Had dinner with some Canadians today (was supposed to be a barbecue, wound up just picking up from a barbecue place). The father is a really social guy and is working on a few TV shows. Turns out we have a '50s diner in town, and they're hiring, so I'm gonna check that out tomorrow (best part is it's close to my dad's workplace, worst part is school starts next month). However, one of the shows the guy's working on is a paranormal show made for public access. That brought up the topic of, "scary shit that's personally happened to you." Found out some shit about our house that kind of bugs me. Apparently, the people who lived in the house before us were... well, not normal. The house was designed, mostly, by a woman, and her husband would make modifications to the house later. There were two daughters and a son in the house. Well, the woman had cancer, and as a result would stay in a lot. Her husband turned the garage into a den and made it her designated area for resting. It turned out that the man was molesting his children, and the woman found out through her son. Nobody said a word about it, but she knew. Not much longer, she was hospitalized and died the same day she was admitted. Some time passed, and the man sold the house to us, a family of four who were expecting a fifth on the way and could no longer live in a two bedroom house. Shortly after we moved in, my parents speculated as to why he wanted to move. The room where that woman would rest in was where the washing machine is, you know, it having been a garage at one point (I was still pissy over the fact that our house didn't really have a garage). Well, a few days in, the room flooded. The washing machine was brand new, couldn't have been anything wrong with it. And this was loaaaaaaaads of water too. Almost enough to seep out from under the door. The water heater would leak too, making the hallway covered in water, and on some days, the same thing would happen to the fridge (although that still happens because our fridge is like, a decade old at this point). I remember those days fondly because I was also pissy that we didn't have a pool and thought to myself, "oh yeah, this is much better than a pool." This didn't let up for some years, and we constantly had work done on the house only to have it continue to flood. It got to a point where my mom apparently lost it, and she called our priest. Now THAT was some shit to see if you were a kid. I remember having to stay in the den while he walked by, blessing the house, but the room has a glass door, and while my parents were trying to cover up the glass door, I could still kind of see what was happening. There were men in robes in the hallway, as the father walked by, swinging his... his... thingy that has holy water in it, speaking in Spanish. When he got to my parent's bedroom, he opened the door and asked for the name of the woman. My mother told him the name, and he started yelling as loud as he could in Spanish. He opened every door in the house, demanding she leave, and then, when he was done, my mom looked outside and saw the weirdest shit. Our dog, a sweet little lazy beagle who would rarely move a muscle, was spazzing out, rolling in the grass, howling. My mom asked the father, "why is my dog doing this?" He pretty much said, "beats me," and took off. The dog eventually calmed down. When my sister was three, however, this is when the problem got really bad. She was sleeping in what's now my brother's room, and woke up crying and running to my parent's room. She said she didn't want to sleep in her room because the lady wouldn't stop looking at her through the window. She said she was looking at her in a funny way that was scaring her. My dad asked her to try to make the face she was making, thinking she just saw the palms and saw a face in that. No, my sister got on her knees, held her palms together in front of her face, and made a praying position. My sister, at this point, had not once been to a single church in her life. My sisters grew up without any knowledge that Catholicism was even a thing or that there is a God that we have to pray to. My sister said it happened again when she was in my dad's room. My dad wasn't going to take it, got his shotgun, went outside, and shot at the ground where the rustling was coming from (again, the window was covered up by palms that we eventually got rid of). The rustling stopped. We all thought he shot the dog, but we had to recollect for a second because the dog was right behind us and was freaking out. I think what worries me the most at this point is the fact that I repressed all these memories thinking they were a normal part of growing up and that nothing paranormal was happening. But then, something strange happened. The man who lived in the house came out on the news. His daughters outed him to the police as soon as they were out of his custody. A trial went on, and the washing machine flooded the den again. When that trial was over, he was found guilty and was sentenced to spend a shitload of time in prison (although he was a pretty old man at this point, so it might as well have been a life sentence). After that was reported? It all stopped. We never had water issues ever again, we never heard people fighting or tumbling around in the den, no more apparitions were appearing at windows, it was over. I mean, our microwave caught on fire and a lot more appliances gave out, but we have really shitty stuff, so yeah. And my parents didn't tell me why any of that went on until they told the whole story to some Canadians.
