The Duplex - Part One
We moved from the Oakwood house directly
into my grandmother’s duplex, her living on one side and my mom and I on the
other. Although there were two bedrooms upstairs, they were rather small so
my mom converted part of the basement into one extra large bedroom for me. Now
you would think that after going through the events at the Oakwood home I
would never set foot in a basement again, but this was a totally different
environment. The basement at the duplex was much more modern and finished to
look like regular rooms, not bare-block walls and coarse floors like the other
home. My room had a dropped ceiling, thick shag carpet, (hey, it was the
70’s) and paneling on the walls. Our move-in went smoothly; we got
comfortable rather quickly and were more then happy to call it our new home.
Everything seemed to be tranquil in the paranormal department, which was such
a great relief to our souls and minds. But that respite did not last long at
all.
Small things began happening at first.
Items where moved out of place, missing or placed in another part of the
house. This caused confusion between us when looking for even everyday typical
items such as hairbrushes, toothbrushes or keys. All the canned goods on the
pantry shelves (that lined the hallway and were not in a type of closet or
cupboard.) were being alphabetized on a regular basis, something my mom
accused me of numerous times. I don’t know how many times I heard, ‘The soups
stay with the soups, the veggies with the veggies, fruits with fruits, etc…’
by my frustrated mom. I adamantly denied moving the cans and also insisted
that I had no desire to have them in alphabetical order anyway. No matter how
many times we re-organized the pantry shelves the very next day upon coming
home from work or school, the cans were again, back to being in alphabetical
order. Mom worked midnights and was home one morning before I left for school
and made note that the cans in the hallway were in ‘her’ order. Later
that day while she slept, someone or something had re-arranged them back to ‘their’
order. She noticed this upon arising to visit the bathroom later that
morning, so she knew right then and there that it wasn’t me who was doing the
re-decorating of the groceries. Later that day, when arriving home from school
mom apologized and we agreed that maybe at least we had a ‘nice’ ghost this
time. So, as time went by we automatically looked for ‘vegetable soup’ under
the ‘V’s’, ‘beef soup’ under the ‘B’s’, ‘peaches’ under ‘P’, etc…and gave up
trying to out-do the ghost. When we added new cans from our weekly shopping
we formed the new habit of putting them in ‘alphabetical order’, and after
awhile never thought differently about it.
It wasn’t long, maybe about half a year
down the road that other things were being ‘re-arranged’. This included
pictures on the walls, photographs in frames on tables, and the furniture
itself. Our whole couch and loveseat had switched places one day, along with
the end table and a floor lamp. My clothes, which hung from a large bamboo
pole in one corner of my room, were put in ‘color’ order on several occasions,
as well as my own bedroom furniture being moved about also. Our ‘friendly
ghost’ also had the habit of re-folding some of the clothes from the dryer
that had been already folded and been lain out to be put up. To this day, as
I learned from the unseen ‘organizer’ I still fold underwear and socks like
‘it’ taught me.
This poltergeist activity began to
escalate as the months went by, so bad in fact that my grandma who lived next
door began hearing noises coming from the other side of the wall that we
shared. Several times she would go and investigate during the day when I was
at school and mom was out running errands to see what was being moved around.
She said she could hear what sounded like chairs being scraped across the
kitchen floor and even the table sometimes. We would upon returning home find
the kitchen dinning set moved out from the wall and into the middle of the
tiny kitchens floor. We simply scooted everything back into place. This
happened several times. Then the noises got louder and more physical as
numerous items began hitting the wall that separated our living quarters.
Whatever was hitting the wall would have such an impact that photos and
pictures that hung on grandma’s side would actually fall off the wall or get
tilted from the jolts. I remember her calling the police one time and said
there were burglars next door. They came and inspected the entire outside of
the duplex and found no forced entries; everything was locked and unbroken.
Upon entering our side they also found everything in place and empty of any
intruders. The noises continued on frequent occasions and there were several
times that grandma actually did find quite a mess in the kitchen, hallway and
living room, with canned goods strewn about along with magazines and pieces of
mail. But upon returning home, either my mom or I first, we would find nothing
out of the ordinary and everything was put back into place, neatly of course.
We told grandma that we had a ‘friendly’ ghost that liked to be neat, tidy and
very well organized. She did not disagree with us at all and she actually
started to ignore all the noises she would hear coming from the other side of
the wall and quit her inspections during the day.
I still had the Ouija board that we had
from the Oakwood house and it stayed in my bedroom in the basement. It was a
source of amusement with my friends and I on the weekends. (The board had
belonged to my mom who had used it for her own curiosities while living at the
Oakwood home. One of the uses back then was to try and find out what entity
was actually haunting the Oakwood house. I also remember using it as a form
of amusement with my friends at my 13th birthday pajama-party; we
had tried to contact numerous famous dead people, including Vlad Tepis Dracul.)
