Clairalience

 I mentioned Clairalience in my last post as one of the multiple 'Clair-' abilities.  The others being Clairvoyant - seeing the unseen, Clairaudient - hearing the unheard, Clairsentience - feeling, either the emotions or physical pain of an entity, Clairgustance - tasting something that isn't actually there (I've never experienced this myself but my sister has.  More on that later), Claircognizance - knowing something we, by all rights, should not be able to know.  This one I've also had occurrences multiple times in my life that I'll go into another time.  And as the title mentioned, Clairalience - the ability to smell something which isn't there.  And that's what I'll primarily be focusing on during this post.  

The floral fragrance that I experienced with dad at Chaucer was the first time I can vividly recall that happening to me.  That's not to say it didn't happen earlier in life at other times.  Just that this specific time is my first time recalling it happening and recognizing it in that moment.  And it's happened a number of times since and I wanted to share a few of them here as they all seem to be directly tied to what may be on the other side of the veil.  

The most significant time I experienced Clairalience was in the days shortly after dad passed away.  This would have been back in 2012, in the week after his demise, I was working on putting myself into a blackout drunken stupor at the time.  I have to be honest, even though we had known this was going to be the eventual outcome for dad, even though we spent months preparing ourselves for the inevitable, when the time finally did come, I honestly wasn't ready for it.  And in those days, weeks and months that followed, I spent a LOT of time doing what I could to numb the pain.  
And so it was in this state of mind that I was several bottles deep into my nightly routine of blubbering on the couch and/or living room floor watching tv, tears would go from simple trickles down my cheek to full-on, body shuddering heaves that left me physically tired.  It was a Wednesday night, I was on the floor, between the TV stand and ottoman, bottle of Dos Equis almost gone and it hit me.  
Dad had this very distinct body odor.  I still can't forget it to this day.  It wasn't the Speedstick deodorant that he always used, it wasn't the Tres Flores brilliantine that he used in his hair, no, dad's body odor was very acidic, very similar to olive oil to me.  Not exactly but along those lines.  And that's the scent I caught in my living room that night.  It lingered, too.  Not like the flowers at Chaucer that was there and gone.  Dad's scent stayed with me a little longer than that.  Enough that once I caught the aroma, I breathed it in again.  A proper lung full.  By the time I exhaled and tried to catch it again, it was quickly becoming as faint as the flowers.  Gone.  I can only assume it was dad stopping by to visit me that night.  You know, he never came to visit me in that apartment while I was living there.  I lived there almost 3 years before he passed.  But he just wasn't driving anymore and climbing a full flight of stairs in his declining health just wasn't going to be happening.  But I have no doubt he came to visit me that night.  Whether it was just to check up on me, let me know he was finally better off or even if it was his way to say goodbye, I don't know.  
I think in that week between his passing and his life celebration, he was making the rounds visiting us kids and grandkids.  My sister-in-law told me that her youngest, who was 6 at the time woke up with a bolt in the middle of one night that week and just sat up and said, "Grandpa!" The other wonder twin, my sister's oldest, would dream of dad in the coming weeks and after as well.  Which made sense because he was one of the grandkids who spent the most time with him before dad went into the hospital.  I never asked any of the other kids if they were visited by dad but it's also been 10 years so I don't know if they'd remember after so long since they were all so young when he passed.  

The most recent experiences with Clairalience that I've encountered have been less personal and actually very recent.  As in, within the past year since I've started going on paranormal investigations and ghost walks locally.  The first time was at the Alexandria Ballrooms tour I went on with Haunted by History Author, Craig Owens.  The Alexandria Hotel is pretty much bordering skid row, just a short walk from the notorious Cecil Hotel in DTLA.  The Alexandria was THE place to see and be seen in a town before Hollywood was truly born.  While we were visiting the ballrooms and getting as much historical information from Craig, he took us to the staircase where he's mentioned guests of the hotel and film crews have seen apparitions walking up and down the stairs at random moments throughout the hotel's history.  And it was in this stairwell that I was struck by the smell, very distinct smell of cigarette smoke.  To me it literally smelled like someone had just been walking the stairs and was smoking along the way.  Which, not only was there nobody in the group smoking, the building itself is a non-smoking facility.  There's no way someone could have snuck into that stairwell to light up without having been seen by multiple people, much less dissipate any cloud of smoke for it to smell like it did.  

