Laurie Mustard / Winnipeg Free Press
A lamp turning on after being bumped by a clumsy cat may seem like a fluke, but in this house the explanation may be more supernatural.
Got ghosts?
A friend of mine says she and her husband are living in a haunted house. I asked if they’d let me tell their spooky tale.
They agreed, asking only that we keep their name and location private, for obvious reasons. Done.
So back in July of 1987, within a week of moving into their home, Victoria (as I’ll call her for today’s purposes), awoke in the middle of the night to see a man standing on her side of the bed. He appeared to be in his mid 20s or so, was wearing a plaid shirt and glasses (and I’m guessing pants, probably), pointed at her and said, "Hey... look..." then disappeared.
"I’ve got to be dreaming," she thought, and went back to sleep. This lady is not easily rattled. "I didn’t tell my husband about that first visit."
Next, mid-September or so of that same year, she got up in the wee hours to get a glass of milk. She pours the milk, about which time she hears an old man’s voice call from the basement (there was nobody down there): "HeellooOOooo."
She doesn’t drink the milk, gets back into bed with sleeping hubby, telling him the next morning of her experience. As with most of us sensitive husbands, he says something like, "Nahhhh," and basically just dismisses it.
Also, as with most husbands, he did find a way to get some humour out of it: "Yeah, well, at least when I go away for my curling bonspiel you won’t be lonely."
Over the next few years, ghostly things keep happening occasionally. Hubby ignores it, Victoria just goes with it. "I mean, it didn’t really scare me. I didn’t feel threatened. Wasn’t bad enough to move for."
So Victoria and I are doing this interview in her living room, which is flooded with daylight from the picture window, when suddenly, the cat jumps up on an upholstered easy chair/rocker beside me, the chair bumps the pole of the lamp sitting behind it and the light goes on.
"Silly cat," says Victoria, getting up and shutting off the light. I say to her, "so does that light turn on by touch, or do you have to use the switch you shut it off with?"
"Only works by the switch, Laurie."
"Hmmm," I say, "so why did the light go on then?"
We, including hubby, checked to see if the bulb was tight, shook the lamp to see if we could make it turn on or off or flicker. Nothing. Only worked using the switch. I think I may have gotten a "hello" from the unseen residents of this little house on the prairie. Cool.
About the year 2000 or so, Victoria is in bed, sick, (hubby elsewhere in the house), when a nurse appears in the doorway of their bedroom. She’s in uniform, in her mid-50s or so, has glasses and a white towel over her shoulder. Victoria, no shrinking violet, tells me, "I got a very bad feeling from her, so I basically yelled at her, ‘Get out of here, this is MY house.’" Nurse disappears.
There have been so many incidents it’s impossible to tell them all here, but there’s been another nurse appearance, this one for hubby, carrying a clipboard. Even visitors staying over have been frightened by ghostly happenings, a niece watched a flock of orbs come in through the front picture window, televisions and radios go on and off at all times of the day and night and always, continuing to this day, the sound of footsteps, someone walking, downstairs, upstairs, everything stopping for a month or two, but then back it comes.
"One night," recalls Victoria, "I awoke to see smoke coming down from the ceiling, like a dry ice kinda thing, and above the smoke there was what appeared to be brown cloth."
Victoria says recently, a couple of times before hubby came up from the basement to go to bed he was preceded by, first, a young woman in a flowered blue dress and, another time, by a young boy with glasses. Hubby is not quite as comfortable with all of this as he used to be — and that would be since he woke up in the middle of the night on the downstairs couch to an old woman, hands clutched around his throat, attempting to choke him. There’s always a light on when he’s down there now.
Victoria, who describes herself as "a sensitive" isn’t going to be scared out of her cozy house by any ghosts. "They don’t do anything, they’re just there. I also tuned into the Dalnavert and Vaughn Street Jail entities on a visit. Didn’t like how they made me feel, had to leave."
But at home, it’s just aaaall in the family. Thanks Victoria, spooky fun stuff. Pat kitty for me.
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