Mom didn’t know I had unpacked it and was using it in the basement of the
duplex, more so by myself then with others present. The board was very
receptive to my touch and would often entertain me for hours. It was only
when I had brought it upstairs and put it on the kitchen table and said, ‘Hey,
mom, check this out, this things moves by itself’, that she discovered I had
been playing with it. I related how I had talked to several different spirits
and how one of them had actually helped me on a homework assignment. (That
will be yet another story in and of itself in the future.) She knew from
experience that the board was a very dangerous tool and was not to be taken
lightly and for whatever reason, she took the board after I showed her the
planchette would move by itself and she tried to break it in half but only
slightly bent it in the center then she threw it in the trash can. We had a
brief and angry confrontation over it and I turned to go downstairs still
incapable of realizing what dangers that the board could hold. (Teenagers back
then as well as now seemed to always know everything; parents were stupid.)
She in turn took the kitchen trash outside, board and all, to deposit it into
one of those old pleated metal silver trash cans. (I miss those things; you
could take that round metal lid off and bang the crap out of it with a heavy
stick and chase off neighborhood trash sniffing dogs, opossums too!)
The next morning the Ouija board, box and
planchette was lying on the kitchen table. Another confrontation ensued as
she accused me of digging it out of the trash, which I had not. It all went
back into the trash. That night I found the board in my bedroom lying on the
floor in front of the stereo. I kept it hidden from then on, until years
later I confided in my mom as to what had happened and that I had decided to
keep it after it re-appeared in my room that night. (To this day I still
possess the board, along with another one I made out of a round glass
tabletop.)
A few months after the ‘Ouija in the
trash can’ episode, my mom was doing dishes in the kitchen. Directly behind
her was the door that led to the basement as well as to the side door to the
duplex. (You would open the door, go down three stairs and then there was a
landing that to the right was the side door to the outside, or to the left was
the stairs going down to the basement area.) While she was standing there she
heard the doorknob to the basement door turn with a slight squeak. Her first
initial thought was that it was I who was turning it. Then she heard it
rattle back and forth, to which she turned around, her hands still in the
dishwater, and actually saw it moving to and fro, back and forth. At first
she thought that maybe she had somehow locked the door from the kitchen by
mistake and that I couldn’t open the door, but she quickly noted that it
wasn’t locked and then something dawned on her…I was not at home. I had left
a few hours before to go visit some friends. She dried her hands off and
reached for the turning knob, grabbed it and threw open the door. There was
no one there, just empty space, and she stood there in confused amazement. In
that moment she remembered me telling her about playing with the Ouija board
and the contacts I had made through it. By her own experiences back in the
Oakwood home, she deducted that this had been one of the spirits I had been
communicating with in the basement of the duplex and it was looking for
me. She yelled out loud, ‘Jan’s not hear! She’s gone!’ With that said, the
unseen spirit then in turn began turning the knob to the door that led to the
outside of the house, and jerking on it as if trying to get out. My mom said
she could see through the slats of the blinds that hung from the side door
that the storm door was clearly shut, so that she knew for a fact that there
was no one on the outside trying to get in. This really unnerved her, so she
slammed the kitchen door and purposely locked it. She told me about it later
and said it was ‘someone’ probably looking for me, one of my spirits from the
Ouija board no doubt.
Had I known then what I know now, I would
have definitely done things a whole lot differently concerning the use of the
Ouija board.
It was about a year later my mom moved to
another state and left me there at the duplex. One of her sisters moved in
and stayed in the upstairs while I remained in the basement, paying rent, so I
could finish up my senior high school year. It was during this time that a
fathomless phenomenon occurred. Something I wish I had saved a part of the
evidence so I could maybe have it studied in these days with possible DNA
testing. I had a ravaging dream one night. One that was so completely real
I had awakened several times during the process of its horrific sequences. (I
have read that experts say a person cannot awaken from a dream, fall asleep
again and finish the same dream, but I beg to differ. I do this quite often,
as well as others I know of that can do the same thing, whether they want to
or not. Would love to hear from other readers out there who can do the same
thing. Of course these are dealing mostly with unwanted or un-purposeful
dreams; not ones you want to finish like with an imaginary lover…smile.) On
one moment of wakefulness I actually had to get out of the bed and walk around
to shake off the fear that had developed in my senses. But upon sliding back
beneath the covers, and after what seemed like an hour, sleep overtook me and
the dream began again where it had left off. The whole visualization of the
dream seemed to unfold like a psychotic horror movie. It basically involved
an insane game of the ‘bad guy’ running after the victim, the victim being
myself, and the ‘bad guy’ being something that was born from the diabolical
nether regions of a dark abyss. This wicked place of perdition was where most
of the chasing took place. It was a tormented, twisted vision of inside-out
graves consisting of tunnels and caves, where the animated rotted corpses of
the lost were protruding outward in grotesque moving portraits of bones,
sticky rancid flesh and engorged maggots, all of them still screaming out in
agony, dripping blood, saliva and tears. The walls and floors of this
frightful maze of caverns were all slick with a snotty spoiled substance, most
likely the juices from the decomposing cadavers poking out from the muddy dirt
like roots from an insidious Mephistopheles tree. The dream began with me
being charmingly seduced by an particularly handsome older man, possibly in
his early thirties, tall, dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, but when his
advances came to the point of his hand reaching out to touch my arm, that is
when the sudden desire to flee erupted throughout my body and I began to run.
