SUMMONING HITLER

Before Ouija boards were sold in toy stores, people used to make their own “talking board” for their séances. This is what Denise’s mother did a number of years ago, Denise tells us. The setting is a small town in Germany called Tittmoning , which lies near the Austrian border. It’s an old town with a dark history. It suffered the plague twice and was virtually burned to the ground on three occasions in its past. Still, it features a castle, old buildings and, of course, cemeteries. Important to this story, too, is the fact that Adolf Hitler was born in Austria, then ruled Germany, much to the world’s dismay.

The story begins on a chilly summer evening in 1985 when Denise’s mother, then a 13-year-old girl, and her friend decided to have a little fun together while their parents were gone. They took a blank sheet of paper and a black marker, and started to neatly write on it the numbers 1 through 9 and 0. Below them they wrote the alphabet, drew a sun and a star, and finished it off by adding "Good Bye" to the right and "Hello" to the left. They set a little wooden desk and two chairs in the middle of the room and placed the paper on the table. They lit six candles around the room, then placed an inverted drinking glass on the table. They switched off the lights off and sat at the table. The two girls moved the glass to "Hello" and lightly pressed one finger each atop the glass.

One of the girls addressed their homemade Ouija board. "Hello? Is anybody there?" she asked. After a moment of silence, the glass slowly started to move toward the letters and spelled out YES. As the evening slowly turned into night, the girls had asked the spirit a variety of questions. They were enjoying this activity until one girl suggested, "Let's ask him his name!" They asked. Two seconds later, their talking board pointed out the letters L-H-E-I-T-R-D-O-F-L-A. At first the girls were puzzled, but then realized the letters were out of order. It was an anagram.

“Are you Adolf Hitler?” they asked. Silence for nearly two minutes. Then suddenly the glass shot across the room and shattered against the wall into millions of pieces. The girls went screaming out of the room and refused to go back in. The next day, strange things began to happen in the house: footsteps, a weird laughing sound... one of the girls even swore she saw Hitler's face in a corner, grinning at her.

Eventually, they were forced to return to the room to clean up the glass. As they entered the room, they found their self-made Ouija board ripped into pieces on the table. The girls picked up the shredded paper and buried it in their backyard. They have never touched another Ouija board – homemade or store bought – to this day.

OUIJA PHONE CALL

Many people firmly believe that spirits and other entities can communicate with them through the Ouija. But can that communication carry over to other devices as well?

Consider Jessica’s experience, who decided to play with the Ouija with a few of her friends in Cottonwood Heights, Utah. They were all at Becka’s house, which everyone thought was incredibly creepy and undoubtedly haunted; in other words, the perfect setting for their séance. Jessica, Becka and Diane set up the living room for the experiment with lit candles. Jessica and Diane sat on their knees on either side of a piano bench which held the Ouija board and placed their fingers on the planchette. Becka refused to touch the board and instead took the role of “scribe”.

“Please take note that we had all turned our cell phones off so that they would not disrupt the atmosphere,” Jessica says. After speaking to a young girl named Wisty and a man who would not give his name, but instead kept attempting to move the planchette through the alphabet, the girls decided to stop. “Suddenly, my cell phone started to ring,” Jessica says. “Being a teenager then, I used to have my ringtones all set as song clips. This time however, the phone rang its original tinny tune.”

Stunned, Jessica glanced fearfully at her friends. She slowly picked up her phone from the table and looked at the display to see who might be calling. “The phone number listed was not in normal format,” Jessica insists, “but it was something like this ************, without hyphens or parentheses as would be the norm.” Shaking, she answered and said, "Hello?" On the other end, a man began to speak incomprehensibly in a language she did not recognize and could never place. When Jessica told him she was going to hang up, the mysterious man got very quiet, then began to laugh. “That was assuredly the last time we used the board at her house.”

WHETHER YOU BELIEVE that the Ouija board is a dangerous object that can open portals to negative forces or that it merely reflects the many fears and desires that lie in our subconscious, the stories of people’s experiences with the board are fascinating. I suspect that many of the tales we hear, including the ones that follow, might be exaggerated or at least colored for effect, yet we’re willing to consider them since the authors have sworn that they are true.

