I read the passage. It spoke of taking someone to the mountains so the angels could carry them into heaven. She died three months later. On Christmas Day 2003, I went to visit my Pa-Pa as I had missed the big family gathering the night before. As we sat in his kitchen, I saw a doe come out of the woods and down the hill. Pa-Pa moved from window to window, telling me how she would come out of the woods at the bottom of the hill, cross the dirt road, go through the neighbor's yard and up the other mountain. We stepped out onto their sunporch, the one from my meditation yesterday, to watch. The doe did not go across the road. She turned and came up the driveway, then onto the bank, until she was less than five feet from us. My Pa-Pa was talking about what a sassy deer that was. I had tears in my eyes because I knew it was not just any deer. I knew it was, well, my Ma-Ma. Her spirit or something. It was her way of telling me that she was never far and she would return for him soon. He died four months later. The T.V. One day, Hyper-Boy, his half-sister Aim, and her mom, Lori, and I were out running around and had come back to my place. The kids had been really good but they were starting to get a little loud and I thought that maybe I should turn the TV for distraction. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind, the TV turned on. Lori looked over at me and said, "I hate it when you do that." But I didn't do anything, I just thought about it and someone happened to be walking past and turned it on. (The remote was lost in the attic for the first three years I lived here and it still doesn't have batteries in it.) The Planes On September 10, 2001, Drunk Boyfriend and I had just gotten into the bed when the sound of jet engines rushed between my house and the nabes next door. It rattled the windows and shook the water in the waterbed. DB jumped up and ran outside. He said the night was as still as could be, not a cloud nor plane in the sky. We all know what happened September 11th. DB called me at work and he brought up the odd sound we had heard the night before. He said, "do you realize that maybe what we heard last night was the last thing that some of those people heard in the WTC?" I didn't want to think about it. I would have passed that off to coincidence did it not happen again. The night of January 31, 2003, I had a similar experience. The next day, the space shuttle Columbia disentegrated on re-entry. I had a false alarm earlier this year. Let's hope another sign like that, never comes true. Thanks for reading everyone. I'm going to take a few days off and catch up on reading blogs, my regulars and some new ones. I'll also be updating my links. When I return, I'll be posting about a question my mother asked me about spirits and awareness of things around us. In the meantime, remember, "when the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up, its them."