Friday the 13th...... a full moon.......... a coyote howls in the distance........ you hear the sound of footsteps in the dark. The hair on the back of your neck stands up and causes your heart to skip a beat. Your ears strain for even the faintest of noise. Your eyes stare into the pitch black darkness trying to catch a glimpse of any shadow that moves........ and you wonder if you're brave enough to get out of bed to turn on a light. Is it an apparition or your imagination???
About a month ago I wrote about the odd night-time occurrences we have been experiencing in our home here. It hasn't been our first encounter with the strange and unusual though. My parents lived in a house several years back which had some rather..... puzzling... things happen as well.
When my parents moved into their home, my mother being the rather meticulous unpacker, would only allow one box to be unpacked at a time so she could carefully choose the spot where each item was to be placed. (Yes, it took a while to unpack.) The house had a built-in glass display cabinet, which was the perfect place of distinction for her china figurines. She carefully chose the perfect spot in the cabinet for each one of her treasures.
After they finished unpacking and settled in, some odd things began happening. It started out innocent enough one morning. She and my dad woke up to find her favorite china figurine, a rather large piece, moved from the display cabinet.
Now I'm not talking about having been moved an inch or two, or even swapping places in the cabinet with another piece. This piece was actually removed from the cabinet in the formal living room and placed on a sofa table in the family room quite some distance away. My parents blamed each other as my mother put the figurine back in the display cabinet.
This happened multiple times over the course of the next 6 months or so. My mom was sure my dad was doing it as some form of prank since it always happened at night after she'd gone to bed. After many months of this happening, my mom finally had had enough. She really read the riot act to my father over his prank and told him to knock it off.
He looked at her quite astounded and said he thought she'd been doing it. He gave her his word he wasn't touching the piece. She still didn't quite believe him....... until my dad, a commercial airline pilot, left to go on an overseas trip.
The second morning after he'd been gone, my mother awoke to the figurine moved from the living room cabinet to the sofa table in the family room. It didn't take long before I was on the receiving end of an early morning telephone call from my rather disconcerted mother. "I think we have a ghost in this house......... and I don't think it likes my decorating.".
When dad got home from his trip, mom told him about it happening again while he was away. He laughed and told her that maybe she should just leave the figurine where the ghost moved it.
As time went by they got used to things being moved every now and again. They decided there was really nothing to get too worked up over ....... until several months later. My dad was again on another trip when I got a somewhat frantic phone call from my mom that the ice maker to the refrigerator quit working.
This was a problem. They were about to host a pretty good sized party and a broken ice maker would pose a huge problem. My husband and I quickly drove over and worked on the ice maker and could find nothing wrong.
We tried to pull the refrigerator away from the wall, but this was an older style refrigerator and it was a beast. Even with the 3 of us, we couldn't budge it. There was no help for it, mom was going to have to call in a repairman.
The repairmen arrived the very next morning and checked everything we had already gone over. It took 3 very strong men, and a lot of huffing and puffing, to move that refrigerator out from the wall. What they discovered was very unnerving.
Someone (or something) had completely turned off the water supply line to the ice maker. The repairmen all said there was no way my dad could have done that by himself. They also dispelled the notion that maybe it was never turned on properly and had, by a fluke, worked all these months. Nope, it wasn't possible they said. Apparently the spook of this house didn't like parties.
When my dad got home from his trip, we told him what happened. He agreed that something other-worldly was happening here and admitted to not telling about other odd occurrences which had been happening in the house.
Apparently, he had been hearing a cat meowing in the garage on and off for a number of weeks. He had been out to investigate multiple times in an effort to shoo away the four-legged foe before it could get into anything. He had looked everywhere and tried to follow the sound of its cries, but he never could find it or evidence it was ever in the garage.
And then came the night of the party. That's when we found out that one of the previous owners of the home had been crazy about her cat. As in creepy-crazy. While she was away on a trip, she instructed her pet sitter that if anything should happen to her cat, they were to place the animal's remains in the garage freezer so she could take care of it when she returned.
We also learned the house was the woman's favorite home and she had not wanted to move away. And the story got even weirder when they said she committed suicide after being forced to move out of state and that her one wish was to be able to go back to her favorite home......... and we're all guessing she did.
It wasn't long after that when my parents decided that moving out to the country would be a fine idea..........
Written by Christie Bielss
"Patience is a virtue". How I hate that phrase. Whenever someone says it, all I want to do is scream "HELLO?!! I'm a redhead! I have ZERO patience!". There have been so many times in my life when I have wished God had gifted me with patience, but, for whatever reason, He didn't.
Since patience seems like it could be something you can pattern into your psyche, I made the decision to try and practice it when I'd rather scream and rant. I figured it may not take completely but if I could knock my stress level down a notch or two, that could be considered a moral victory. I'm pretty sure God, having a great sense of humor, said "Yeah, right! Let's see how committed you really are!" and immediately tested my level of commitment within moments of me making that proclamation.
