I've got a few. The best one is rather long and takes place over the course of a decade plus, so I'll save that one.
My son has always been very sensitive to "things" in the environment and atmosphere. Since he was very little, he has been unable to sleep without a light on. Having been there myself, I don't fight with him about this, even though he's almost 15.
Anyway... about 7 years ago, he had fallen asleep on the couch in our livingroom while watching TV. This was a bit unusual, but instead of hauling him upstairs, I just covered him up and went to bed.
The next morning, he came to me with a very serious expression on his face and said that we needed to talk.
He told me that he was always seeing a man in the house, out of the corner of his eye, and that it had always creeped him out a little, but that last night, the man yelled at him.
I encouraged him to continue, and he told me that the man was older and mean, and that his face was hovering in front of the TV screen, but the TV was off. And that the man was yelling, "Get out of my house! Get out of MY HOUSE!"
Being somewhat knowledgeable about how to handle this type of thing, I went through an elaborate process with my son. We prayed throughout the house, burned some white sage, told the spirit to go the light and all that good stuff, but Geno (my son) told me he was still here. (Oddly enough, Geno wasn't too terrified by all of this. He was rather calm.)
A few days later, I decided to call the realtor who sold us our house, to see if I could learn anything from her. A couple of hours later, she showed up at my office with a file folder. She's actually gone and done some research that confirmed our house to be over 100 years old, and that the first owner and most likely the builder was a man named Sam Smith. He was a carpenter, and he lived here with his wife.
I brought all this home to the family, and we talked over dinner about what kind of man we thought Sam was, and decided he probably loved this house very much, and was sad to see it in such disrepair. (Previous owners had done lots of "bandaid" cover up instead of really fixing things that needed to be fixed. We learned this the hard way during the first few years we lived here.)
We decided it was time to start doing some redecorating and some Do-It-Yourself simple renovation, and to begin in the livingroom where Sam had first appeared to my son.
(Sam was still shadowing my son throughout all of this, and the rest of us started catching motion from the corners of our eyes. But Sam didn't speak again. He did stand over Geno's bed one night, and scared the beejeezies out of him.)
The day came to start on the livingroom. We began scraping the walls... layer after layer of paint and wallpaper, sandwiched together. No one who had lived here after Sam or before us had ever bothered to remove the old layers before slapping on new layers. Ultimately, the very walls started to crumble, and there was nothing to do but demolish them.
During that demotion... the entire ceiling fell down. Fortunately, we were so close to the wall we were pulling down that we were not seriously injured... but talk about dust and dirt and getting thumped by debris!
All the plaster had pulled away from the lathe in a way you couldn't see, and the vibrations from the demolition of the walls made the ceilings collapse. It was then that we saw there were no supports for the rooms above -- an attic, which had obviously never been meant for living space. Especially for very active boys.
If Sam hadn't appeared with his message, the most likely outcome would have been a collapse in the very area where the boys beds were. (And boys do not just sleep in their beds -- there was always lots of jumping and pillowing fighting, too!)
It took several months, but we got massive supports put in, new drywall and ceilings up, got things painted, and one day, I happened to ask Geno how Sam was. He told me that Sam had become "happy", and then Sam went away.
I've tried to find photos of Sam, but have had no success. I don't think he and his wife ever had any children, and can't find any record of where they went from here. But I have no doubt at all that he was the one who was responsible for keeping our boys safe, and that our hard work on "his" house made him happy enough that he could move along.
The End
Jeanne
Jeanne
Y
http://jeanze.blogspot.com/
