Do you believe in ghosts? That question has always bothered me, since
believing isn't part of the answer. If you have had an experience with a ghost, you know they exist. You do not need to prove anything to anyone or really have any need to. Nobody can convince you that there are no such things, that would be like trying to convince you that you could
not touch the tip of your nose with your finger; you know that you can. With the ghost(s), you know they were there. If you have not had
first hand experience then you must rely on the trustworthiness of the
person trying to convince you that they are real. In that case, it isn't "Do you believe in ghosts?", it is "Do you believe them?". Once you have had an encounter, it is part of your life and you can't change it even if you wanted to. Can someone convince you that a fact you know is real is no longer a fact, because they can not see, taste, touch, smell or feel it?
Now, what happened to me I could never positively identify as a ghost.
That is just the best way I can describe it. It could be a ghost,
something or someone trapped between worlds, a group of atoms or
molucules that joined together, a spirt or time traveller. I don't know that part as fact. It was is something unseen and unknown that
hung
around a house. It was there, it proved to me it was there; scared me
from head to toe and after a medium came and released it, was gone. The
excuses I have heard for what it "may have been" happened ranged from it being
an old house to stress. I have lived in a lot of older houses, and
been under a lot more stress during other times in my life, and so far
it hasn't happened again. Can I prove it? No. Do I feel a need to
prove
it? No. I know what I know. I do not have any pictures of it or dials
on
scientific meters that measure some atmospheric change. I did not see
it, as it wasn't solid. I wasn't able to touch it, I never heard it but
I
sure felt it and smelled it.
In 1980, I was hired as a nanny for a
couple that lived in Santa Barbara, Hawaii, England, Spain, various
hotels and also owned an 80' yacht that provided accommodations. They
also had the most adorable 5-month old baby boy. I do have pictures of
him. Most of my three years with this family were spent travelling
between houses, apartments and the yacht. Since the only rules were
that
I would have 24 hours notice for a domestic location and 48 for an
international destination, I kept suitcases and supplies for the baby
and myself at the ready. I learned early that there was nothing worse
than having 3 diapers on a 4 diaper flight, so I always stayed prepared
with 6 or 10 if I could get them. What does this have to do with a
ghost? Well, this was the tip off. Back then, disposable diapers didn't
have the tapes that were reusable. If you didn't put the diaper on
tight
enough it would leak and if you undid the tape to change a diaper it
was
ruined.
As we travelled around, it became quite obvious between sleep
deprivation, trips to a 7-11 in the middle of the night to buy diapers, and massive amounts of unused ruined diapers that something was going on in the Santa Barbara house that wasn't happening anywhere else in the
world. When we were in that house, the baby would wake up crying
throughout the night. When I would go to him, he would stink of a dirty
diaper. I would, of course, immediately go to change him only to ruin
another absolutely dry clean diaper. The smell would disappear, the
baby
would go right back to sleep. In the morning not only would I be
exhausted, but there would be 5 to 7 unused ruined diapers. Everywhere
else we stayed the baby would sleep right through the night. Aware
something was causing him problems in the Santa Barbara house, I
changed
the placement of his crib. I placed it right next to my bed since
it didn't seem to matter to him where it was. I dressed him warmly then
tried cooler. I closed the drapes and windows then opened them and kept his diet to only items I knew his tummy liked and did not give him gas. Nothing worked.
Around our third or fourth stay in this house, the
pattern was becomming very noticable along with something else.
Different places in this house I was able to walk into a freezing sewer
smelling spot. It got to the point I could walk into it, then out of
it,
then back into it. The only problem was that it was in different spots
in the house, when it decided to leave it was gone until I
accidently
walked into it again. I couldn't go find it, it found me. This was the
same smell that I assumed was being made by a dirty diaper, but this would
happen even if the baby was not at home. As for the freezing, this
house
is in southern California and, more often than not, we were trying to get
cool not warm. Wearing mostly shorts, bathing suits and t-shirts, the
weird thing is that the cold spot would be on only one arm or leg and I
was able to run my hands from warm to cold to warm. When I discovered
the cold spots could also be felt on the baby during our nightly
interruptions, I tried to turn our room into a sauna only to discover I
could run my sweating hand from sweating baby to cold spot, to sweating
baby.
