We wondered if the pacifier had been intentionally set on fire by a spirit or if the heat and burning been a side effect of a spirit interacting with it. It seemed perfectly clear that spirit was ready, willing, and able to communicate with us, but we also realized that we needed a better plan and a more logical approach if we expected to catch activity or receive reasonable answers to our questions. As eventful as the night had been, we had gathered no real information from the evening’s activity and the unexpected responses we had apparently been given. Next time we would prepare better questions and perhaps get a video camera to monitor our immediate area.
fifteen
Things remained quiet at the house for eighteen days. Then, while Tony was at work, something unexplainable happened in front of a co-worker.
Earlier that day, I’d spent several hours at the library thumbing through the card catalogue, diligently searching for any publications on ghosts, hauntings, and any other related topics. It was then that I realized how little material documented factual accounts of ongoing hauntings and determined that there was a distinct need for such public information. I also discovered, in my conversation with the librarian, that when new books on this and similar topics arrived, it was often hard to keep them on the shelves. Some are sought after so much that they simply don’t see much shelf time between one borrower and the next; others just seem to disappear.
I had screened dozens of books, looking for the properties and specific differences between the activity of ghosts, spirits, residual hauntings, and poltergeists. Since each one was significantly different and handled in a variety of ways, I wanted to know how to categorize our experiences so we could learn how to deal with the occurrences and live with the situation. I also thought that if Tony read some of the books on his own instead of getting suggestions from me or the psychic, he might take things more seriously. That afternoon I returned home with almost a dozen books.
Before going to work that evening, Tony and I spent several hours reading excerpts from the references I had brought home. Occasionally, one of us would run across something especially interesting that seemed to parallel our own experiences and read it out loud to the other. Instead of shedding light on our situation, however, all the reading just left us a more confused. Notable activity and significant behaviors did not suggest one specific situation but instead seemed to cross over into several of the categories; the activity we had been experiencing seemed to suggest residual spirit, interactive spirit, and poltergeist activity.
Tony left for work at 10:30 p.m. and took a couple of the library books with him. I continued to read as well. Preoccupied with the subject matter, I found myself reading into the wee hours of the morning. It was close to 4:00 a.m. when I finally went to bed. At the very same time, Tony and a co-worker experienced one of the strangest things they had ever witnessed.
The grain elevator where Tony worked was sizeable. It could be described as a couple dozen huge grain silos standing side by side and paired off in rows of twos. The silo-like enclosures are called bins, and each is approximately thirty feet in diameter. There are roughly 120 bins in all at the Atchison facility. About 120 feet above ground level and along the top of these bins is an enclosed hallway called a galley. It runs the length of the bins, approximately 2,640 feet or 900 yards long. At the far end of the galley, you turn the corner, walk a few more feet and open a heavy metal door to Tony’s office. The room is the size of a good-sized kitchen. Across from the door on the opposite wall inside the room is a window that measures approximately three feet by six. The window frame consists of welded steel bars and crossbeams, and the glass panes within them are each one-and-a-half by two feet.
Tony usually occupied this room alone. However, that night a co-worker stopped in and the two of them sat for a while talking about ghosts and a few of the experiences that Tony had witnessed at home. Suddenly and without any warning, an unusually strong gust of wind ripped open the heavy office door with extreme force. The wind rushed across the room towards the window with an intensity that blew out the window. The whole window, frame and all, went crashing to the ground below.
Tony and his co-worker sat there dumfounded by the force of the air and the power that had just ripped past them. There was nowhere that gust of wind could have reasonably come from. If it were a natural occurrence, its path would have started at the other end of the enclosed galley hallway, almost half a mile away. It would then have had to turn a corner, and still have enough speed and force to blast through a metal door and blow out the heavy window.
Of course, this was inconceivable. Ruling out that possibility however, left room for only one other. This was a paranormal incident. The experience did not sit well with either one of them and was the beginning of strange occurrences at work on the midnight shift. Word spread to the rest of the elevator workers, and soon not even the maintenance personnel would work in Tony’s area of the facility.
March 1994
On March 3rd, one of Taylor’s musical toys played continually throughout the day without anyone activating it. It was interesting to watch these occasional and innocent forms of communication become more frequent. Sallie was with us often throughout the day.
One night about 2:00 a.m., an extremely loud musical nursery rhyme awakened me from a sound sleep. I’m sure it seemed excessively loud because it was so abrupt in the dead silence of a peaceful night. It had come across the baby monitor I kept at my bedside. The other monitor stood on a shelf above the crib in the nursery where Taylor slept. I recognized the music as coming from an electronic top-like toy in the room. You only had to touch the toy to get it to work.
Figuring that it was Sallie being ornery, wanting acknowledgement or play-time, I scolded her for making so much noise and told her to stop before she woke the baby. The music did stop, but not necessarily because of my request. It was likely because it was the end of the tune. As I started to drift off to sleep, I was startled again by the same musical toy. I hollered, “Sallie, quit it!” This game continued for a few hours and I had been awakened no less than four times. About 4:00 a.m., the toy continued to play the same tune over and over. This was very odd because the toy had a bank of six different songs that it could play at random; normally I had never heard it play the same song more than twice in a row. If this kept up, the baby was sure to wake up through all the noise.
