I have had many encounters with ghosts when I was a child, but I had no idea what they were until I was older. From the time I was around two up to seven years of age, I have seen a lot of freaky things that wouldn’t fit a lot of people’s ideas about what a ghost is.
Once I was at my grandparents’ house. It was morning, and I had just woken up. I remember sitting up in bed and looked at the floor. There was a pair of feet standing by the bed. No one was attached to them. Or at least no one that I could see. I wasn’t really that alarmed, because it was just another of lot of weird things I had encountered, and it wasn’t near as alarming as other things I had seen.
When I was four, we lived in a duplex on the second story, and I had some really weird and frightening visions there. There would be times when I would wake up during the wee hours of the morning, and although there was a streetlight that would normally shine through the window of the bedroom that I shared with my two younger brothers, the room would be dark as pitch. You couldn’t even see the window. On these nights I would see a giant pair of eyes staring at me from the wall. They appeared human, but really outsized. I couldn’t wake my brothers, no matter how loud I screamed or how hard I shook them. My parents wouldn’t even wake up.
Later on, I learned that this could have been what is known as ‘psychic sleep.’ I would see hands sticking up out of the floor, and I swear to God, one night when everyone was asleep, I became restless and wandered into the front room, and saw some kind of strange, hovering being pulsating with some kind of light outside our second story window. Keep in mind that at the time, I didn’t know what any of this was, but I knew that it somehow was not ‘right’ or ‘normal.’
Another night, I saw a glowing skull with the eyes still in the sockets staring at me when I looked over the edge of the bed. At that time I didn’t know that it was a skull, just something that looked like a face, and that it gave me the creeps. Our parents didn’t let us watch horror movies until we were older, so I had no frame of reference for what I saw. I wouldn’t know what it was I saw until several years later, when I was in the first grade. Our home room teacher was passing out our science books. It was the first day of science class. I flipped through my book, and came across a diagram of the human skeleton. For the longest time, I couldn’t take my eyes off the skull. That’s when it dawned on me what all the wild and weird stuff I saw really was. Ever since then, I have been reading everything I could about ghosts, spirits and hauntings. Once I even helped an online friend get rid of a ghost that was haunting her apartment.
I have learned that children are very psychic, much more so than most adults, which explains why I saw all those things. The ones whom we call psychics or mediums are people who have somehow, and to varying degrees, managed to carry this ability over into adulthood. Whether my brothers ever experienced anything, I’ll never know, because they don’t like talking about things like ghosts.
My experiences finally tapered off completely when I was around seven years old. I’m not any more psychic than the next guy, although I have had periodic visits from deceased pets (cats) I have owned over the years, and once my grandmother paid me and my mom a visit a week and a half after she was buried. These visits are always welcome for me, and never scary.
From: “fingerman” fingerman@austin.rr.com
To: obiwan@ghosts.org
Subject: I have Been A Believer Since I was A Small Child
Date: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 11:54 AM