The next tour I went on where I caught the smell of something was with Haunted Orange County at the Kellogg House in Santa Ana.  Not to be confused with the Kellogg House in Pomona.  Hiram Kellogg of Santa Ana was a surveyor and engineer, not related the breakfast food magnate who owned the Pomona property.  It was at the end of the tour, we were all leaving the house and thanking Helen for letting us visit the home and I was stepping out the front door to the porch when I suddenly caught the aroma of smoke.  It was either a cigar or pipe smoke.  Much more aromatic than cigarette smoke, heavier, bolder.  And again, nobody around to be creating that.  In fact, I'm quite certain the entire property is non-smoking.  I mean, 100 year old wooden homes, you better believe they're not going to allow anyone to light anything on the porch.  And yet, there it was.  Very clearly, very distinct smell of smoke lingering outside the front door.  I should have asked our docent if Hiram was a smoker but the whole thing didn't really register with me and what it was until I was already in my car pulling out of the parking lot.  

Lastly and most recently a scent that hit me out of the ether was at an investigation with Craig Owens' group at the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro.  I had been on a previous investigation at theater and while there were a handful of other activities to occur before, that second investigation seemed to yield much more EVPs than the first trip.  But the clairalience I experienced was during a quiet moment for me in the upstairs lobby.  The other investigators/guests were either upstairs in the projection booth, downstairs in the restroom lobby or under the stage.  I was sitting between the restroom doors, camera gear down, still recording everything just in case and I was suddenly hit by the scent of shoe polish.  Very unusual since I wasn't wearing dress shoes and there was no one else nearby.  I could only assume that at some point in the theater's 90-year history, there may have been a shoeshine stand right about where I was sitting.  Logically it makes sense as it's a theater and people used to dress up for a night out on the town.  The fact that San Pedro is also a port, so Seamen would likely have stopped by the theater on leave, shoeshines would have been a common thing.  I just need to find out if there was a shine stand upstairs, if at all.   

And to just wrap this up on the Clair- senses, I mentioned my sister experienced Clairgustance at least once before.  And that was during her quinceañera.  During the church service as she was receiving communion, the priest gave her the Eucharist, just a small wafer of bread, and she said as she was eating it, that it felt and tasted like meat.  "This is my body."

Chaucer

 For the entire time I lived there, I always referred to the house as Chaucer.  Considering Geoffrey Chaucer's most famous works are the Canterbury Tales, it made perfect sense to me.  Although it's unlikely others would have clued in to things like that.  But while The Garage and Mountain Top were active residences for me and the Cul-de-Sac wasn't, Chaucer seemed to be a quietly active place from even before we moved in.  

My brother bought the house as a fixer-upper and boy, did it ever need the fixing up.  Several of the power outlets were bare wire, open boxes.  Some live, some not.  There may have been a foundation crack as there was a crack running most of the driveway into the garage and you could feel an uneven floor in the kitchen despite the tile that was laid over it.  The roof leaked, as did the bathroom, the bathroom being renovated after we had moved in.  I'll tell you, taking a shower in late winter with a partially missing bathroom wall makes for QUICK showers to get the hell back into the warmer house.  There were chain-link fences between us and the neighbors with both our left and right not even having the privacy slats in the fencing.  You could see everything our neighbors were doing, even when that meant the neighbors to our right were sunbathing or running naked from the kitchen door to their garage because she was doing laundry and literally had nothing clean to wear, or the neighbors to our left who would dig a hole in the backyard and dump their motor oil after changing it.  These were the same neighbors where their son's friend just decided to smash dad's back window out of the minivan just because he felt like it.  Oh, the shitstorm their dad gave that kid when he found out what had happened. 
But despite all of that, we actually turned that house into a home for the time we lived there.  

