A Ghost of A Chance
By Silver Blue
Okay, before you go and write me off as a complete lunatic – I do believe that my house is inhabited by more than just my roommate and myself. There have been too many coincidences with too many roommates and guests in the house to just attempt to write it off to chance.
I have reason to believe that it is occupied by three spirits: Mildred, Harry, and Philip. Mildred and Harry live upstairs, while Philip prefers the stairwell and downstairs. These are helpful spirits, not poltergeists nor malignant ghosts. Philip has helped me correct situations in a few ways that I can’t describe – knocking here, tap dancing there, to let me know that things just aren’t “right” at the house at that time. The names came in dreams and “glimpses” to a former roommate and me that neither of us could explain.
I first came to realize there was something at work in the house before I even purchased it when, upon preparing to return the key to the seller due to her ineptitude and penchant for lying, I heard a voice from the stairwell saying “Watch your back and I’ll take care of the rest”.
A former roommate and I have heard Mildred singing in the upstairs rooms and when you try to focus in on her song, she stops. Harry is Mildred’s companion. Only once or twice have I heard a male voice mumble something in response to Mildred’s singing. Mildred also enjoys opening the bathroom closet door. A mutual friend, Kate Turney, came to the house and “pish-toshed” the idea of a ghost. She firmly closed the bathroom closet door and she and I went into what I was using as the office. Within 15 minutes, we heard the door handle turn and the door creak open.
Philip lives downstairs. When you are upstairs, there are times when you can hear him practically running laps from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen, over the stair-stoop, and back to the living room. In fact, you can even track which room he is currently in by the sound.
When I first purchased a digital camera for work (the Agfa ePhoto 307), I took it home to attempt to learn how to use it. That evening, in August 1998, I was to snap what I consider to be a picture of Philip in my living room.
The dormer windows in the photo below show in the above photograph. Something moved between the lens and the desired photo of the mantel. I have always stated that I thought it was Philip, even though I have no physical proof that it is.
Sandi has discovered that Mildred likes to hide items that she doesn’t approve of, be it shoes, hats, or the like. Former roommate Chris Byer discovered that Philip has a proclivity for making his displeasure known, from causing a Home Interiors glass-jar candle to levitate, cross the room, and hit the wall beside his head, dropping to the couch without breaking, to causing the glass door on the front of the stereo cabinet to swing out and fall to the floor with much commotion, without breaking the glass, and with the hinges that go up and down into the cabinet still firmly in place.
Mildred’s “bathroom closet door” became quite the spectacle at my annual Christmas Parties. People attempted to test her by the same methods that Kate used in 1998 – and to everyone’s amusement, the house always fell silent before you heard the door mechanism click and the door open. When former roommate Randy first moved in, he was a skeptic. He shut the closet door, sat on the water closet do to his business, and saw the door handle turn and open an inch. He later was to comment that it was a good thing he was already “doing it”, because he certainly would have been otherwise.
Silver Blue, who has been on both sides…at the same time. Don’t tell me it can’t be done.