Was There Really a Ghost?

I grew up believing in things such as ghosts because my mother did.  Ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, hauntings, déjà vu, superstitions, my mother believed in all of it and taught me to also.  But I was always more than a little disappointed because I had not observed nor experienced any of it myself.

Until I did.

I was living in Los Angeles, just on the edge of East L.A., at 459 East Adams Boulevard.  It was a beautiful three-story Victorian house.  The house was owned by my friend's uncle and his partner.  After buying it they needed renters to help pay the mortgage, so five of us moved in:  my friend and three more prior-enlisted Navy, all now attending USC as Navy ROTC midshipmen, and me.  I lived on the uppermost story and had a huge walk-in closet which I loved.

I never heard what made my landlords curious enough to do this, but one day they hired a medium to come and check out the house because they were wondering if it were haunted.  And the medium told them it was.  A young boy who had died in a train accident was haunting it.  He didn't die there — no railroad tracks right next door or anything like that — but he had spent many happy times there visiting his grandfather.  So that's where his spirit was drawn when he died.

After hearing about the results of the seance, my housemates decided we would try to contact the ghost.  We set ourselves up in a room on the second floor with a Ouija board and a candle, and they started asking questions.  Nothing had happened, and they were getting frustrated.  Then someone asked, "If there is a spirit here, show us a sign", or something pretty close to that.  Suddenly the candle went out.  Which normally wouldn't be that big of a deal, but all the windows were closed, and there wasn't any breeze going through the room.  So we took that to be a sign, but it made some people nervous, and we wrapped up pretty quickly after that.

Okay, one little candle goes out.  Not much of an experience, right?

Ah, but there's more.

Some time after that, Bill and I were on the ground floor on a Saturday.  No one else was home.  I was reading a book.  I don't remember what Bill was doing, but he was in another room.  And suddenly I heard footsteps running downstairs from the second floor.

I looked toward the stairs, but I didn't see anyone.  I was starting to wonder where whoever it was could have gone, when I remembered — Bill and I were the only ones in the house, and he was already on the first floor.

It had to have been the ghost!

I ran over to find Bill and asked him if he had heard the footsteps also.  He hadn't, of course, but I knew what I had heard.

My only experience with a ghost.

Today, May 3, is National Paranormal Day, so it's a good day to record that experience.

Nobody seems to know how National Paranormal Day started or who created it, but it's listed by several of the sites that track events.  National Day Calendar and National Day Archives don't say anything about when it started.  Days of the Year, National Today, and There Is a Day for That agree that the observance began in 2013.  But according to Holiday Calendar, it began in 2011.

Image by Aberrant Realities.  Downloaded from Pixabay and used under the Pixabay Content License.