At this point I needed to tell the parents. I was surprised when
they told me that they too had felt and smelled this. The father had
run
into cold spots while looking at the house and as part of the purchase
had a new heating system installed that was deducted from the price of
the house. The previous owners were still complaining about the cost so it wasn't that. I already knew as much because the temperature of the house
everywhere the smell wasn't, seemed just fine. They had also smelled the
sewer smell but it wasn't coming from the plumbing. They were able to
rule that out. Two of the housesitters had smelled this and the owners
had plumbers in to check everything, which left them with bills they
were still complaining about. This brought the conversation to
housesitters and they told me that they had to keep replacing them.
Nobody would take the job twice. They all had complaints of weird
things
happening while they were in the house alone. Two had even moved out of
the main house to stay in the guest cottage by the tennis court because
they just didn't like being in the house. One of them had even told
them
the house was haunted and she never wanted to come back.
At this point
I
didn't "believe" in ghosts. I switched to looking for a logical
scientific reason this could be happening. I started my investigation
by
interrogating the gardener. After all, they came with the house so they
would have noticed any strange happenings or, as I expected, would not
have noticed a thing, since this was in the house and probably wasn't
real. Well after speaking with Art, I was heading further from
scientific and logical. Different gardeners over the years had told him
about strange happenings at the house and had experienced many strange
things while working around this house. He even had to call the police
once. A gardener had heard someone talking to him from an open window
in
the master bedroom, he only spoke Spanish and thought the house owners
were trying to tell him something. He went and got another gardener
who could understand English. They both went to the window, which was
now
closed, so they went to the front door and rang the bell. Nobody
answered.
When Art had come at the end of the day they both reported that someone
had kept opening the windows and had been trying to tell them to do
something all day but wouldn't come outside. They couldn't hear
exactly what they were trying to say to them. Art, knowing nobody was
to
be in the house, called the police and they came and checked it all out.
All the doors and windows were found to be securely locked and nobody
was in the house. He told me that it had changed since we had
moved
in and they sure liked the new owners daughter. They didn't mind
when she came out and watched them work. Well, I told him I wasn't
their
daughter I was only looking after their baby. He said, no the little
girl about 5 years old that watches them a lot. I told him they didn't
have a little girl, only the baby boy. He didn't want to hear that.
Still not wanting to "believe" there was a ghost, I contacted a retired
policeman my parents knew for a long time. He was still doing private
investigation work. I told him I felt silly but would make him lunch if
he could just come over and take a look. The parents were going to be
leaving in two weeks and I was supposed to stay alone with the baby in
the house. I wasn't feeling too safe with all the ghost stories.
Well, he just made it worse. Of course, this was a day I could not find
the cold and smell anywhere in the house even though it had been a nine
clean diaper experience the night before. The detective followed me to
all the previous spots it had been, then walked around the outside and
inside of the house. He didn't find any reason for me not to be safe
in
the house. He started telling me his ghost stories. He said it
most
likely was a ghost but that I shouldn't be frightened of it.
He then
went on to tell me that what I had told him reminded him of an unsolved
case he had worked on years before. A few parts of what I had been
telling him matched up pretty well. There was a 5 or 6 year old girl,
who's family was moving from south of this house to north of it. The
girl had been anxious to get going and at one point was told the only way to get there faster was to start walking because they
had to finish packing the load before they left. The next thing her
family knew, she and her doll were gone. Witnesses had seen a little
girl with a doll walking down a road that was about five miles east of
this house but then all sightings of her stopped. He told me maybe
the doll was why she was bothering only the baby and not me at night.
Maybe she just wanted to play. This was something I had not even
thought
about, that it had never woken me up only the babys' crying had done
that.
This girls' father had worked on appliances and that fit with finding
the spot by the laundry room. He said that his main suspects in
her
disapperance were brothers that lived on a road that used to connect
with the road that this house was on. The road was open when she went
missing and was changed soon after to two dead ends to make the traffic
use a better route. He always had thought she could still be in this
area. He sure wished that if it was her that he could "talk" to her and
ask her about the brothers. By the time he left, I was convinced this
was a ghost and was nothing to worry about. I too now wanted to get to
the bottom of this.
That afternoon the baby's mother had found a
medium.
The mother was convinced that it was a ghost from the beginning and had
been looking into solving this mystery that way. The medium was going
to
come over the next day. That night I was actually looking forward to
being woken up. I wanted to see if our nightly visitor was a little girl
and if I could "talk" to her. I was going to ask her about the
brothers.