THE OUIJA’S WARNING

“I used to live in a house in Pueblo, Colorado that I always thought was ‘peculiar’ because of the way I always felt in it,” says a reader who uses the name Aphrodite. She always felt like she was being watched, a feeling that intensified when she was alone. But she couldn’t quite identify the feeling. Was the watcher staring in anger or fascination? Soon the feeling turned into sounds.

One night her father had to go out to the store. To feel safe, Aphrodite locked every door in the house while she was upstairs. “The house is very big, so it creaks a lot, especially the stairs,” she says, “but as I was stepping into the shower, I heard the floorboards creak like someone was walking on them.” Aphrodite wrapped a towel tightly around her, counted to three and flung open the bathroom door to confront the intruder. There was no one there. She dismissed the sounds as her imagination and got in the shower. As she turned on the water, she heard the floorboards creak again. “Determined to find out the source, I left the shower running and with one huge thrust opened the door and, expecting to see someone, pushed forward so they'd fall down the stairs,” she says. Aphrodite grabbed only air.

Now thinking that the intruder might be a spirit, Aphrodite went to her room and fetched the Ouija board from under her bed and set it up on the floor. “I thought, if it was a ghost, it might want to communicate,” she says. Aphrodite lit five candles: red, green, yellow, blue and white. She set four of them at the corners of the board and placed the white one between her legs. “I gently put my hand on the board and called the spirit out. ‘If there's anyone here who wishes to communicate with me, please make your presence known.’” Something blew out the red candle and the Ouija’s pointer began to move. “The spirit told me he was a man age 32 who wanted to communicate with me,” she says. “He also said that he hated the way I lived and that’s why he watched me. I asked him if he was mad at me. He said yes. And the last message he relayed to me was: ‘GET OUT. WON’T BE SAFE LONGER.’ And with that the board was done.”

Aphrodite didn’t tell anyone of this experience, but she did try to convince her dad to move from that house. They didn’t even move when, during dinner one evening, they both heard the stairs creak, followed by an upstairs mirror crashing to the floor. They finally did move when Aphrodite’s dad got a new job. “Ever since then, I have wondered if the spirit is still there,” she says. “I still wonder if maybe I should have faced it or if it was a good thing we moved. I've talked to the recent owners of that house, and they say that their dog won't go into my old room and that the wife gets violently shoved when she is alone.

In September 1878, Mr. Daniel Teed and his wife, Olive Cox Teed, lived on Princess Street in Amherst. Their household included Mrs. Teed's niece, 19-year-old Esther Cox. Miss Cox soon became famous as part of "The Great Amherst Mystery."

Before the ghostly manifestations, Miss Cox had been the victim of an attempted rape in a secluded part of Amherst. Her attacker, Bob MacNeal, was a shoemaker with a terrible reputation that Miss Cox had not known about. She escaped the attack with minor injuries. The "mysteries" started soon after this event.

The hauntings began with small poltergeist phenomena: little fires, voices, and rapping noise. It soon escalated to include times when Miss Cox would seem to inflate like a balloon, even to her extremities, and then abruptly return to normal size. These events were witnessed by a large number of people.

The hauntings followed Miss Cox outside the house. Once, the knocking and rapping noises interrupted a Baptist Church service that Miss Cox attended. Although she sat towards the back of the church, it sounded as though someone was hammering on the front pew, making it impossible to hear the service. Miss Cox left the church in humiliation, and the noises stopped immediately.

Desperate to find the source of the problem, Miss Cox tried automatic writing and consulted spiritualists. The primary ghost claimed, in automatic writing, to be Miss Maggie Fisher. Miss Fisher had attended the same school as Miss Cox, but had died around 1867, before graduating. Miss Cox had not known Miss Fisher, but was aware that they'd been in school together.