The earth quickly opened up underneath me and I fell into a netherworld. The
attractive stranger then morphed into a demonic being and it was this
monstrosity that chased me for what seemed like hours through the horrific
catacombs of his world. His image would melt from one illusion to another as
he ran after me; it constantly changed, sometimes mimicking the corpses around
him in a mirror likeness. In the end of the dream, my heart felt like it had
grown to fill my whole upper body, it’s pulsations rocking me like thunder
strikes, my breaths came in deep gulps that burned the lining of my throat and
esophagus. I had to stop, in the end, and lean up against one of those slimy,
putrid walls of moldy dirt, ready to admit defeat and surrender. “God, help
me…” I uttered in an almost silent whisper through the heaving of my lungs,
and the earth opened up before me letting in a tremendous light. I remember
falling to my knees and crawling towards this brilliant revelation. The
fiendish adversary that had been behind me all this time, caught up, stopped
violently, like running into a solid wall then opened his mouth and emitted a
cursing roar. While heaving myself up towards the incredible aperture of
radiance, I glanced backwards, at the enemy that seemed blocked by an
invisible force field. His hideous form twisted with unbearable pain against
the brightness as he still attempted to lurch forward, trying to grasp any
part of me to pull me back into his sinister chasm. Just as I reached the
edge, I stood up off my knees, feeling the warmth and comfort of the saving
glow and stepped away from the obscurity behind me. It was in this moment of
action that my head jerked. The demonic fiend had grabbed a hunk of my hair
and was yanking me back towards him. The touch of his hands on the thick
strands singed and smoked like the way smoldering leaves do underneath fresh
ones. I remember smelling something like sulfur mixed with burnt hair.
My body lurched upwards out of the bed.
The covers went flying over the edge and I leaped to the floor, gasping for
breath. I could have sworn I smelled matches and scorched hair in the air.
Going back to sleep was not an option at that time, and besides it was only
about an hour before I had to get up anyway and get ready for school. I
gladly went upstairs to take an early shower to try and shake off the
nightmare. After a very long, hot session standing in the tub, I reluctantly
stepped out, dried off and began towel drying my hair. I used part of the
towel to wipe off the misted mirror so I could see to start blow-drying my
long wet mane. It was only when I was hanging my upper torso upside down,
using the blow dryer to get underneath that I saw the discoloration in the
left side of my wet tresses. Still bent over, I tilted my head to the right
and grasped the end part of my hair that seemed odd with my left hand and
brought it closer to my eyes. “What the Hell?” I actually spoke out loud, and
then rose up, still not letting go of my hair, to look again at it with better
lighting. I stared in amazement at the section of discoloration. It was
about 4 inches in length, and encompassed a thick hunk of strands, over an
inch when grasped in the hand. My hair, in this particular place, close to
the ends, was green! A nasty pea-soup green! And it smelled like putrid bile
upon closer inspection. Back into the shower I went, taking careful steps to
try and rid my hair of this mysterious staining. Over and over again I
attempted to scrub the green color out, even using a hairbrush soaked with
shampoo, soap, and even shaving cream at one point. Nothing. The smell did
however diminish, thank goodness. This whole ordeal unnerved me to no end,
and I had to wind up braiding my hair to try and hide the odd pigmentation.
Most people did not notice, but those
that did, all I could tell them was that some green food coloring fell out of
a kitchen cabinet with the cap off and it splashed on my hair. This was the
third high school I had attended, the second one that I had to go to while
living at the duplex, and didn’t have many friends at all at this one, and I
did not want to be classified as the ‘nut job’. The green color eventually
faded over the next few weeks, and what was left I had trimmed off with my
next hair cut. I have no rational explanation to this day for this puzzling
occurrence. Over the years I’ve studied and read up on dream research, the
unconscious mind, out of body experiences, etc…I cannot honestly state what
actually happened nor the cause of the stain in my hair, but I can tell you
that the same attractive stranger has tried to infiltrate my dreams several
times over during the past 26 years since then.
-Jan Thompson.