However, this next part killed me. Last year, you may remember I posted about how my neighbor had passed away. My neighbor and my mom hated each other as kids, but when her son had so much trouble with school and needed my mom to tutor him, they learned to be more mature and accept that they were stuck with each other now. She had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer some years ago, and it had spread and developed into breast cancer. When she was at home, she would shower a lot. Not sure why, but that's how she'd relax. Well, her husband didn't seem as stricken with grief as we thought he'd be. No, one month later, he had himself a girlfriend, and he was trying to keep going with life. I remember we took food over to him one day, and I felt something. I may have been the only one to assume that he had been so devastated by his loss that he was in serious denial and trying to assure himself that life would still be the same without her. Well, their house is mostly empty now. My mom got a letter from him about the day his wife passed away. He said that he had to pull the plug. That she asked him to. She couldn't take the suffering anymore, and she didn't want to see her boys so upset. But the reason he wrote to my mom was to let her know that she was upset that she didn't get to see her. They used to hate each other, and they became good friends. She felt upset that my mother wouldn't at least visit, not knowing that my mother couldn't take the stress of seeing her the same way she saw her aunt die of the exact same ailment. She didn't want to remember her like that. So my neighbor, at this point, has skipped town, trying to get his life back on track. The grass is growing, some of it's dead, the shrubs are gone, and the house itself is probably empty. They didn't sell the house. It's just sitting there. Well now, just two days ago, my mom wakes up and is getting ready to go to work. She stepped out of the room and saw that one of us was up at 5:30 a.m. taking a shower. "Impressive," she thought, "someone actually has something to do today." She went back to her room and continued to get ready for work. When she stepped out, whoever was in the shower was done and out of there. The light had been switched off as well. She keeps her hair dryer in that bathroom, so she stepped inside to dry her hair, when she noticed something. The towel was still hanging from the sliding door, as if someone was getting ready to take a shower soon. It was neat, clean, and dry. The mirror was clear, no steam on it whatsoever. Now, it could be someone just took a cold shower, but that's another thing. The towel on the floor was not damp. The feeling you get when you step into a room where someone had just showered was absent. The smell of soap and the humidity could not be detected. She went to each of our rooms. First my brother. He was sleeping with the door open, dog sitting on his chest, and his arms and legs, spread out, wearing the same clothes he had on the night before. My mom didn't even have to step into my room. I sleep with the TV on, and when she passed by, she heard it was still on. If it was one of my sisters, they would have been on the computer at this point. They weren't. Dad stayed home and confirmed that everyone woke up at around eight or nine and had not been up before that. My mom immediately thought, "oh my god, she's back." "She" being the woman who lived in the house before us. But no. She remembered how much my neighbor loved those showers.
After all of this was discussed, I remembered a dream I had when I was five that I could never seem to forget. The dream was about me attending a private school, where everyone was in uniform, and there was a very nice lady with black hair and all white clothes that would lead us around. There was no work being done, just walking around this small second story area, circling the staircase. I just sat there and thought about how pretty the school looked; teal carpet, a darker shade of teal for the walls, white frames surrounding the windows, and the stairs and railing were brown and made of wood. All of a sudden, a fire broke out. The stairs had disappeared (my dreams do that sometimes), so I ran to an elevator, as the rest of the children were being shot at. When the elevator wouldn't work, the woman in white ran up to me and held me. She was crying, and clinging on to me, not letting me go to run away from the men approaching us. The dream ended with me being shot and killed. I didn't get to see what happened to the woman in white. The reason all of this reminded me of that dream was because that woman felt so familiar, yet I had never seen her in my life before. And this happened after we had moved in to the new house. It felt real, too. I remember thinking for a while that I had really been there. And that I had watched the place burn down with my own eyes. And that woman...
Thanks, mom and dad. I guess I'm not sleeping tonight.