Other ghosts came forward during this time, announcing themselves as: Bob Nickle, age 60, also a shoemaker like Bob MacNeal who'd attacked Miss Cox. Another was Mary Fisher, sister of Maggie Fisher. Other ghosts included Peter Teed, John Nickle, and Eliza MacNeal. The number of ghosts and "coincidences" among names and professions reduces the credibility of this part of the story.

Further, Bob MacNeal, Miss Cox's attacker, later claimed that he'd been haunted for years by the same Bob Nickle. The accounts sound as though Mr. MacNeal was trying to shift the blame for his violent acts, to the ghost.

Nevertheless, Miss Cox continued to be plagued with hauntings wherever she went.

Hoping to turn her misfortunes to her advantage, Miss Cox went on tour in June 1879, hoping to draw audiences to hear her story and make a living from the income. She was assisted in this by actor Walter Hubbell, who'd visited Amherst specifically to witness the now-famous ghostly manifestations.

However, the crowds were skeptical and easily angered. One evening in a theatre, a rival theatre-owner leaped to his feet and began heckling Miss Cox and Mr. Hubbell. The crowd joined in, and soon a riot broke out. This was Miss Cox's last time on stage, as her touring efforts were a clear failure.

The series of manifestations continued until one dramatic event changed everything:

Miss Cox went to work for Arthur Davison of Amherst. Mr. Davison was a skeptic, although he admitted to witnessing numerous poltergeist events at his home when Miss Cox was there. The worst was when the ghost(s) set fire to his barn and it burned to the ground.

Mr. Davison accused Miss Cox of arson, and she was convicted of the crime by an ambivalent court. Her sentence was four months in prison, but public support for the unfortunate woman led to her release after only one month.

After that, Miss Cox was troubled by minor poltergeist events, but nothing significant.

She later married Mr. Adams of Springdale, Nova Scotia. Her second husband was Mr. Shanahan of Brockton, MA.

Esther Cox Shanahan died in 1912.

In 1948, a disturbed teenager named Wanet McNeill was forced to live with her father after her parent's bitter divorce. The girl and her father moved to an uncle's farm, just west of Macomb. Wanet was very unhappy with the situation and her emotions were high. Soon those emotions took a most dangerous course. In the weeks that followed, Wanet managed to start fires all over her uncle's farm with nothing other than the power of her mind. She had no idea that she was causing the phenomena. The kinetic energy in her body caused an eruption of power that ignited combustible material all over the house.

The mysterious fires began on August 7 at the farm of Charles Willey. He resided outside of Macomb with his wife, his brother-in-law and Wanet’s father, Arthur McNeil, McNeil’s two children, Arthur Jr., age 8 and Wanet, 13. McNeil had recently divorced and had gotten custody of the children. His former wife was now living in Bloomington, Illinois, where Wanet desperately wanted to be.

The fires began as small brown spots that appeared on the wallpaper of the house. Seconds after they appeared, they would burst into flames. This began to happen day after day and neighbors came to help keep watch and to dowse the small fires with water. Pans and buckets were placed all over the house in preparation. Still, the fires materialized in front of the startled witnesses. Volunteers began standing by with hoses and buckets of water to put out the blazes. The fire chief from Macomb, Fred Wilson, was called in to investigate and he had the family strip all of the wallpaper from every wall in the house. Dozens of witnesses then watched as brown spots appeared on the bare plaster and then burst into flames. More small blazes even spread to the ceiling.

"The whole thing is so screwy and fantastic that I’m ashamed to talk about it," Wilson said. "Yet we have at least a dozen reputable witnesses that say they saw brown spots smolder suddenly on the walls and ceilings of the home and then burst into flames."

During the week of August 7, fires appeared on the front porch, ignited the curtains in every room, and even engulfed an entire bed. The National Fire Underwriters Laboratory investigated and reported that the wallpaper had been coated with flour paste (a flame retardant) and that no flammable compound, such as insect repellant, was present. They had no explanation for the fires they witnessed.

In addition to insurance investigators, the Illinois State Fire Marshal, John Burgard, also visited the farm. "Nobody has ever seen anything like this," he announced to the press, "but I saw it with my own eyes".