Maybe there was something wrong with Taylor and our house spirit was desperately trying to get my attention. Or, depending on where the toy was in the room, a blanket from the crib could have been hanging low enough to hit the toy. This might have happened repeatedly if Taylor’s arm or leg was in motion while he slept. It also hit me that I might have left the nursery door open. Perhaps one of the cats had gotten to playing in the room and was responsible for bumping the toy.
I got up to investigate, but when I got to the hallway, I saw that the door to the nursery was already closed. Thinking that I might have mistakenly shut one of the cats in the room, I reached to open the door. As I did, I noticed both of my cats sleeping at the other end of the hallway.
At this point, I had run out of logical explanations and just wanted to stop the toy from bellowing out another ballad. I quietly entered the room, carefully picked up the toy, holding it as if it were a land mine ready to blow at the slightest bump, and left the room. I quietly shut the door and gently placed the toy on the floor in the hallway. I wasn’t about to put it in my room for fear it would continue to wake me. Although leaving it in the hall would have put it closer than before and surely louder if it would have gone off again, I did so as an experiment. I was testing to see whether the cats were able to set it off. The toy never made another sound that night.
On March 11, Tony had another terrifying encounter with an unnatural force. Early in the evening, after putting Taylor to bed, I went upstairs to do some sewing. Saint Patrick’s Day was coming up, and since Taylor was going to ride
in the parade with his grandfather (who was grand master of the parade for the year) I’d decided to make him a green outfit to wear. I had been working in the sewing room for about three hours. I had taken a few breaks to go downstairs and get a snack or a drink and at some point noticed that Tony had fallen asleep on the couch. It was therefore completely unexpected when he burst into the sewing room. I could see that he was upset or preoccupied; was breathing rather heavily. It was odd for him to just keep me company while I sewed, trying to make small talk, and it was odd how close to me he needed to be. Unable to figure out the reason for his strange behavior, I finally I asked him, “What is wrong?”
“She was downstairs with me.” He paused, and then continued. “Jesus, Deb, she was right on top of me and wouldn’t let me up.”
I tried to console him and then asked him to tell me what exactly happened.
“I was sleeping on the couch, lying on my back, and I remember feeling a strong, cold breeze. Actually it was more like a wind, because it moved my hair.”
As he spoke, he pointed to the top of his head. Tony used a lot of styling products on his hair and his hair was always stiff; I often joked that he someday would poke someone’s eye out with it. As he continued to tell his story, he raised his hand to the top of his head and then moved his head toward me. He wanted me to feel his hair in order to verify how stiff it. The breeze would have to have been very strong to move it at all.
After describing the brisk wind that had blown across his face, he said, “I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move! It was as if someone was sitting on top of me and wouldn’t let me up. In fact, I couldn’t move any part of my body!” He described how terrified he’d felt and how he’d tried to scream, but because he was so scared, nothing came out. “I finally said, ‘Sallie, let me up,’ and almost immediately I felt a heaviness lift from my body.”
I decided to call it a night and returned with him to the living room. We sat down close to each other and watched TV. My mind wandered often. It wasn’t long before I was remembering an episode of Unsolved Mysteries we had watched just a few nights before. Although we didn’t know it at the time, we realized it was the same episode my sister had called us about back in November. It had been about a female spirit who was haunting a young man and woman.
Early in the episode, the couple was shown lying in bed. The female entity had allegedly entered the body of the young woman and caused her get on top of the man. The woman had laughed in an unusual manner, and although she was much smaller than the man, she was able to keep him restrained. He was unable to dislodge her or get out from underneath her.
We were shocked by the similarity of the televised couple’s experience to Tony’s. We stared at each other.
He asked, “Do you think she learned that from watching TV, too?”
“Probably,” I said. “Which means we’ll have to be really careful about what we watch.”
Humor being a large part of his personality and his only form of defense, he was compelled to jest. “She’s a quick study, huh?” He meant to be funny, but somehow we couldn’t laugh—we felt so cornered, defeated and worried.
In one of my calls to Barbara updating her on how we were doing, I told her about this experience. I was concerned that Sallie might have learned this trick from watching the program with us, and I asked Barbara if she thought it was possible.
Her response was not one that I had anticipated or hoped for. “Yeah, sure,” she said. My first thought was, “Oh, wonderful.” We not only had to be careful about what kind of television we watched in front of our own child, but also our ghost. Since we really had no idea when she was around, that meant censorship had to be enforced morning, noon, and night. I wondered how Tony was going to take this intrusion.
On March 22, we got together with what I called the baby club—Samantha and Mark, Rodney and Jenny, and our three babies. There were two other individuals that came that night, too: Mark’s cousin and his cousin’s friend. I will call them Chad and Tom. They had heard of the ghostly happenings at our house and were apparently interested enough to tag along for the evening.