The way the house was set up, the baby and I shared the room at the
back
of the house next to an empty bedroom at the front of the house. Both
rooms were at the end of a hall. The doors were side by side in the
middle at the end of the hall. Often these doors would be shut when we
arrived at this house. The carpets were so thick that I struggled
to open the doors, so I just left them open. Our room also had a pair of
french doors that led outside to a patio and backyard. At the other
end
of the hall was a family room with the laundry room in the corner. Closest to our hall and halfway down that same wall, was the hall that
led to the master bedroom at the back of the house.
The family had a
little yappy yorkshire terrier but the dog never came down to the part
of the house where the baby and I stayed. I just figured the dog didn't
want to go near the baby. Everytime I took the baby near the dog,
the baby would make a beeline for the dog and the dog would take off
running. It didn't bother me that the dog didn't come down to our part
of the house because I was a cat person. Ever since we had moved in,
I had spotted a wild cat that stayed in the field just beyond the lawn
that was just beyond the patio outside the french doors of our bedroom.
When we were at the house I would try to coax the cat to come to me. I
would put food and milk out on the patio but that cat didn't want any
part of it or us either. It was a very skinny and skittish cat, but if
we were around it didn't care what we offered it, there was no way it
was going to come within catching distance. This was all about to
change.
That night, after the cop and before the medium, I was anxiously
awaiting the ghost. At the same time, I felt awkward so I had shut the bedroom door, which because of the struggle getting it over the thick carpet I usually didn't. I didn't want anyone walking down the hall and see me talking to a ghost. The baby was sleeping and I was waiting for him to wake up crying. He didn't. I eventually turned off the lights and went to sleep once again thinking this ghost stuff might just be bunk. I had slept awhile when the baby cried. From the smell in the room, this time I knew it wasn't going to be a dirty diaper so I just turned on the light and said from my bed, "Is that you?" "What do you want?" The baby stopped crying and the door instantly flung wide open. This scared me so much that I grabbed the baby from the crib and ran down the hall to his parents room. They were sleeping and even the dog on their bed only lifted her head and then went back to sleep. I whispered his mother's name and even touched her arm but she wouldn't wake up. As I stood there the clock went from 4:43 to 4:44 and with a sleeping baby in my arms, standing next to their bed, I started feeling very stupid. So I went back down the hall. The door I had just ran out of was now closed again. I didn't know what to do.
I took a deep breath and then touched the handle and pushed on it. The light was still on
in the room. I put the baby back in his crib, turned the television on and fell back to sleep. I woke up before the baby did. That morning at breakfast, his dad asked me if the ghost had been there. When I told them what had happened, they both couldn't believe it. They both said that the baby's mom was such a light sleeper and would wake at the slightest sound. They also couldn't believe that the dog that would bark at shadows, let us down the hall without a sound. When I told the mom what she had been wearing, we all knew I had been in their bedroom that night. I was trying to figure out if they could have played a trick on me. They knew my plans to try and talk to the ghost that night. Could the dad have pushed the door open while standing in the other room, then
somehow beat me to their room? But how could he have closed our bedroom from the inside after we ran out and made it back to their bed? They didn't have a door to the outside from their room.
I was still batting
it back and forth in my mind when the medium showed up. She did not
know
about the policeman or what he or the gardener had said and we had not
said more than hello to her. We just watched as she went by the laundry
room door and said "Yes, there is a spirit here". She then walked to
our bedroom door and the next thing out of her mouth was. "It is
feminine and an old soul", "She is very sorry, she was only playing".
"She thought you wanted to play too". "She feels very bad and will go
with me now and leave you alone". The medium asked us to burn
bayberry candles in the room and we wouldn't have any further problems.
As soon as she left, we went out and bought bayberry candles. I only
burned them for a few days because I could tell it was gone. The baby
slept through the next night and every night after that. I did too. The
cold was gone, the smell was gone. The next day the "wild" cat walked
right in through the french doors and from then on would only go
outside for a few minutes at a time. He got fat and was so calm, every
once in awhile I would have to touch him so he would lift his head and I would know he was still breathing. He took over the front bedroom. The dog started coming down to our room and was great company while the baby's parents went away and left us home alone. We needed their company because we were alone. Both the cat and the dog liked the housesitter the family continued to hire long after I moved on.
My only regret was that the medium had released the spirit and sent it forward before I could tell her to ask about the brothers or tell her what the gardener said. When I did tell her, she was pretty sure this was not a child and had been more than willing to move on. I left it with her. I don't care if anyone believes me of not, at this point I only know what I know.
