The Ghost In the Mix (Spring 1992 -- Spring 1993)

Before I go on with my alien encounter memories, I have to address another paranormal anomaly we dealt with…

At the end of May 1992, Gerick and I found another, smaller, apartment right next door to his parents. It was the second floor of a converted house, but it just had a living room, kitchen/nook, bathroom, and small attic bedroom. Less than half the size of the apartment we were in at the time, but only a third of the price!

So we jumped on it, of course, as we’d actually have spending money if we could pay less rent! Since we didn’t have much and only had to move a block or so away, we managed the feat in half a day. We were able to be fully unpacked and situated by evening.

Our very first night there, I discovered we weren’t alone.

Exhausted, we had pulled out the bed on the pull-out sofa and crashed. Gerick went out like a light, and our 2 cats cuddled up with us, and I began to drop off…

I’m a very light sleeper, and I was much more nervous back then. I distinctly heard footsteps starting by the front door (which was downstairs) that, step by step, climbed up the staircase leading up to the living area of our apartment. I bolted out of bed and grabbed a glass to smash on an intruder’s head (thinking it was human, as the footfalls were so heavy). I ran out of the living room to the top of the stairs at the landing (which had doorways to the bathroom and kitchen/nook as well as the living room) realizing the intruder was only a couple of steps away from reaching the top–

– and found no ONE there at all!

It was a hot, early summer like Ohio gets, so the windows were open, but it was comfortably warm. However, there was an electric cold I could feel (which I know means ‘ghosts’) and a strong sense of presence, right by the top of those stairs. I was too tired to give a damn, though, so I turned around and crawled back into bed. Just as I began to fall asleep, it happened again!

This time I was awake and sat up quickly, then crept quietly to the open threshold of the living room where it opened to the landing, and really listened… But there was no mistaking it. A very physical sounding heavy set of footsteps was slowly and loudly coming up the stairs! I popped my head around the archway to look at the top of the stairs, and the steps stopped.

I waited… Well…? What did this invisible person want..?

No response. All was chilly and amped up at the top of the stairs, but everything was utterly still once I came out to look. Now I was irritated, but needed sleep, so I shrugged and crawled back into bed. However, I could not sleep. I wasn’t sure what to do. It seemed like maybe we had a ghost, so how could I sleep if they were going to make noise like that?

A few minutes later and once again the steps began at the bottom of the stairs. THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD. Slowly and deliberately, the heavy footsteps came. There was never any sound of someone going down the steps. Just starting all over again from the bottom all three times.

I’d had enough!

I flung the covers back and stomped to the top of the stairs just as the footsteps reached the landing halfway up. I could feel the presence, but it was too far away to feel the electric cold from there. I walked down 2 steps myself and sat at the top of the stairs and looked down at the landing at about where an adult’s head would be…

I said something along the lines of: “Listen, I can hear you coming up the stairs. I can’t see you, but I can feel you are around. I don’t know who you are or why you’re here. I assume you’re a ghost. I don’t know why you keep coming up the stairs over and over again, though. Look– I don’t mind sharing a home with you, but we have to have some ground rules. I have a body, that means I require sleep. I am also a light sleeper and you’re preventing me from falling asleep. Now, I don’t mind if you make noise all day long, but at night can we just have no noise? PLEASE!? You want to give me a message or do things, just do it during the day when I can actually meet you halfway. Deal? Now I’m going back to bed in the living room. Please don’t walk up the stairs loudly like that again until morning.”

Then I stood up, walked up two stairs, stepped onto the top landing, turned into the living room, and crawled back into bed again. Would the haunting phenomenon get worse? Or would the ghost heed my request? I left it standing at the middle landing– would it go back down or up again? I waited anxiously for a few minutes, but nothing more happened. Soon, I was falling asleep, and there were no further incidents. In fact, I never heard the heavy footfalls upon the stairs at night ever again. I sometimes heard footsteps during the day, but I either ignored it or said, “Hey Ghost Guy! How’s tricks?” or something like that.

We sometimes felt someone around, and there were some incidents we attributed to the ghost. Especially around Halloween, when any decorations that looked like ghosts kept getting moved around. Once, Gerick and I were busy accusing the other of being behind the pranks. We were facing each other, and getting rather heated. Then we both looked down at a plastic ghost figure at the same time and observed simultaneously that it had shifted positions while we were looking at one another! At that point, we knew neither of us was doing it. Our nerves were just fried by that point because of all that had happened the previous summer into early autumn.

It wasn’t until autumn that we thought to ask the downstairs neighbor (an elderly lady) about the history of the house and our apartment in particular. She told us that in the mid-80s a young man named Eric who lived in our apartment had some issues and hung himself. It was really sad, she said, because he was a very nice guy, but apparently there was love troubles or drugs or something involved, she wasn’t sure. She lived there at the time, and ever since they’d had issues with finding tenants who would stay for more than a couple of months. I surprised her when I told her that I had heard the ghost, but I that I spoke to him and asked him not to mess with me, and he didn’t– except at Halloween. I told her if any tenants had issues after we left to feel free to advise them to just address Eric directly. He really did seem like a nice guy. Maybe he just wanted people to know he was around because he was lonely? I acknowledged him to be polite and so he was like a really quiet roommate most of the time.

It’s funny. People often say they don’t want to talk about ghost encounters because they’re afraid people will think they are crazy. Well, given the much crazier things I’ve dealt with, ghosts seem pretty tame to me. Anyways, I’ve usually found that most people are open to it, and a surprising number have had their OWN experiences. When you share, they are actually relieved and have their own tale to tell! Its comically tragic that if we all just shared more of these types of things, we’d begin to realize how often they happen and we’d stop worrying about appearing ‘nuts.’

A third of the population experiences anomalous phenomena, and they come from all walks of life, both high and low– all sexes, all races, all cultures. It runs in some families more than others, but past history or bloodline are not guarantees to either have nor avoid such experiences. A third of the population is NOT crazy! We’re not so stupid that we’re mistaking what’s happening. We’re not ignorant of physics nor of the dominant materialistic paradigm that insists such things “just cannot be.” Its just a matter of random fortune– or misfortune. And for most of us who have these types of encounters, non-material conclusions are generally drawn only when there are no other options left!

What I found interesting about our ghost roomie, Eric, was that he was around in the spring and late autumn, but when the alien and dimensional slipping was going on, he was entirely absent as far as we could tell. I am only guessing, but I think it scared him into hiding! Imagine a ghost being too scared of things even more strange than himself! But I conclude this because the motives of ghosts are human, and therefore conceivable… unlike the agendas of more bizarre entities.

Though its a bit embarrassing to admit we were living in a haunted apartment at the time of an alien anomaly flap, I think I have to confess this detail because the information may have importance at some point down the line. I can see how the different phenomena could get mixed up for someone who wasn’t as experienced as I became at differentiating the many strange occurrences, but again– ghosts are just a whole different set of oddities! All the same, there is the chance that I was mistaken somewhere and perhaps Eric was behind some of what I’ll be reporting on in the coming month or two. Keep that in mind as we go forward.

In 2 weeks, I’ll be talking about how taking trips to see 2 different researchers and an abductee support group seemed to spur attention from both the aliens and some quasi-governmental group. That was the beginning of things going nuts the summer of 1992. At Spiral’s End: What’s Left After the Paradigm Shatters is the personal paranormal blog of a woman that follows not only current odd events in her life, but recounts incidents from her past, including lifelong alien abductions, encounters with ghosts and other spiritual beings, and premonitions from either waking visions or dreams. She reacts and speculates about the deeper meaning behind these incidents and wonders– what is the ultimate reality or intelligence behind it all?