That week, over two hundred fires broke out and on August 14 finally consumed the entire house. Willey drove posts into the ground and made a shelter for he and his wife while McNeil moved his children into the garage. The next day, the barn went up in flames, followed by the milk house (being used as a dining room) on Tuesday. On Thursday, two fires were discovered in the chicken house and that same afternoon, the farm’s second barn burned down in less than an hour. A company that sold fire extinguishers was on hand with equipment, but it did little good. An employee of the company stated that "it was the most intense heat that I’ve ever felt."

The family escaped to a nearby vacant house but the fires continued. The United States Air Force even got involved in the mystery. They suggested that the fires could be caused by some sort of directed radiation (presumably from the Russians!) but could offer no further assistance.

By this time, the farm was swarming with spectators, investigators, and reporters. Over one thousand people came to the farm on August 22! Theorists and curiosity-seekers posed their own theories and explanations. They ran the gamut from fly spray to radio waves, underground gas pockets, flying saucers and more. The authorities had a more down-to- earth explanation in mind. They suspected arson. They realized that they could not solve the riddle as to how fires could appear before the eyes of reliable witnesses, but things were getting out of hand on the Willey farm. An explanation needed to be discovered, and quickly!

On August 30, the mystery was announced solved. The arsonist, according to officials, was Wanet. They claimed that she was starting the fires with kitchen matches when no one was looking, ignoring the witness reports of fires that sprang up from nowhere, including on the ceiling. Apparently, this slight thirteen-year-old girl possessed some pretty amazing skills, along with a seemingly endless supply of matches!

Fire Marshal Burgard and a State’s Attorney named Keith Scott had taken Wanet aside for an hour’s worth of "intense questioning". After that, she had allegedly confessed. She stated that she was unhappy, didn’t like the farm, wanted to see her mother and most telling, that she didn’t have pretty clothes. The mystery was solved! This was in spite of the fact that witnesses to the fires had seen them appear on walls, floors and even on ceilings, all when Wanet was not even in the room.

This explanation pleased the authorities but not all of the reporters who were present seemed convinced. The hundreds of paranormal investigators who have examined the case over the years have not been reassured either. One columnist from a Peoria newspaper, who had covered the case from the beginning, stated quite frankly that he did not believe the so-called "confession". Neither did noted researcher Vincent Gaddis, who wrote about the case in his landmark book "Mysterious Fires and Lights". He was convinced the case was a perfect example of poltergeist phenomena.

What really happened on the Willey Farm? We will probably never know because the story just went away after that. Wanet was turned over to her grandmother. The insurance company paid Willey for the damage done to his home and farm. The reporters all had closure for their stories and the general public was given a solution that could not have possibly been the truth. But that’s often the case, isn’t it?

The Smurl Haunting was an alleged demonic possession in the United States, on which the film The Haunted was based.
The claimed incidents began in 1974 and lasted until 1989 in the home of Jack and Janet Smurl in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Whether the haunting was genuine or an elaborate hoax is debated.
The Smurl house was split. Jack and Janet lived in one half of the abode while Jack's parents, John and Mary, lived in the other half of the semi-detached house.
According to the Smurls, the first signs of paranormal activity began in 1974. They reported that a television set burst into flames, and a stain appeared on a carpet overnight. Water pipes began to leak even though they were repeatedly resoldered by a plumber, and scratches resembling those from a large cat appeared on paintwork and bathroom fittings.
By 1977, the reported events were escalating. Toilets flushed without human intervention, footsteps were heard on the stairs, chest drawers opened and closed unaided, radios worked when they were not plugged in, rocking chairs rocked while empty, and a sour smell filled the house.
In 1985, John and Mary claimed to hear loud, obscene language, and Jack and Janet's house became often extremely cold.
Two days after this, an icy cold swept the house and a strange black human shape allegedly materialised in the kitchen in front of Janet. It was about five feet nine inches tall, and with no facial features. It later appeared to Mary Smurl in her kitchen.
The violence and frequency of the events continued to escalate.
In 1986, the family brought in a controversial pair of demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who announced the house was haunted by three minor spirits and a powerful, evil demon. They tried to persuade the demon to leave by playing holy music and praying. The alleged demon reacted by shaking mirrors, dressers and drawers.
Jack alleges he was raped one night by a scale-covered succubus with a young girl's body and an old woman's head. Janet also claimed she was sexually assaulted by a shadowy humanoid figure (described as an incubus), and that pig noises were heard from the wall cavities. The attack on Janet and the shadowy apparition are similar to the description of the attacks on Carla Moran that were portrayed in the movie, "The Entity".
The Smurls brought in Father Robert McKenna. He conducted two exorcisms in Latin and more than fifty Catholic Masses, which allegedly infuriated the demon further. The demon was said to follow them on a vacation to the Poconos and harass Jack at work.
It was at this point the Smurls appeared on television on a Philadelphia talk show called The People are Talking hosted by Richard Bey. The demon allegedly reacted by raping Jack again, and appearing to him as a half-man, half-pig. Janet was throttled and thrown about by invisible forces.
One obvious question that skeptics always ask is why the couple did not move out of their house if the attacks were so violent and distressing. The Smurl's response being that the demon could apparently follow them anywhere; having shown this to them when they abandoned the house for a week only to be intensly harassed at the campground where they were staying.

The angels speak to us through repetitive number sequences, which you see on license plates, phone numbers, receipts, and more. If you are seeing 999 everywhere, you are amongst an elite few, as this is one of the more rare Angel Number sequences.

The story behind this legendary haunted spot may not be true, but there are still many unexplained events surrounding this eerie intersection. See our exclusive photos of the railroad crossing ghost.

Just south of San Antonio, Texas, in an unremarkable neighborhood not far from the San Juan Mission is an intersection of roadway and railroad track that has become somewhat famous in the catalog of American ghost lore. The intersection, so the story goes, was the site of a tragic accident in which several school-aged children were killed - but their ghosts linger at the spot. And the curious from all over the country come to this section of railroad track to witness firsthand the paranormal phenomena they've heard takes place there.

The story - at least 20 years old - is the stuff of urban legend and its details vary from telling to telling, but this is essentially it:

Back in the 1930s or 1940s, a school bus full of children was making its way down the road and toward the intersection when it stalled on the railroad tracks. A speeding train smashed into the bus, killing 10 of the children and the bus driver. Since that dreadful accident many years ago, any car stopped near the railroad tracks will be pushed by unseen hands across the tracks to safety. It is the spirits of the children, they say, who push the cars across the tracks to prevent a tragedy and fate like their own.

Even today, cars line up at the haunted intersection to see if the legend is true. The driver stops the cars some 20 to 30 yards from the tracks and puts the car in neutral gear. Some even turn off their engines. And sure enough, even though it appears that the road is on an upward grade, the car begins to roll. It rolls slowly first, then steadily gaining speed - seemingly of its own accord and against gravity - up and over the tracks. This has been tested time and time again, and cars really do roll up and over the tracks - every time.

But that's not all. The second half of this legend is that if a light powder - like talcum or baby powder - is sprinkled over the car's trunk and rear bumper, tiny fingerprints and handprints will appear - the prints of the ghost children pushing the car. Many who have tried it swear that indeed they can see the evidence of small children's handprints in the powder.

First-Hand Experience

Fact or fantasy? A true unexplained phenomenon or an urban legend fueled by eager participants with heightened imaginations?

One person who tested the legend with favorable results was Brenda Pacheco, the fan club president of Wayanay Inka, a musical group from Peru. "I put my car in neutral, took my foot off the pedals and the car moved!" she writes at mysa.com (for my San Antonio - a website jointly sponsored by KENS 5 television station and the San Antonio Express-News). "It moved quickly toward the tracks, up over the bump and down the other side, well out of harm's way!"

Pacheco also succeeded with the powder test, having dusted the back of her black station wagon with talcum. "I was so excited, I got out to check the back of my car and there were the tiny handprints! Plain and clear, and so, so tiny! The prints were so perfect, you could see the lines of the palms, and the swirls of the fingerprints!"

She was so thrilled with the results that Pacheco repeated the experiment, with even more startling results: "Up and over the hill again," she says. "I got out, and there were several little handprints, not only on the back of the car, but down the sides toward the back doors! And there was one big handprint on the side! (The sides had also been wiped down.) Could this be a handprint from the bus driver? That's what we think.."

What Are the Facts?

Is there any factual merit to the story? Do cars really roll uphill? And do tiny handprints really appear?

Several investigations into the legend have come up empty-handed when it comes to documentation of the accident. A precise (or even consistent) date has never been determined. There seem to be no records or archived newspaper articles about such a tragic accident. And the much-used excuse of "well, records weren't kept very well back then" seems inept at best. A San Antonio police officer, who regularly patrolled that district and had heard the ghost story, researched police records for such an accident and found nothing.

So what about the gravity-defying cars? Are they pushed or not? According to The Haunted "Ghost Tracks" of San Antonio at Abstract Dreamteching, a local television station hired a surveyor to determine whether or not there was an upward grade on the road running toward the tracks. "They claimed the results showed that, despite an illusionary appearance of a level, or even slightly inclined road, the street surface was actually at a 2 degree declination as it approached the railroad track crossing."

In other words, the road runs downhill slightly, so naturally a car in neutral will roll in that direction of its own accord.

And what of the fingerprints and handprints? The logical explanation is that a light powder reveals prints that are already there; in fact, that's the basis of fingerprint detection in police work. "Latent fingerprints can be lifted from some objects years after they are made; crimes have been solved thusly," says the author at Abstract Dreamteching.

Other Weird Things

So there's a logical explanation for everything that occurs at this railroad crossing, right? Well, maybe and maybe not. Whether there ever was an accident involving children on a school bus at this spot is open to serious question. Nevertheless, many people report other strange phenomena taking place there:

• The author at Abstract Dreamteching, using an audio cassette recorder in the course of his investigation, recorded an unexplained heartbeat. He also had "a genuinely frightening psychic/spiritual experience" of an undisclosed nature.
• The author also reported that during a few of his experiments at the intersection, his car unexplainably slowed down and stopped squarely on the tracks. "It was truly startling moment," he says. "There was no reasonable explanation for the occurrence, only the odd thought that the ghosty kids wanted some company."
• At least one other person, a native San Antonian, had car trouble on the tracks. "We did start out about 30 yards from the tracks," she told mysa.com. "But as we got closer my husband would press on the brakes. When he let go the car would go faster. He did it again and again and the car went until the last time. He stopped on the tracks and the car did not go. To top that, the car did not start either. We stayed there for about 5 or 10 minutes and decided to push it under the Loop 410 overpass. We were there all day until someone came to help us tow the car home."
• Brenda Pacheco experienced more than the ghostly handprints. "The four of us heard children's voices... loud and clear, like children playing on a school ground. We listened in amazement, then it stopped abruptly!"
• Pacheco claims another bizarre event occurred when her sister tried the experiment. Because she had a white car, they did not spread powder on it. "When her car was pushed over, we were shocked! No handprints, but there were little blood droplets all over her trunk! They continued down the sides and there were blood droplets on the inside of the car where her daughter had the window down on the back door!"

Little Girl Ghost?

Just recently I received the photograph shown here, taken at the haunted tracks by the daughter of Andy and Debi Chesney.

Debi's note reads:

"My daughter and some friends went to San Antonio, Texas this last weekend and went to the railroad tracks where they say that a busload of children were killed a long time ago. They took several pictures. They emailed them to me after they got home to show me, and a ghost appeared in this one. They had no idea that it was in the picture until the next day when I printed out the picture and showed them. It was really freaky. It appears to be a little girl carrying a teddy bear."

While some ghosts seem to be lost and confused in their altered state of existence, others - like this one - seem to be watching us, and perhaps even destined to deliver an important message.

