Here we go again

   Things in this house disappear and often reappear. Sometimes they never reappear and sometimes they reappear in totally unethical places. This morning I needed to take some medicine and vitamins. I keep them in a large circular pill box that divides the doses into daily allotments for a week. This is no small pill box, it measures about 8 inches in diameter. The pill box is normally on the kitchen table. If I fill it and forget to put it on the table then it should be with the vitamins on the kitchen work area beside the sink. This morning I looked the table over, no pill box. Really, other than salt and pepper, a jar for straws, and a caddy for outgoing mail and a bottle of honey, thats about it.  Certainly no way to hide a large pill box. So I checked the kitchen counter. The bottles of herbals and vitamins were there but no pill box. Makes no sense, I know that no one has taken that pill box out of the kitchen so I go over the whole kitchen even to looking inside the cabinets. Keep in mind I'm home alone unless you count two schnauzers, but they can't really reach the table and what would they want with a pillbox full of nasty tasting pills? So I came to the original male conclusion that my wife must have put them some place else. I went into the library with the intent of calling her and asking. Her place of business phone was busy. Figuring I'd have to wait til she got home to ask, I gave up on the quest and returned to the kitchen for a bit of lunch. There on the table, about where I would put my dinner plate was the missing pill box. There is no way that that pill box was there when I was going nuts trying to find it. Thats a bit too obvious for even the most irresponsible of males to overlook. That box was not there, then it was, period. This has happened before, but it has been a while. The candelabra bulbs are still missing.

A possible haunting

    A local aquaintance of ours who was always polite but obviously  would have nothing to do with "ghosts" or anything paranormal; has had an episode that calls her beliefs into question. I guess the fact that we do not openly buy into the ghost theory of the strange, she felt she could ask us about something she and her granddaughters experienced this past week. It seems she has had, since her days of youth, a doll house which she admits she tends to rearrange the furniture in from time to time, so she is very familiar with all the furniture and things in that house. Her own residence, while not in this town, is in the same county. It is an old farmhouse, built in the late 1800s and sits pretty much to itself. In the ten years she has lived there she has not had any sort of paranormal experience until now. Her story is thus: My granddaughters came to visit with their mother last week. The girls saw the old doll house of mine and asked if they could play with it. Knowing these girls to be quite responsible for their ages (6 and 10) she said they certainly could so long as they put anything taken out of the doll house back in it when they were finished playing with it. She said the girls amused themselves with it for quite some time, but came bedtime they placed all of the pieces back into the doll house and went to bed. The next day one of the girls came to her and said, "Honest Grandma we didn't break it", "Break what?" "The little chair in the dollhouse", the child replied. The older grand daughter entered the kitchen at this time saying, "Honest, she's telling the truth, We really didn't". Well I said lets go see what you are talking about and we went into the room with the doll house. Lying in the corner of the dollhouse parlour was a small wooden chair; retriving it, I immediately knew it was not out of my dollhouse where almost all of the furniture is plastic except  a bureau and china closet which are wood. The little chair was wood. Two rear legs were broken so the chair would not sit up right. But this chair had to have been one expensive piece when it was new, it had intricate ingraving up the existing legs and across the back. I assured the girls that I believed them and wondered where on earth this little broken chair came from. We were discussing this whole business at the breakfast table when the younger child said, Maybe it was the little girl's that Sherrie saw last night. The mother gave the younger child a hard look, like "Shut up". "OK that did it, I said I wanted to know what was going on". The mother, who is the lady in questions own daughter, said, "Oh nothing Mother". Well we all know you don't say Oh nothing to any Mother and live to hear the end of it. So the daughter had to reveal all. "Last night, Sherrie thought she saw a little girl in the upstairs hall, you know how kids are, they have a very intense imagination." Then the younger child piped up with, "Then why did you make us sleep with the lights on last night?" Grandma thought that was funny. "OK, OK, the daughter admitted, it unnerved me, so shoot me." Grandma asked what the little girl looked like. Sherrie said "She was a little smaller than me but bigger than my sister. She was wearing a long flowered dress that almost went clear to the floor. She ran down the upstairs hall." "I still think it was her imagination", replied a slightly red face mother. Grandma took the little broken chair and laid it upon a bureau, thinking she could get a friend of hers , who was an expert in old childrens toys to look at it. The girls and their mother left for home. Grandma looked at the tiny chair again before going to bed. The next day she planned to run some errands so she figured she'd stop off at the toy mans shop with the broken chair and get his opinion. She went to retrive the chair....it wasn't there. She looked all over, it was not there. So she said, "What do you think?" There are some very remote possibilities, but I really didn't feel they were grounded enough to suggest; none of them covered all aspects of this episode anyway. What do YOU think?

Update on Thunderous blast

     I finally found another individual who heard that thunderous blast that shook the windows and the ground I was standing on. A villager who lives about a quarter of a mile from us told me it shook the windows of her house and about scared her to death. Then she said in a very discusted tone; my husband was in the livingroom and when I asked him about the blast he said, "What blast?" He didn't hear anything, so he said, and he is not hard of hearing. She was relieved that someone besides herself  had heard it. We still have no idea what it was or why the majority of people in town have no idea what we are talking about. I'm not kidding when I said the ground shook and my ears rang. My wife said the windows rattled and so did the lady up the street; but nobody but us three heard it. Selective hearing?

