Encounters with the Dead?
You be the judge!
Halloween is the time of year when we are reminded of our own mortality. This is a good thing. The well-known Roman/Latin phrase “Memento Mori” captures the essence of it: “Remember You Must Die.” Halloween reminds us that someday we too will be skeletons. Our souls will certainly be separated from our bodies. Perhaps also, one day we might even be ghosts ourselves, appearing as shadowy, smokey figures seeking the prayers of the living.
This is why I love ghost stories. They are reminders of our own mortality, and they add a certain magical, spiritual element that I certainly don’t see in my ordinary life. I see them as evidence of the reality of the afterlife. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that all reported ghostly encounters are paranormal. Very often, reported phenomena will have weird but natural explanations. For that matter, even if there is paranormal activity, it does not necessarily have to involve a spirit or apparition. These include categories such as poltergeists and hauntings where forces other than apparitions are involved. (For more information about this, see Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World on Youtube.)
Over the years, while I have never encountered any paranormal experience personally, I have collected the stories of my friends and acquaintances who have. Those that I relate here are just a few of the several that I have heard. The described events took place in either Maryland or Kentucky, the two places where I have lived. They are all true stories, although keep in mind that they are retold here based on my own memory of the telling. While certain details may be mistaken or omitted in the retelling, I have not embellished on the main circumstances of each story—the encounter itself.
With all that said, please enjoy…
Encounters in the Family Home
All of the following events occurred in the early to mid 2000s. They were told to me by a man I know who I have re-named Hubert. As a young man, Hubert had several encounters of possible paranormal origin.
Shadow Stalking
Once as a boy, so he told me, Hubert became very sick. In his fevered sleep, he had reoccurring nightmares where a shadowy grim reaper figure, complete with a hooded and skeletal face, stalked him.
This sense of death following him, needless to say, added to the unsettling nature of his illness. A week or so later he had recovered from his illness. He was sitting in his home’s family room playing video games. He suddenly got the feeling that he was being watched from behind. He quickly turned and, out of the corner of his eye, saw a shadowy figure peaking back at him from around the corner. In an instant, he recognized that it was the same hooded figure that had stalked his nightmares during his recent illness.
He looked away in terror and refused to look again for several moments. But then, taking a chance, looked again and saw that his watcher had disappeared. The death-like face, however, lingered on ever since in his memory.
Lingering effects from his recent illness or a paranormal entity? You decide.
Knock, Knock
On another occasion in the same house, he was again playing video games, but this time he was in his bedroom alone. He heard a knock at his door and responded to the effect that the door was unlocked and to come in.
There was no response. Again, a few moments later, the knocking sound came again. After this repeated again, he arose and opened the door to an empty hallway. After checking, he found out that the only other people in the house were downstairs and had not been near his room.
Was it a prank that no one fessed up to? Hard to say.
A Late Grandpa’s Visit
On yet another occasion, Hubert was again in the family home. The house had once been owned by Hubert’s grandfather, who had died before Hubert was born. Unlike his other encounters, he was this time totally alone in the house.
After sitting in the family room for some time, Hubert sensed that the room temperature had dropped to a noticeably lower degree. It was then that he got the eerie feeling that someone, though invisible to him, was watching him. Along with the feeling of being watched, he also felt a recognition of who it was. Though he had never met him, he had a powerful sense that his silent, invisible watcher was his own grandfather. This sense of his grandfather’s presence lasted for a few moments and then left him, along with a corresponding rise in the room’s temperature.
Did Hubert encounter his grandpa or did his imagination just get the better of him? You decide.
Echoes from the Dark Past of an Old Farm House
This happened in the early 1990s. Told to me by an old friend of my wife. Here I have named her Erma.
Erma rented out the back rooms of an old farm house. While the rest of the house was occupied by the family of her landlord, she had her own outside access to her rooms. She loved the historic nature of the place—it had been built sometime before the Civil War. When she first visited to inquire after the rental vacancy, she had been given a tour of the rooms, but also of the entire house to which they were connected. The tour even included the basement wherein there was an old, disused closet that had at one time been used as a holding cell for disobedient slaves. Yes, the first owners of the house had indeed been slave-holders. While undeniably interesting from a historical perspective, it was, she thought, a sad echo of a time when certain human lives were considered less so than others. Yet, as it was not in the part of the house she was to let, she decided to take the rooms.