But it was even before we moved in that I took first notice of unexplained activity.  And it started with my bedroom.  We knew for a while when we were going to move from the rental to our new place so unlike previous moves, we had plenty of time to prep the house and start transitioning over from one to the other.  So I took advantage of this time to set up my bedroom before the move and make better use of the space.  I installed one of those wire closet organizers.  That helped a lot since I was scaling down to a smaller bedroom and smaller closet.  Maximize the use of space.  And I also bought a simple bookcase from Target.  You know the kind, the cheap particle board with the woodgrain decal in your choice of 'woodgrain' brown or dark brown/black.  I went with the 'woodgrain' and went into the house about a week before the big move to get those all set up.  It was just me in the place, all by my lonesome and listening to some music while I worked.  Didn't think anything about the random noises I heard in the other rooms since I just figured it was the house settling and since there wasn't anything else in the building, nothing to mute the echoing sounds.  No biggy.  
After I finished the bookcase, I went ahead and started to fill it with my books that I had mentioned previously.  The spiritual reading, shamanism and books on the occult.  Mind you, this point in my life I was also EXTREMELY anal retentive about my organization.  While I didn't always organize everything alphabetically...  well, I DID do that with my VHS collection.  Gah, late 90s of course I owned a small library of say, 50 VHS movies on an organizer.  But I didn't bring that over/set it up, just the bookcase and books.  But the books (and movies), I would always organize so they faced the same direction.  In that, you can read them Left to right, top to bottom.  Everything 'faced' the same direction so the book's spines, you could read at a glance.  

I finished up, locked up the house and left.  I wouldn't be back until the Big Move.  In fact, nobody was back in the house until the Big Move Day.  There were only 3 keys and I had one, my brother and our dad accounted for all 3.  Nobody was in the house from the time I finished working there until I moved the mattress into my bedroom a week later.  And it was as soon as I dropped the mattress on the floor and stopped for a few seconds to catch my breath that I noticed something was amiss.  From that laying position, I looked over at the bookcase and two of the books were facing the opposite direction.  Upside down for lack of a better word.  I know I would never have put them there like that and like I said, no one had been in the house since I was there last.  Who could have touched them much less moved them and then put them back exactly where I left them but facing the wrong way?  The books? 
A Dictionary of Angels and Demons
The Encyclopedia of the Supernatural  

Having lived with the entities in The Garage and then Fred and Wilma at the Mountain Top, I honestly didn't think much of this latest in a lifetime of unexplainable and genuinely didn't think about it again until hours later when I asked dad if he had been to the house since I was last there.  Of course he hadn't.  And of course my brother hadn't.  Yet, there it was.  And it was truly only the first of many small, very subtle activity in that house.  The next significant event didn't take place until a few years later and it was when it was just dad and I.  

My sister had a medical procedure done in Tijuana, because stateside doctors can often never find anything wrong or their process takes too long that people often opt for medical care outside of the country.  Medical "vacations" are a thing if you weren't aware.  Anyway, my sister was at a hospital in TJ and mom was there by her side as always.  So back at home it was dad and I.  He was laying on his bed, doors open leading to the living room and I was in the living room, facing the TV, my back to him.  He made a rustling noise like he was sitting up so I looked back at him and in that instant, he asked me, "Did you smell that?!"  
"No, what?"  
At this point, dad had already had surgery to remove his lower intestine, ulcerative colitis, so he had an ostomy appliance attached to his hip.  I mention this because some of you might be thinking dad farted and as a joke wanted me to breathe it in.  He couldn't pass gas that way anymore so no.  I didn't smell anything.  
He took a few seconds to compose himself and said, 
"I just smelled flowers.  The most incredible smelling flowers like someone had just walked past me with a bundle of them." 
"No, I didn't smell anything." and part of me was wondering how that could be.  After a couple of minutes of just sitting there facing one another hoping to smell it, me for the first time, him a second time, we both just went back to watching our separate TVs.  Him laying back down, me turning back to the living room.  Then it hit me.  

To this day, I can't fully describe properly what it was I caught the aroma of.  It was distinctly floral, almost like a rose.  But even a rose didn't smell as sweet.  It swept past me and I caught a whiff of it, just enough to register and then when I went back to breathe it in deeper, it was gone.  I swiped my head back and forth, leaning forward, stretching my neck out further and further to catch that aroma once again but it was gone.  I looked back at my dad who was sitting up on his bed again and he just smiled at me and said, 
"There it was again."  