My daughter and I were in the car headed up to the grocery store to restock my pantry since my son has been eating us out of house and home. Driving around our city on a good day can be aggravating with our great diversity of horrendously bad drivers on the road, but during the holidays it seems like these people drive even worse (if that's even possible) and there seem to be lots more of them. When you combine these terrible drivers with all of the out-of-town drivers who don't know their way around, it's a recipe for serious aggravation and road rage.
So, as we were making our way down a multi-lane road, we kept having to go around drivers who were doing 25mph in 40mph+ speed zones. My jaw was set as I was determined to just go about my errand and not be cranky. Apparently I wasn't doing that great of a job controlling my aggravation since my daughter patted my hand and said "Hmmmm, there seem to be a lot of slow drivers out today Mom. We'll get there".
Not sure how many times I've said those last 3 words to my daughter when she's running full-tilt to get to something she's excited about, but it sure does stink having it spit back at you. I inhaled deeply and forced myself to relax. We finally made it to the stoplight where we turn right.......... and sitting smack-dab in front of me is an out-of-stater who is wanting to go straight....... in the right turn only lane.
Grrrrrrrrr!!!!! I started thinking "Christmas spirit........... Christmas spirit............ Christmas spirit.........". I guess I was thinking it so hard, I actually said it out loud. My daughter looked at me and started cracking up. She then leaned over and kissed my hand and started rubbing my shoulder as she said "That's right Mom! Smile and get the Christmas spirit! At some point the light will change and then somebody from the other lane will run him off the road as he tries to weasel his way in from the wrong lane. See! Happy place!".
Now she had me laughing since that was pretty darn close to what I was thinking! The light finally changed and as we (and 20 cars stuck behind us) turned right, we could hear the cars honking with great gusto at the person who had been in front of us as they did the bumper shuffle to see who would let the out-of-stater into their lane. We giggled to ourselves as we made our way up to the next stop light so we could turn into the grocery store. This time though we were turning left.
As the light changed and we started turning, out of nowhere the car from the middle lane decides that he needs to grocery shop and nearly side-swipes us in his zeal to replenish his milk and bread reserves. As I laid on my car's horn and expertly dodged this moron's vehicle, my daughter yells at the other driver "Hey! You can't turn from there! Can't you read?!"
Laughing hysterically, I looked over at my daughter and patted her hand as I said "Christmas spirit, dear! Christmas spirit!". She smiled broadly as she said "Not when it's on my side, Mom!"........
Christie Bielss
Police officers and security experts tell you it's dangerous to meet people online and it is something you should avoid at all costs. Even though you hear horror stories of people being robbed and murdered from someone they met online, you still see and hear commercials on the tv and radio espousing the benefits of it. There have even been songs written about it, comedy skits acted out, movie scripts created, and real life drama that's unfolded on the evening news.
Being a typical redhead, I ignored those warnings and spent part of the weekend with a friend I'd made online. But this case was different (isn't that what the person always says in a movie before their online "friend" either robs them blind or kills them with an axe?). Yes, you heard me right, it was different. This wasn't from an online dating site, or some I'm a loser and need a friend site. No, this was a much different orchestration and can only be described as us having been put together by God.
I know it sounds crazy but sometimes that's how God orchestrates our lives. You see, I had known this person for a few years from a photography website I am a member of. Photographers can be a very close-knit society and when one of our members suffered an unthinkable tragedy a couple of years ago, without even so much as a backward glance, we all came together and formed a bond which has become unbreakable.
Since that time, our group has met several times around the United States but unfortunately I've been unable to attend each gathering for one reason or another. When the opportunity presented itself to meet one of the members of our group while she and her family were travelling on vacation this summer, well, being the crazy impetuous redhead I can sometimes be, I jumped at the chance and invited them to stay at our house.
My husband was sure I'd lost my mind, but he went along with it. The morning my friend was to arrive, my husband said "you realize this is something police tell you never to do, right? We could end up on the news looking like a couple of idiots". I laughed, but I was a bit nervous as well.
My friend and her family arrived and she told me about the first time our photography group got together and she had to explain the excursion plans to her family. She has a great sense of humor and explained it to them as: one of the males in our group would pick her up in a white unmarked van at the airport. He'd then take her to the hotel where he'd made her room accommodation to drop off her luggage. They would then head several hours out to the desert for a photoshoot. Ummm........ yeah. Maybe I'm wrong, but it sure sounded like the makings of a Stephen King novel.
After that description, I think our visit sounded quite tame. It was, after all, just bbq, relaxing, and church. We had a great time and introduced them to some good old-fashioned Texas staples like fried okra (she'd never even heard of okra, much less fried okra) and corn dogs. I could not believe her children had never had the cornbreaded, deep fried mystery meat yumminess on a stick we call a corn dog.
All in all it was a fantastic weekend and we look forward to spending time with them, and the rest of the photography group, in the near future. And thankfully, none of us made the evening news' headline story and no Amber Alert was issued for our disappearance. Was this crazy? In today's world, yes it was, but it was a crazy wonderful blessing as well, but not something I recommend anyone else doing.
by: Christie Bielss