After a few months into her tenancy there, Erma found herself entirely alone in the house on a late Saturday afternoon; her landlords were away traveling that particular weekend. She was sitting in her rooms enjoying the silence of the day. After a time, however, the silence was broken. From somewhere, emanating from another unknown part of the large house, came the sound of creaking wood. At first, she dismissed it with that old rationalization that it was just the old house itself doing a bit of settling. But then, after a few moments of listening, she recognized the rhythmic creaking as the unmistakable sounds of an old rocking chair scraping back and forth on a wooden floor.
Along with that recognition came to her an electrifying recollection of an antidote about the house that the landlord had told her in her first tour. Back in pre-Civil War days, so Erma had been told, the old lady of the house frequently occupied a rocking chair in the house’s front parlor. On a particular occasion that would become her last hour in this realm, the woman was disciplining a disobedient slave, a man. As she was attempting to imprison him in the holding cell (to wait for a later reckoning by her husband, no doubt), the enslaved man broke free and, likely by accident, killed the old woman in his escape. From thence forth, in the countless years since, there could often be heard echoing in the house, the sounds of the old woman rocking in her chair.
Rather than a fearful response, Erma felt a mixture of wonder and sorrow at the tragic circumstances of an old woman’s death so long ago.
Or, was it simply a passing breeze pushing an old chair back and forth? You decide.
Predawn Walker
This encounter took place approximately one year ago. It was recounted to me by a fellow I will call here Fred.
It was a weekday morning in the pre-dawn hours, approximately 6:30 a.m. Fred lived in a subdivision that had been built in the 1990s on the land of a former family farm. In fact, the original farm house had been converted into a modern home while a nearby barn was transformed into the neighborhood’s activity center. Fred had left the comfort of his home that morning in a quest for breakfast biscuits, ones that only Chick-fil-A could satisfy. He pulled onto the old two-lane route that served as the passage to and from his neighborhood. Surrounded on both sides by trees that grew up to the sides of the road, it is a dark and narrow winding road that led down the hill.
There is no room for shoulders on this road, much less for joggers or pedestrians to walk there. And yet, as his headlights appeared to illuminate, there was someone in the road further down in front of his car. In the middle of the road to be precise. This was all in an instant, Fred recounted, yet he was able to discern in those brief seconds that it was a woman in a long dress, actively walking away from him. He could even see that she had on shoes with light-colored socks that covered her ankles. As he closed in on her location in the road, she was suddenly gone from his sight, though he had fixed his gaze on that strange scene before him. Even so, she had nowhere in which to disappear to that quickly, except perhaps to dive head-long into the trees surrounding the road. No, Fred concluded, she had simply vanished. He had just seen a ghost.
Later that day, second-guessing himself, Fred decided to post something anonymously on the neighborhood’s Facebook page about his encounter. Sure enough, several people responded to his post. In fact, many people had seen walking woman over the years. They even knew who the suspected ghost was in life. She was, they said, the former owner of the farmland the neighborhood was built on.
So, Frank thought, he wasn’t crazy. He was especially gratified that he had not heard anything about this prior to his own encounter. Thus, it was not just a figment of an overactive imagination, possibly due to an intense craving for breakfast biscuits.
Or was it?
That’s all I have for now, but as I said above, these are just a few of the stories that I’ve heard over the years. I have several more.
That said, I invite you the readers to tell your own stories in the comments. Tell us what happened and what you think it was that you experienced.
Happy Halloween!
By the way, in case you weren’t aware, Halloween is an eminently Christian/Catholic Holiday. It is short for “All Hallows Eve,” meaning the eve of All Saints Day. It does NOT have pagan origins, nor should Christians boycott Halloween. For a thorough examination of this, see this episode of Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery Podcast: