>
When my parents first purchased our 150-year old farm in
1968, they had no idea that ghosts were part of the package.
One night in 1969, my sister Sara, a few months old at the
time, was asleep in her room. In the middle of the night, my
father and grandmother heard an infant crying. They entered
Sara's room and saw a crying baby standing in her crib with its
arms outstretched. Upon reaching the crib, they found that the
crying baby had vanished and Sara was fast asleep. Sometime
later, my mother was resting in that room, when she saw an old
lady standing over her. When she looked again, the apparition
was gone. When Sara was four, she saw a woman come into her
room one night. She threw a stuffed animal at the figure. The
toy passed through the woman and Sara yelled for our father.
When he arrived, the woman was gone, but he saw a figure moving
down the hallway. Investigation revealed nothing.
On another occasion, my father and his brother had had a few
drinks and were investigating the cemetery on our property.
They accidentally knocked over a gravestone, but opted to wait
until the next day to restore it. That evening, the glass salt
and pepper shakers were not in their usual perches on the back
of the stove. They were found smashed, in a corner of the
kitchen. Later, they saw the light switch turn off and on. The
next day, they fixed the stone.
About twenty years ago, my father put a toy typewriter we no
longer used in the attic. A few nights later, around midnight,
we could hear someone pounding away on the keys of that
typewriter. We were all in bed, and no one could've entered the
attic without alerting our dogs. It certainly redefines the
term "ghost writer."
Then there are the floating lights. The first time I saw one
of them, I thought it was a light behind me reflecting off of
my watch onto the wall. When I jerked my hand, the light moved
where I expected it to, but seconds after I stopped moving my
hand. My cousin, who was out in the barn, came in, out of
breath,and said he saw a light floating in the barnyard. I had
seen some kind of reflection of this light on the wall. My
sister Sara says she sees these lights periodically on her
bedroom wall at night.
They flicker and move sporadically around the room. A few
years ago, something else happened to me. It was late, and I
was the last one awake. I had had some ice cream, and was in
the kitchen washing my dish, when the light turned off. I
turned the light on again, washed my dish and went to bed. I
know when to call it quits. You can think what you will about
these events, but experiencing them first hand made a believer
out of me!
As recently as June of 2010, a tenant on the first story
apartment in the farmhouse at Hide-Away Farm reported a
supernatural encounter. He said that when he would try to sleep
at night, someone or something was poking him. He was up late
one night working on his computer when an unseen force
scratched his harm. One of the most disturbing activites to
occur was when his razor fell from the top shelf of the
medicine cabinet directly to the floor. Our tenant, an amatuer
paranormalist, conducted one hundred trials in which he
carefully attempted to recreate this incident. Every time the
razor fell from the top shelf, it landed in the bathroom sink.
It was shortly after this that every razor in the house would
mysteriously end up in the bathtub.
Our tenant finally contacted a medium and she said she felt
two presences in the house, one male and one female. The male
presence had some negative designs for our renant's adolescent
daughter. The female presence was identified as the tenant's
mother and she was protecting the daughter. She could not
protect two people, so the male presence was displacing his
anger on her father, our tenant. The medium was able to
convince the male presence to leave. She did get his name
however before he departed. The tenant came up here with his
daughter and asked to be taken to the cemetary at Shady Lane
Farm. The name they had been given was the name of the second
person to be interred at that cemetary and he had been buried in
1854. Reportedly, the male presence has not been back.
<.div>