Oooohh, Yikes, I’ve got three vivid ones:
1: At age eleven, my family lived in a big old house in Maine. One day I was home alone (in a family with six kids an unusual occasion), and heard footsteps in the attic. Being young and stupid, I went up to see what was up. I lifted the door and sat up there; nothing for a bit, but then I saw something that terrified my little butt for quite awhile. A pretty concrete spinning wheel (as in the apparatus to spin wool) appeared, and in back of that, a woman, bluish, almost in negative, who was speaking, directly to me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I’m a wuss, so I fled downstairs and outside 'til my family came home. It flipped me out so badly that I refused to ever be home alone in that house.
A few months later, I started to spend time visiting an elderly woman down the street, Mrs. Hilton. Turned out she had lived in that house in her youth. I told her what I had seen, and she seemed particularly intrigued with the fact that I had seen a spinning wheel. She said that there was a real spinning wheel stored in the attic when she lived there, and that she’d also heard footsteps in the attic, but had never never been brave enough to go look. I dunno, sounds like a cliche story, but really flipped my little butt out at the time.
2: I was going through a rather rough adolescence, and living in an apartment with four roomates. I was in bed, nodding off, but wrestling with all the shit you wrestle with at 21. All of a sudden, a calm came over me, and I made a very conscious vow to accept whatever was my lot in life. The next part is quite vividly embedded in my mind: ( and I was very sober) African drums began to beat, in an incredibly powerful sonata. At the point they were most intense, I saw a blindingly white whatever descend through the ceiling, yowling down through the floor. It made a Whooooshing sound. Again, I’m a wuss. So I ran to turn on the lights, and then ran back to pull the covers over my trembling self. At that moment, one of my roomates roused himself out of bed and opened my door. " What the hell is wrong, L, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!" His exact words. And here’s the weird part: for two months afterwards, the door to the apartment, bein’ in the South, left open for air, would often slam shut, with footsteps heard by all, leading toward it. “Ls ghost”, they’d laugh, but I hated it, and begged it to stop. It did.
3: My husband’s grandfather died a few years ago, right after Christmas. We made the trek up to Chicago for the funeral. We stayed in Papa’s house for the visit, and D and I stayed in the bedroom the boys were raised in. Late the night before the funeral, I felt a strong tug on my big toe. I ignored it, but a few moments later had the same feeling that my big toe was being jiggled. I sat up, and had a strong feeling of Papa in the room. I got a message, loud and clear, even though he wasn’t my blood relation.
I didn’t say anything about that experience during the funeral. On the way home, in a restaurant in southern Illinois, I told D about the toe-tugging, He got the most misty-eyed I’d ever seen him. After a long silence he said, “That’s EXACTLY the way Papa would always wake us up as children; He’d jiggle our big toe.” He, nor anyone in his family, had told me that before. It was a complete surprize.
Yipes, and Yipes again. All I can say, MSK, is it’s a word weirld, and perhaps there’s something to the Strange Attractor theory. I’ve seen enough to have the generosity of plausability.
The pictures falling were right after I got off of the school bus. My daughter would talk to Bobo any time of day or night. Happy reading!