Everyone had arrived around dinner time, so we ordered pizzas and rented a few movies for the evening. As was usually the case, the conversation focused on Sallie stories, strange events, and photos. Although they were very polite, it was easy to tell that Chad and Tom were non-believers in the paranormal. They were however, very interested in seeing something with their own eyes, and indulged themselves for the evening.
Mark, Chad, and Tom eventually found their way upstairs and into the nursery while the rest of us remained downstairs. From there, we could hear them talking, and it seemed as though they were gently taunting Sallie. “Come on, do something if you’re here.”
Overhearing their pleas for activity and realizing no one was responding to them, I went up to tell them they should refrain from demanding a show because we didn’t know how she would react if she got mad. For a while we stood there quietly, and feeling that she might perform for me (after all, Sallie told Barbara that she would “show off” for us if we wanted her to) I simply asked her to do something for us to show that she was there. I could tell she wasn’t going to do anything; I could sense her reluctance to comply with our requests.
Wanting an experience for them as much as they did, I came up with an idea that I thought would work for all parties. I recalled one of the photos we had taken of the staircase, and that after viewing it Barbara told us that Sallie was protective of the private “family only” rooms upstairs. With this in mind, I wondered if I could force her into performing on the promise that we would all leave the upstairs.
“Alright Sallie, I know you really don’t want us up here, and if you do something to show us that you are here, I promise we will leave.” We stood in the doorway of the nursery waiting for a sign, but nothing happened. It took three more attempts to interest her in the arrangement. “You can move something or even throw something at us if you want. Or you can turn out the lights.” We waited, and just when it seemed that she was not going to comply, something happened.
The guys had been standing at the doorway of the nursery looking into the room when suddenly the light in the hallway behind and above their heads went out for a good three to four seconds. Then it came back on. I recognized the questioning look in their faces and I volunteered that the light switch they were getting ready to ask about was on the wall several feet behind them.
Without saying a word, they looked at each other for support and a clue as to what they should do next and what they should believe. Without warning, Chad and Tom turned toward the stairs and all but trampled each other to get downstairs and away from the ghost they realized was in the area. It reminded me of two boulders tumbling down the same narrow space. As Mark had been witness to other experiences in the house, his fear level was low. The two of us stood there almost snickering at the sight and sound.
When the two of us joined everyone else downstairs, Chad and Tom tried to act like they had regained their composure. Both, however, were wide-eyed with anticipation and fear. Tom had been nervously pacing the floor and had eventually planted himself on the end of the couch nearest the door. I’m sure he felt that getting the seat closest to the door would give him a quick getaway, should something else happen. After one of the guys explained about the lights in the hallway going off and then on again, Samantha volunteered that the living room lights had done the same thing downstairs. Instead of showing fear though, she had simply said, “Hi, Sallie. Thank you.”
Having had an experience of their own, Tom and Chad wanted to know more. The rest of us took turns talking. As we did, Chad reported that he was feeling a funny coldness around him as he sat there at the end of the couch. I got up from the other end and walked past him over to the front foyer just a few feet to the left of him. Feeling the same coldness as I stood at the bottom of the stairs, I wa
s sure he had been feeling Sallie. I told him that she was likely standing her ground and not about to let anyone go back upstairs. Rather nervous that she was that close to him, he got up and moved into the dining room with the rest of us.
Twenty minutes later, Tony moved to where Chad had been sitting, and he also reported a distinct coldness across the left side of his face. A few minutes later, Tony got up and sat on the floor where Taylor and I were playing in the middle of the room. As he turned around, Samantha noticed a scratch on his face that went from the left side of his forehead down almost to his chin. It was on the same side of his face where he had felt cold. He reported that it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, he hadn’t even realized it was there until Samantha pointed it out. I guess the lack of pain, coupled with the thought that he may have inadvertently done it himself without realizing it, kept us from focusing on the possibility that it could have been paranormal. None of us were concerned or frightened by it.
The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed what had happened. In Sallie’s eyes, Tony and I had allowed the guys to go up and poke fun at her. As a father figure, he should have protected her; any child would have found it humiliating. I believed that this was Sallie’s way of letting us know she was unhappy with us.
Samantha and I supervised the playing babies from the couch and pursued our own conversation. The men had gathered at the dining room table, except for Tony, who was sitting on Taylor’s little rocking horse, just a few feet away from the dining room table and behind the rocking chair in the living room. From the couch, we could only see Tony’s neck and head above the rocking chair.
Suddenly, Samantha was pointing at something that was obviously shocking to her. Her eyes were wide, and she gaped as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t. What I saw seemed to be a very narrow, two-foot flame shooting straight up from behind the rocking chair. It also seemed to be just in front of Tony. Just as I took notice of it, Tony jumped off the wooden horse. He stood there in shock.
The Sallie House Haunting: A True Story Page 17
