A Presence of Ghosts

Do you believe in Ghosts? Or should the question be 'Do you believe that there are ghosts?' I word it this way because a professor once told me that you can't believe in Santa Claus, you have to believe there IS one. I'll never forget that.
I believe that there are ghosts. I have never seen one...I have only felt them and heard them. No, it is not scary...or at least to me...it is actually comforting. My friends and I have experienced them together, my sister and I and even my dog. My dog and I had two really definite experiences together, the first I have ever experienced.
It was night..and not a dark and stormy one either. It was very near the time of my grandpa's death. We lived in a brand new house in a brand new neighborhood at the time. My children's bedrooms were upstairs~mine down. It was the middle of the night. I heard something rustling like footsteps pad along the hallway and then the first stair step creaked. My dog Schroeder sat up and cocked his ears. I sat straight up. He looked at me, I looked at him. We jumped off the bed quietly and I followed him chase the sound up the stairs. The children were asleep and he stood on the landing and just stared inquisitively at me. After that, he often stopped in the middle of the downstairs hallway, usually during the middle of the day and looked at the ceiling and howled. Dishes would break in the cupboards in that house and sometimes I would hear a child crying outside..there were no small children in that neighborhood at the time. It was located at the foot of an Indian burial ground however and many Indians died from malaria in that area back in the very early years.
A few years later, we moved to an older house in a more established neighborhood in the same town. About 2pm on a weekday... the kids weren't due home from school for another hour and a half. I was vacuuming the downstairs guest room. Of course, Schroeder was always with me. I heard the door between the family room and the garage open and shut, although it was locked. Schroeder heard it too. I shut off the vacuum cleaner as he ran through the kitchen, into the family room and pounced on the door and then ran following his nose back through those rooms and up the stairway to the children's bedrooms. I ran up also. I searched. There was no one to be found. The kids came home at the usual time.
My sister and I were spending the night in my deceased grandparents old house in which my daughter was living. She was gone for a long weekend and since the house was right next door to my mother's house and we were helping Mother clear out "a half a life's worth of stuff', we decided it best to spend the night over there. I took a shower before I got into bed. My sister was already in the bed. I fell into that alpha state, the state you go into right before the deep sleep and I heard something knocking on the foot board. I then felt a presence or a presence of several people standing beside the bed between the bed and the closet...the closet where my grandparents always kept the treasured family photo box. I stirred enough to know that I wanted to turn over to face what was standing behind my back ...as I said, I am not afraid and I saw nothing but I felt that there were several people standing in a line beside the bed. I felt calm and went to sleep. The next morning as my sister and I were waking up, I decided to tell her what had happened. She got quiet for a minute and I thought she was gonna say I was nuts. She said, "you know, while you were in the shower, I was just about to doze off and I felt something standing at the foot of the bed but I couldn't see anything so I just went to sleep". Since then, when we have been together in my Aunt Freda's third floor room in Rochester, New York, we have experienced charged energy night after night and photographed orbs and smokey like phenonmena especially in that room and the closet where family photos and documents are contained.

My experience with my best friends is illustrated in photos in New Orleans on the Christmas Eve just before Katrina hit.~flames in St.Louis Cemetery I and orbs over the house where the jilted Octoroon mistress spent the night and died on the roof of her French lover to prove her love for him one stormy December night during the brutal days of slavery



Yes, I believe that there are ghosts. Alas, I moved away from my haunted town and I have not had any experiences in this 80 year old house I now occupy. I miss the comraderie. I keep the treasured family photo box in the closet by my bed.