Thunderous blast

First of all, keep in mind this town is rather small. Most of the towns residents live on Mainstreet which is less than a mile long and is a part of the Old National Road. The town only has four roads running east and west, but there are many alleys and side streets. In short the village is pretty  much clustered in a small area. Last Saturday night as I was working in my garden, just as the final rays of light were passing into the evening shadows, I heard the first of several volunteer firemen come down the street and hurry into the fire station. Within less than a minute the firetruck, siren blazing, had headed out of the station and west on mainstreet toward the Interstate. The firetruck had had about enough time to leave the village limits when a thunderous blast was heard that was so loud the ground shook where I stood. I wondered if the Firetruck had hit something. My wife came out the backdoor of our house which faces our garage and garden, asking what on earth happened.  I assured her I did not know. Strangely, I did not see another neighbor anywhere. The blast was loud enough to (my wife said) rattle the windows in our house; surely others were curious....wouldn't you think? My wife got into our car and drove around town looking for the source of the explosion. She came back, shaking her head. "I saw absolutely no one" she said. "Nobody in their yard or along the street to ask, nobody." This is strange, the town is small, but usually busy on a week end. Today, I asked around at church and the neighbors.....strangest thing.....none of them heard a thing. You tell me.

An update

We have entered the period that is normally quiet in this house. That is not to say the strange doesn't happen in summer and early fall, but it seems to be far less frequent. To bring you up to date on past events. The "Thumping" sound that plagued us for months, occuring only in the Library until the last month that we heard it (that month it was heard only in the kitchen), it suddenly stopped and has not been heard since. The lightbulbs that suddenly went missing in the diningroom have never, as yet, reappeared. Perhaps the "haunts" have grown tired; we haven't experienced as many episodes this past year that we normally do. But if things occur, I will report it here.

Local "Witch"

     When we first moved here in 79, we heard the story about the local witch. As that was several years before I started this blog, I had pretty much forgotten about it until reading a story about witchs bottles in an old issue of National Geographic brought it to mind. The county history does not mention her. The story is second hand from older residents who supposedly were in on the demolition of the witches house in the mid-1940s, just after World War Two. The "Witch" was a recluse; though she lived near the center of town her house was an old ramshackled log construction and stood by itself in the center of three lots. According to the story everyone in town was afraid of her and she wasn't overly friendly with anyone in town; just staying to herself. Needless top say, anytime disaster struck anyone in town the whispering started that the old witch was probably behind it. Whoever she was, her time in the village took up the later part of the 1800s. Not date of death is remembered, but everyone who knew of her insists it was from natural causes.  Her old house sat, primarily empty, after her death. It was thought that a relative, in a neighboring state, inherited the property and pretty much forgot about it; though they must have kept up with any taxes. Sometime just after WW2, someone new bought the lots and what was left of the log house. The new owner decided to build a new house on the center lot where the log house stood. This necessitated tearing down the old house which was in really sorry condition. Right off the bat, when distruction started, the whole place caved in, almost getting some of the workmen who, luckily, saw it coming and got out of the way. It was just a matter of cleaning up the rotten logs and getting them disposed of. Much of the house had fallen into the basement. One wall that fell into the basement was found to be a falsewall. The wall behind it (they had collapsed together) was found to be covered with horse shoes in different configerations. While clearing out the basement they found sealed jars with nails and human hair in them. That got tongues a wagging. Other sealed jars appeared to have pieces of cloth, needles, and nail parings in them. All of this weird stuff was gathered up and burned or buried. I'm told no one opened any of the jars. I suspect the old girl was just alone so long, she was crazy. But older residents in this village think, even yet, that she was a witch. Think what you like, the time of "The Witch" was over a hundred years ago, even if there are still people around who remember the distruction of the house and what their elders told them about the old "witch" that lived there.

Glass broken inside in middle of the night.

   Our neighbors, not those next door but still in the village, experienced a strange phenomena last night and again early this morning. They live in a house that is modern in design, all on one floor; no basement, no attic. The house rambles a bit; you enter through a large sun room which opens into a roomy sitting room which opens into a small kitchen. From the kitchen is a hallway that leads to a Great Room on the right and the hall continues past the Great Room and leads to the Bath and three normal sized bedrooms. From the middle bedroom the hall continues to a pantry and then a utility room and the back door. From the hallway into the Great Room are French Doors. These doors contain of several panes of glass. These doors have been here better than 15 years. The doors open and close easily. The interior temperature of the house is controlled by either air conditioning or a furnace. The temperature range from summer to winter is between 60 and 75 degrees. There are two dehumidifiers that keep the humidity in the house close to normal. Last night, around 3 am a terrific crash of glass brought both owners out of bed with expectations of someone breaking in. A through search of the house revealed only that a pane of glass was broken out of those interior French doors. An inspection of the doors revealed that the other panes of glass were solidly in place and uneffected. Nerves shattered the owners retreated back to bed, the male of the household trying to convince himself the glass breaking was the result of changing temperatures. This morning when the pair got up, half convinced the broken glass was a fluke, they again went to the Great Room to look over the door in broad daylight. Again they inspected each pane of glass for evidence of why one would suddenly break. Everything was firm and fine. The couple had breakfast and as the lady of the house was going to the bathroom she again passed the French Doors and something didn't look right. Going over to the door she noticed the pane above the broken one was full if fine cracks. Considering the fact they had just checked each of these panes less than an hour prior, this was a surprise or maybe shock would be a better word. Running her finger over the crazed pane, the glass fell out of the center but remained around the edges. They now have two panes of glass to replace, But what could possibly cause such an unusual chain of events?  I know this entire area experiences the weird. I doubt that I hear even a fraction of what goes on in the area of strange occurances. These people are very close friends. I saw the result of this particular weirdness as they had not, as yet, replaced the glass. Anyone out there care to hazard a good guess how such a thing can happen?