READERS TALES
In the summer of 1978 my Airman ex-husband our twin daughters and I had just
returned from tour in England of four years.
We were stationed in
Alamogordo New Mexico but because of the base housing shortage on the Holloman
Air Force Base we were allowed to live in the base housing on White Sands
Missile Range. While living in England a friend of ours was into doing brass
rubbings and gave us four of five of them. (Brass rubbing is a technique in
which a sheet of paper is laid in contact with some
brass and is rubbed with a waxy pigment to reproduce exactly the engraving on
the brass. Usually the rubbing is of a person;
at least ours were.) My husband mounted them on
thick pieces of hard foam so they could stand up. I
hated them and refused to hang them up in our home.
My sister K. was having some problems at home and my Mom and Dad sent her to
live with us for awhile. After we moved in K. made friends with another girl,
"A." who lived a couple of doors down from us. She would come over at
night and she and my sister would hang out together. One night A.
brought over her Ouija board, and they asked
a lot of inane questions about boys and stuff. It
seemed so innocent I let them have their fun. After all,
K. was at home safe were I could watch after her. They started to use the board
every night and they made contact with a spirit that called him self “Tony”.
“Tony” said that he had died in a motorcycle accident. This went on for a few
nights the girls asking “Tony” questions about unimportant stuff.
At this point I still wasn’t too worried;
I thought all this was just nonsense and said so to A.
and K.
My sister K. began
to look haggard and way too old for a 16 year old girl.
That’s when she told me that she and
“Tony” were in love and he was coming to her in her dreams. She
told me that her dreams would start out like any dream then a “thin young man
with dark hair would float into her dream” and they would make love.
I told her she had to stop with the Ouija stuff.
K. agreed and arranged with A.
to use the board one more time to tell “Tony” goodbye. That’s when odd things
started to happen.
K. began to tell me that when she was alone in her
room she could feel someone with her and she begged
not be left alone in the house at night. One night she woke me and my husband up
screaming. When we
went to check on her she said that just as she was falling asleep she felt
someone sit on the her bed. She
said that she could feel the bed give under the weight of the person and thought
that I had come in to talk to her, so she turned over
to look and no one was there. After that K. slept on
the sofa or shared a bed with the twins. She would only go into her bedroom in
the daylight or if someone was with her. Then other stuff started to happen
around the house.
Small things would go missing then turn up where you had searched just a while
before, or not ever turn up again. One particular
episode stands out in my mind. I
had run a bath for my three year old twins after
making sure the water wasn’t too hot.
I shut it off and went to get them undressed,
then brought them into the bathroom and picked up my daughter to put her
in the tub. As soon as
her feet touched the water she let out a yell telling me the water was too cold.
When I checked it the water was like ice! How
could a warm bath turn ice cold within a matter of a few minutes?
Even with air-conditioning on the water could
not have gotten so cold. Other times I would be working in the kitchen or some
other room alone and I could feel someone staring at me;
this always gave me the creeps. This even started to affect the twins;
they would tell me that they were scared to sleep with the lights off at night
and would cry until we turned on the bathroom light.
One night while my husband was working a night shift me,
K. and the kids went to a friend’s house for dinner.
We stayed later than we had planned
and it was well after 11:00 pm when we left. As
we pulled into the drive we could see that the lights were on in the house.
At first we thought my husband had gotten off
work early and came home but his car wasn’t in the drive. When we entered the
house we could see all the lights in the house were turned on,
even the TV and the radio were playing at full blast. And,
in the middle of the living room were all of the brass
rubbings sitting in a circle around a lamp whose shade
had been removed. I felt a cold chill and the hairs on my arm and head stood up.
I made K. take the kids to A’s house and
used the phone to call the MPs. I’m not sure why but
before the police arrived I put the lamp back on the table it had been sitting
on and put the brass rubbings back in the storage closet. Then I went back
outside and stayed in the front yard until the police arrived.
They listened to our story,
then they made a complete check of the house to see if there were any sings of a
break in. There wasn’t.
No foot prints, no fingerprints, not even an open window and
nothing was missing. They said that we had most likely left the lights
on and forgot. I know that we did not
turn on a single light not even the front porch light was on.
(My sister and I had discussed that on the drive home) I had not planned
to stay out as late as we had; usually if I knew I was
going to be late getting home I would turn on the front porch light and maybe a
lamp in the living room but not the TV, the radio and every single lighting
source in the house. Even
the light on the stove was on! The MP’s were
respectful but I could tell that they thought we were a couple of kooks.
When we talked to A. the next day she said that she
could see our house from her bedroom window and had been watching our house to
see when we came home because she had wanted to visit. A.
said that she had last checked our house around 11:00 pm and had not seen a
single light on . We
had base housing maintenance come out to check out the wiring;
they could never find anything wrong. About two
weeks later a house opened up on Holloman AFB and we moved.
I was relieved to get out of that house.
-B.