I'm sure if you're even passingly familiar with the unexplained, the term Clairvoyant or even Clairaudient should sound familiar.  The ability to "see" or "hear" that which isn't there.  Mediums OFTEN claim to be Clairvoyant, even when they're not.  But I so rarely ever hear about the other Clair- abilities.  And I had never even heard of the term; Clairalience.  The ability to smell something which isn't there.  Yet, that seems to be what I've experienced.  In fact, both my dad and I experienced the same thing at the same time.  And if that doesn't do it for you, I'll do you one better.  We weren't the only two to smell those flowers at the time.  

Down in that Tijuana hospital as my sister was recovering from her surgery, and mind you, MANY of the hospitals in Mexico are run by churches.  And this one was no different, with the nurses actually being nuns associated with the church.  But in that hospital bed, my sister with mom sitting at her side, she asked mom what kind of incense the nuns were lighting in the hospital.  
"They don't burn incense here, it's a hospital."  

Cul-de-sac

It's taken me a few days to finally getting around to talking about this house for a few reasons. The first being that it wasn't 'our' house. Dad lost the previous house due to bankruptcy and we quickly needed a new place to live. So we found a rental in a cul-de-sac, the price was manageable and it was just big enough for the family. This was also around the time I started reading up more and more about what existed beyond our understanding of the world. Yes, I believed and saw with my own eyes unexplainable events but at this point in my life I started reading up more and more about angels and demons and got in touch with my spiritually. Sure, I bought a paperback about witches and spells when I came across the New Age section at B. Dalton years earlier when I was still in high school but I was well into working at the college at this point. However, once mom found that book back then, all hell broke loose and one of my aunts took it to do, I don't know what she planned on doing with it. She later told me she had put it in a closet in her home and her girls would "see" someone/some thing in the closet because of the book. I'm pretty sure I rolled my eyes at that statement back then and I'm rolling my eyes again just writing this out. 

Anyway, I started practicing shamanism and deep meditation techniques by the time we had moved in so I must have either blocked out what was going on at that house or it was leaving me alone for some reason. But that's not too say things weren't occurring there. Just that I wasn't experiencing it personally. So these are going to be second- and third-hand accounts. 

While I never sensed anything, my sister told me once we had moved out years later, that she never felt comfortable going into my bedroom for any reason. That in the back of her mind, she kept feeling/sensing that, "it's Louie's room, we can't go in there." Which I found so odd she felt that way since I hadn't been doing anything other than meditating in there. 

But it was my sister in her bedroom that she mentioned a sense of unease at times. She even stated that a few times she would wake up in the middle of the night and see a figure squatting in the corner of her room, only the moonlight coming through the window giving any sense of what she was looking at. Or that she once woke up to a woman standing over her bed looking down at her. 

While living at this house, my sister and the guy she would eventually marry started dating and a few times he'd sleep out in the living room and he said he never felt comfortable sleeping out there, that there was something or someone watching him while he slept. 

Other family members have mentioned an unsettling feeling at that house while we lived there. 

We were told at some point through my sister and brother's friends that the rental house was once known as the "party house" among their friends of friends. Which may be a reason why some of these things were happening. But considering the dark nature of what everyone else was feeling, it never bothered me, much less get my attention like what had happened at our former residences. Or what was to come at our next home. 

Fred and Wilma

While Fred and Wilma were mostly pranksters over the years, things changed once the baby was born.  My brother's girlfriend gave birth to my nephew and moved in with us.  Naturally, we made several changes to the living situation and the un-living made their own changes.  Firstly, I had been living in the garage, which had been partially converted to a living space.  Not the entire garage but at least a good 2/3rds of the space was walled off, drywall was hung and a window was cut into the back wall.  Was it up to code?  What, are you kidding?  You think dad was going to bother with permits much less doing anything the legal, proper way?  But that was my 'bedroom' for a few months, and as I mentioned, once the baby was born, I swapped the larger room for what had been my old bedroom in the house where my brother and Cynthia had been living in before the baby.  

The first instance I can CLEARLY, VIVIDLY remember when Fred and Wilma were watching out for the baby was sometime in late spring.  Cynthia had just come out of the room, I was sitting in the living room watching TV and she asked if I could just listen out for the baby while she ran to the bathroom.  As she said this, I heard the baby briefly cry out and was quiet again.  Cynthia briefly stopped, looked back towards the room and turned back to head to the bathroom again.  When you gotta go, you gotta go.  The only reason I remember this all in such great detail is because of what happened once she came back out.  

