I don’t believe in the supernatural.

The house I live in is my fathers childhood home. His mother was, frankly, schizophrenic, in an era where most people equated mental health with Rose Kennedy. She went untreated. She beat him as a child, and drove her entire family away. She died 15 years ago, and we are still cleaning out her accumulated garbage. She called for him on her deathbed; my father still didn’t go.

My mother also died in this house, suddenly. But she loved us, and we love her.

So I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I have been friends with two self proclaimed witches, who both said this place has an “off” energy. and sometimes, at night, you might sense movement out of the corner of your eye. It can be unnerving.

A few years back, I moved into an old farmhouse in the countryside. It was peaceful, except for the noises that would come from the attic every night, a soft thumping like someone walking around. After a couple of sleepless nights, I finally mustered the courage to check it out.

I climbed up to the attic with a flashlight. It was full of dusty old furniture and trinkets, probably from previous tenants. As I was examining a pile of old newspapers, my flashlight caught something - a pair of eyes glowing in the dark, staring right back at me. I nearly dropped the flashlight in shock. As I shone the light in the direction, I found an old portrait of a woman. The eyes were eerily lifelike. I convinced myself it was just the way the light was hitting it.

The noises didn’t stop, but I learned to live with them. But the weirdest part was when I left the house a 6 months later. The movers came to get my stuff, and I told them to leave everything in the attic, I’d Grabe those items myself. I mainly needed movers for the big heavy stuff. Later, when I returned to pick up some remaining items, the portrait was gone.

To this day, I still can’t figure out where it could have gone, why just that. Probably some completely logical explanation, but it still gives me chills when I think about it.

My sister and I got a Ouija board as teens because we were curious. We had a few interesting sessions, but things got dark one afternoon after school. Words were being misspelled that we both knew the correct spelling of. The messages were getting aggressive. At one point the message announced that both our parents had just died in a auto accident on the way home from work. (It was after 5 at that point.)

They both arrived safely, but a couple of hours later a friend came over who led a weekly class in metaphysics. (This was the late '60s.)

The instant he walked in the door, he froze. He announced with great concern that there was someone present to needed to be encouraged to move on.

At the beginning of that night’s class, he held some kind of ceremony encouraging whatever that was to leave.

We put the Ouija board away and never used it again.