The Haunted House Surprise

Unicorns, dragons, fairies and ghosts were things I believed in as a young child. As I grew up, ghosts were the only entities that I continued to believe in, almost unquestioningly. I began actively studying the paranormal in 1997 and began investigating the paranormal in 2004. I was having fun debunking anomalies in my photographs and identifying spooky-seeming sounds in digital recordings to find the logical answers for previously unexplained experiences. I hoped one day I'd have something that did not have a logical answer for me to find. While I hoped to encounter genuine paranormal, it never occurred to me that I would move right into a haunted house.

We moved into a three bedroom, two bath, two car garage home on the water in the Spring of 2005. The rent wasn't cheap so we assumed the previous tenants' eagerness to move out before their lease end was simply a financial reason. It was a big house and fit our big family. I was pregnant with our fourth child and we needed the space. Our sons especially liked that they could fish in the backyard. The move-in was pleasingly uneventful and swift.

The unexplained incidents began with a full-bodied apparition accompanied by bone-chilling cold witnessed by my husband on the first evening in the house. He saw a woman in the reflection of the mirror as he was brushing his teeth. He saw a partial apparition of the same woman a month later. He didn't tell me about either experience until Halloween of that year when I experienced something odd.

On Halloween night, the kids were put to bed after trick-or-treating, eating dinner, and enjoying some of their candy. My husband was also in bed. The kids' candy bags were still on the table and, as exhausted as I was, I couldn't find the inspiration to find a proper place for the bags of candy. I intended to leave that task until morning. As I reached for the kitchen light-switch, a mature woman's voice spoke both inside and outside of my head. "Clean off the table." the voice said. It didn't sound like my husband or any of my children and there was no one around me to have that clear of a voice. I checked my children's rooms. They were all asleep. I checked our bedroom. The television was off and had been off. My husband had not said anything. I told him what I'd experience and he told me about his previous experiences. I let the matter go since it was Halloween and I felt it was just too trite to have a paranormal experience on Halloween.

In early December of the same year, I was walking to bed in the late evening when I stopped to close the garage door that kept popping open. My husband had been tinkering with that door since we moved in and several times a day, it still managed to open. I was curious when I saw a large bright spherical object moving irregularly in the garage. It was clearly spherical, about the size of a standard beach ball, and was its own light source, illuminating the parts of the garage it flew through. Not really knowing what to think, I closed the door and went to bed. My husband and I spent hours the next evening trying to duplicate the experience from inside and outside of the garage and could not manage anything close to what I saw.

January 2006 through April 2006 had a number of different experiences. My husband continued to have experiences, once getting touched in front of me. We experienced several incidents together, including "shadow people", or unexplained forms without shape or definition, moving throughout the house and master bedroom. Our bedroom door would open and we'd look up expecting to see a child that should have been asleep, only to see nothing. When saying, "Excuse me?", the door would close just as smoothly and easily as it had opened. None of the children experienced unexplained phenomena or felt fearful living in the home, so we just continued to document what we experienced.

On a Saturday afternoon, we were in the family room discussing EVPs. An EVP is an Electronic Voice Phenomenon, a type of audible recording that contains an unexplained voice or sound, considered to be disembodied. On a whim, I hit the record button my digital recorder without announcing it and let it record through ten minutes of conversation. The discussion surrounded an EVP that was recorded by a different paranormal investigation group that was shared on the internet. We were discussing the possibility that the interpretation of the name "Ivan" was actually "I've been...". As I said the words, "I've been..." a disembodied woman's voice was captured on my recording as saying, "I've been back to the house." My husband was stunned to hear that this EVP happened right in our family room just moment ago. No other EVPs were recorded in the home. To listen to the EVP, click the following url:
http://www.elleweemsphotography.com/040706-livingroom2-ibeen_natural.wav

I had not seen an apparition in the home until May 2006. My daughter had trouble sleeping and asked if she could sit in her favorite chair in the family room. I was working late on my laptop, seated comfortably on the couch. I told my daughter that she could stay on the chair until I decided to go to bed, then I would move her back to her bed, but if she started bouncing around before then, she'd have to go to bed right then. As it happens, she fell asleep in a matter of minutes and I continued to work a little longer. In my peripheral vision, I saw movement so I thought my daughter had gotten up. I looked up to tell her to go back to bed when I saw a full-bodied apparition of a woman standing next to where my daughter was sleeping. She froze and I froze and we just stared at each other. "Hi." I said. I thought about my camera but remembered that I'd left it in the car. Without looking away, I grabbed my digital recorder from my bag on the floor and began recording. She was a thin, white woman with whispy shoulder-length hair. She wore a nightgown with broad shoulder straps. Her eyes were big and expressionless. Overall, her appearance was almost monochromatic and dull but still three-dimensional. I don't remember if I could see through her because I had focused my eyes on her, but there was nothing lifelike in her presence. I couldn't tell you if this lasted seconds or minutes but while it lasted, I was frozen cold into my bones, like a Chicago winter when a January wind will cut straight down into the marrow of your bones, except this was Florida, it was Summer, and there was no wind. The apparition faded and warm returned. My daughter never stirred. I put her to bed and woke up my husband to share the experience. The digital recording provided no evidence.

We moved November 2006 to live closer to my husband's work and cut down on our rent costs. While we weren't particularly intimidated or negatively affected by the paranormal experiences in our home for over two years, moving into a newly constructed home that had no previous residents had a certain promise and appeal. To this day, no family member has reported having any paranormal experienced in our home. On the other hand, our former residence appears to have new tenants every four to six months.