As I mentioned, I sat watching TV the entire time, not a peep from the baby and Cynthia steps back into their room, takes a few steps in, then turns around and point blank asked me if I had gone into their room.
"No, I've been sitting here this whole time.  What's up?"  I get up and start walking towards her and their doorway.  She turns and points to the baby, who's laying in the middle of the bed, sucking on his bottle.  She goes on to tell me that she was about to feed him when she ran off to the bathroom.  But she left in such a rush that when she heard him cry, she knew it was because he was hungry but she really had to go.  
Mind you, the baby was laying in the center of the bed, still too small to turn himself over, never mind crawl, and she had left his bottle on the corner of the bed, far out of his reach.  And when she got back, he was still in the same spot but happily sucking on his bottle.  Right then, I knew it had to be our other residents looking out for the baby.  

Another event with the baby, he was in his walker bouncing around the living room and he got too close to this record cabinet dad had in the living room. It was just big wooden monstrosity, super dark brown, almost black, that kind of brown. It was also up on caster wheels because dad wanted to be able to move it around if mom wanted to rearrange things. Which just looked so bad and I guess he thought all that effort to even install them wasn't as bad as just taking the records out to move the thing. Anyway, this was up along the wall between the house and garage. Sitting precariously on top of that was a large wooden cassette tape organizer. I'm sure you know the kind I'm talking about if you owned any tapes in the 80s to mid 90s. So dad was sitting on the couch, still in his bathrobe since it was still fairly early morning still. I was sitting at the dining room table half reading the paper, half watching whatever it was dad had on the TV. Rob was bouncing along right up to that record case monstrosity and hit it just hard enough that it got both mine and dad's attention. We both just saw the wooden cassette case start to wobble from the impact and we jumped up. But it was too late, the case started to topple over, right above the baby. And it somehow missed him completely. 

From the position it was sitting at and the angle of the drop, by all accounts, it should have fallen squarely on top of the baby below. Instead, the whole thing tipped forward father than it realistically should have, hit the armrest of the couch and then dropped to the ground right next to it. The entire thing barely even grazing the bouncer. Despite the baby's safety, dad was already worked up thinking the worst had happened that he swore at the cassette case, grabbed it and somehow managed to open the front door at the same time and flung it halfway across the yard, screaming, bellowing, swearing at the thing. Scaring the baby. I just looked on in shock. That the only reason the baby was even crying was because Grandpa's rage startled him. There's no way the baby could have, should have been unharmed. Yet, here we were. 

Still another time with the baby was probably the most concrete to me that would suggest we had more than just our family living in that house. 

I was sitting in the living room, on the couch, wall side so to my right was the hallway leading to the bedrooms. The baby was just strong enough to sit up, hold his own head up, so I was playing with him in my lap, holding both his hands in mind. More like his hands wrapped around my fingers lol only for the roles to be reversed for the next several years haha. So I'm playing with the baby and the only thing behind me is the wallpaper. Suddenly, he stops bouncing and turns his head to the left, looking down the hallway. And slowly, he kept turning to his left, to his shoulder, reaching back as much as he could before he reversed it and went to his right side and then kept turning, looking until the was looking at the end of the wall as it lead into the kitchen. He was watching someone or something walk through the room. That's the only logical reason for what he did. He was tracking an object from one side of the room to the other. 

Shortly after that happened, we ended up moving. No, it wasn't Fred and Wilma that ran us off. Financial reasons and we moved into a rental in a quiet cul-de-sac. At least street was quiet, the house itself was another story. 

The Shadow Knows - Vol. II

 The next time I could recall seeing a shadow person...  You know what, I'm just remembering from my youth in playing Dungeons and Dragons that there were shadow people in the game but they were called Shades.  Humanoid characters that had entered the Shadow Realm.  I think I'm going to use that term to describe these things from now on.  It sounds better than just "Shadow People."  
So as I was saying, the next time I saw a Shade was after we had moved to Riverside.  The house mom and dad had bought was a few steps up from a shack.  Yes, it was four walls and a roof, 3-bedrooms, front and back yards, the whole shebang.  But there was no insulation and it was raised on short pillars.  Which meant heat waves and cold breezes ran under the floors, which in turn made summers unbearably hot and the winters, bitterly cold.  The one gas heater in the hallway did nothing to warm the house in the winter.  And the only AC in the summer were two window units that had been installed into the walls at opposite ends of the house.  That first summer we moved in, my brother and I would spend most of the day laying on the floor in the living room under that AC unit.  And THAT house had a number of unexplained events occur in the years we lived there.  