Dee A. lives with her family in Texas, renting an old house for the past four years. She had never had a problem with the ghost that she felt lived there... until April, 2002. From that time, her relationship with the spirit that has become known as "The Pink Lady" would be a mixture dread, bewilderment and thankfulness. Here is Dee's own story of this unrelenting ghost and the effect it has had on her family.

It was Easter Sunday and members of my extended family were over for the annual dinner and egg hunt. All the kids were in the backyard jumping on the trampoline while the adults sat around out front talking and catching up. My husband, who is considerably older than I (I am 26, he is 59) went into the back to check on the kids. For some reason, he decided to get up on the trampoline with them. His reflexes not being what they used to be, my husband fell off of the trampoline, crushed his ankle and was knocked unconscious.

While all of this was going on in the backyard, I was in the front talking with my cousin. Suddenly, something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned and saw this lady whom I didn't recognize standing at the edge of my yard. She was dressed in a very nice (yet quite simple) pink sundress with matching pink shoes and a pink handbag. I knew no one in our neighborhood who looked like her and couldn't imagine who would just walk up into my yard like that.

As I looked at her she said, "He needs you - NOW!"

I was mortified! I told my cousin I had to go check on the kids. As I rounded the corner to the back, my son was running to me to tell me about his dad. We called 911 and he was rushed to the emergency room. He spent three days in the hospital, and for those three days the Pink Lady never seemed to leave my side. She was right there everywhere I went - when I was home with the kids and when I was at the hospital with my husband. I saw her several times. She seemed to be watching my every move.

A Change in Temperament

The day my husband came home from the hospital, he was very weak from the pain killers they had given him, so I had to help him up the front stairs, into the house and into bed. I eventually got him settled, and when I turned to get his drinking glass, there stood the Pink Lady. But this time her demeanor was quite different. Over the three days I had seen her when my husband was in the hospital, she seemed just to be watching and thinking. But now she looked angry!

I quickly walked out of the bedroom, and when I turned to close the door, there she stood in the doorway. I left the door open, never considering I could ask her to move. For one thing, I seemed to be the only one who could see this apparition, and my husband would have thought I was crazy for talking to the doorway. Second, who knows what the spirit's reaction would have been?

I tried to put her out of my mind and went to the kitchen to start preparing dinner for the kids. But the Pink Lady wasn't going to let me off that easily. I had always known there was a ghost in my house... I had felt the presence and just knew. But now to have her there... watching me and letting me see her watching me was very unnerving! Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I turned and said, "What do you want?"

The Message

She didn't answer, but just vanished. Apparently, the Pink Lady decided this was not the time for a confrontation. That was fine with me, and so the kids and I had our dinner.

I was about to clear the table before going in to check on my husband when she appeared again. I was standing there in my kitchen with an armful of dirty dishes, and this spirit glared at me with a look of total disgust on her face. "Should he come last behind EVERYTHING else?" she said.

was so horrified at this admonishment that I dropped the dishes. I ran into my bedroom where I found my husband trying to reach for his pain pills. He had apparently been lying in the bed in severe pain, but because he knew I was cooking for the kids, he did not holler out for me.

That was when I realized what the Pink Lady had been doing. She had showed herself to me in an attempt to make me see the obvious. I was neglecting the most important things to take care of the most mundane.

But who was this spirit?

I have since discovered from my landlord that his mother had lived in this house for nearly 50 years before she died. Her favorite color was pink and she loved to wear sundresses. I asked to see a picture of his mother, and he showed me the only picture that had not been lost when his own home burned down. The picture was black and white, but my landlord provided details of colors. His mother was standing on what was now OUR front porch in a pretty pink sundress, pink shoes with a pink handbag - just as I had seen her. Furthermore, the photo was taken on Easter Sunday, 1940.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the Pink Lady was enjoying our family gathering right along with us, and when my husband got injured, it disrupted our celebration as well as hers. Then, I guess, she didn't think I was taking good enough care of my patient, so she stuck around.

Once I realized that I had to pay closer attention to my husband's needs while he was out of commission, she stopped hounding me. I have not seen her since that day she admonished me, but I still feel her presence. She's no longer intrusive... but the Pink Lady is still there.