Within the first few weeks of us moving in, everyone in the house had dreams of dogs or wolves surrounding the house.  In Mexican culture, pre-Columbian era, dogs are considered to be guides for the departed, leading and protecting our spirits on our journey to the afterlife.  It's no coincidence that Dante was Miguel's spirit guide in the Pixar film, Coco.  The Xoloitzcuintli breed has a long, deep history in the Aztec religion.  Also, I LOVE that Dante is the dog's name.  Overt reference to Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.  A story where he, the author, is taken on a tour of the afterlife. Granted, teenage me didn't know about the dogs as spirit guides at the time but I do recall it was an unusual thing to be hearing family members all talking about seeing dogs in our dreams shortly after we moved in.  

But it was during our second, possibly third summer living there when we saw it.  And by we, I mean it was both my sister and I at the same time.  We were sitting in the living room watching whatever it was on TV.  It was summer break so it was either Price is Right or a Soap Opera.  I blame our brother for getting us into One Life To Live for a while there.  The room setup was: the couch was a giant L-shape and coffee table, all facing the console TV.  My sister was sitting on the side that was resting against the wall.  I was sitting opposite side with my back to the dining room table behind me.  
I'm not entirely sure why I looked, could have been that feeling you get when you just know, can sense, someone else in the room.  But I turned to look to my right, behind me towards the dining room table.  And that's when I saw the Shade.  Just a dark shadowy figure, I couldn't make out any features other than it was an adult-sized figure, not even dressed in black, literally just a shadow but it was a very defined shape.  It stood there for a brief moment before it suddenly reacted, like someone who got caught looking, and dropped behind the couch out of sight.  I immediately jumped up off the couch and ran around the arm rest to the dining room.  No one there.  From the dining room it was a clear, straight walk to the kitchen dining area, no more than 20 feet or so from where I stood to the sliding glass doors, which were closed.  I quickly crossed that distance and looked around the kitchen as well.  
Mind you, the house was pretty sparse with its furnishings.  There wasn't anywhere for anyone or anything to hide.  But there was no one there.  I slowly walked back to the living room and looked at my sister and just asked, "Did you see that?" 
"The man standing there looking at us?" I nodded, "and then he hid behind the couch."

It's one thing for a person to claim to have seen a Shade when they're alone in the middle of the night.  Could easily be dismissed as a pile of clothes sitting in a chair and you couldn't make out what you were looking at in the dark.  And even my previous encounter with a Shade that again, someone could dismiss as a shadow from outside being projected in.  But there's no reasonable, logical explanation for two people, to see the exact same shadowy figure, in the middle of the day, in the middle of summer and behaving as it did.  Reacting to our presence with conscious effort.  

I had another Shade sighting in that house before we moved out.  Although, that one was a little more nerve wracking/unpleasant and I've never talked about it before.

But for the most part, the unexplained phenomena in that particular house was more playful.  Keys missing from where you left them until you returned and they were right there the whole time.  The toilet flushing at odd hours, lights being left on when you know you turned everything off before you left.  Little things like that.  We even started to call them Fred and Wilma.  I don't know which of us kids started using those names for them but pretty soon we all just accepted Fred and Wilma were going to be part of our lives while we lived there.  But it was once the baby was born, my oldest nephew, that Fred and Wilma really became more active and took on a protective role in the house.   

The Shadow Knows

 I've retold this tale many, many times over the years.  It's become a common topic the more ghost tours and investigations I've attended so the story has become old hat to me at this point.  But it does lay the groundwork for what's become my personal history in the realm of the unexplained.  

I've mentioned for years that we grew up poor and it wasn't until I was a teenager did our family finally live in a proper home and I had an actual bedroom rather than a converted garage to sleep in.  Yes, dad worked at a patio construction shop so he had access to construction materials that could almost pass for something real but when the 'walls' that separate your bedroom from the living room and the bedroom next to yours are just thin particle board and honeycomb paper, you really don't have much.  But it was in this living situation, the converted garage at grandma's house that I saw my first 'entity' and realized something was amiss even then.  

Now, grandma's house had stories.  Oh, so many stories since as far back as I could remember.  Unusual dreams were the most common among anyone who lived or even stayed there for any length of time.  And in one of the bedrooms on the opposite end of the house, family claimed to have felt people tugging on their feet in the middle of the night.  But what I experienced when I was probably about 8 or 9 years old, I'll never forget.  

I was sleeping in my 'bedroom' when I awoke in the middle of the night.  Not a clue as to what time it was other than it was dark.  No bedside clock to even look at.  From where my bed lied, I could look out the opening that made up the door that lead into the living room.  And from there, I could see pretty much the length of the room, from the front door to a curtained alcove dad made up as a closet for the family.  It was that darkness where there's a blue hue to everything, the only real light coming in from a window along the wall opposite the door.  And it was in this darkness I made out a figure in front of the closed front door.  Totally in black, which considering the hour of night and lack of any light, didn't seem out of place. The figure looked to be a female form, dressed in what looked like a robe and atop their head, a bundle that could be described as a turban, similar to a woman with her hair wrapped up in a towel.  So my mind immediately assumed it was mom coming in from having showered in the main house.  
I watched as she walked from the front door to the closet area, behind the curtain and then nothing.  Dad had set a pull-chain lightbulb and that was the only light available back there.  But the light never came on.  It felt like minutes that I kept waiting for the light to shine from the gaps in the curtain.  It may have only been seconds but it struck me as odd what mom was doing back there in the total darkness.  Finally, after what felt like forever, I started to call out to her. 
"Ma!"  nothing.
"Ama!"  silence.
"AMA!"  I called out again hoping to get some kind of response.  Still nothing.  What is she doing back there in the dark?!  I called out a couple more times before dad responded from their bedroom. 
"Que quieres, mijo?"  What do you want, son?
"Donde esta mi ama?"  Where's mom?
"Aqui dormida.  Que quieres?"  Right here sleeping, what do you want?

I don't even think I replied, I just pulled the covers over my head and forced myself to try and sleep.  But obviously I've never forgotten about that night.  

Naturally, anyone who will deny the existence of shadow people has likely never seen one.  Or if they have, they've attempted to rationalize away what they actually saw.  But even my young mind realized what I saw had no explanation.  There wasn't anything outside the window that could have created any sort of shadows that appeared to move, like a human would, tracking that distance in that space of time and actually pull the curtain back before going in.  

That also wasn't the last time I would encounter a shadow person.  But the next time wasn't in the middle of the night and I wasn't alone when I saw it.  

Baby Steps

 Welcome to my first foray into documenting both my own personal history with what one might consider the supernatural or paranormal.  I'm sure like many of you, there have been events, occurrences or activities that just don't have a clean, definitive explanation.  My life and those of my family, both immediate and extended, have been filled with unexplainable phenomena.  What this blog is intended to do is both catalog and dissect some of those events. 
Also, I'll be charting my own personal progress into a more detailed approach to exploring what's out there.  I know even using the phrase, "scientific method" rubs some people the wrong way because "There's no proof ghosts exist!"  That's true, you can't publish papers or have anything peer-reviewed because tracking these, for lack of a better word, entities, has been a crapshoot at best. 
And at this point, I'm going to clarify that the majority of my topics are going to be about the supernatural.  I will not be actively discussing UFO's or alien life, unless something drops out of the sky on the news tomorrow.  I also will not be going over cryptids because of the sheer number of them and how they're predominantly location based.  

As for how the site got its name; "I would have gotten away with it, too!  If it weren't for you meddling kids!"  Many of us grew up watching the Scooby-Doo Mysteries and for all the run-ins they had with ghosts and the supernatural, they all came down to Old Man Withers chasing kids away from his run-down amusement park.  There weren't any ghosts to speak of.  So, in that spirit, (HA, see what I did there?)  I'll be as discerning and discriminatory as possible when I do come across some claims.  I can think of a handful of YouTube channels dedicated to the mysterious universe and how laughable their claims can get when their proof is a 2-second blurry video clip without any background information that shows a door swinging open.  ~oooohhhh...~  

Please bear in mind that these are my first steps into cataloging these events so I might be all over the place at times.  And with that, let's see what's out there!