July 11, 2003
Saint Petersburg, FL
It’s late and the house is quiet. The phone isn’t ringing, the neighbors are asleep and nobody‘s home but you. It’s the perfect time to unwind and relax.
And then an old familiar feeling starts to creep into the back of your mind. Someone is watching you. Cautiously, your eyes slide side to side, glancing at the darkened corners of the room. Nothing stirs. Shaking your head in self-recrimination for such skittishness, you arise to prepare for some well-deserved sleep.
As you move towards the beckoning bed, you feel it again. You swing around and find…nothing but empty air. You must be more tired than you thought. Still, just to be safe you decide to sleep with the lights on.
Does this sound familiar? If so, you may be dealing with more than lack of sleep and excessive caffeine consumption. These vague experiences may point to an unseen tenant within your home, a spectral spy keeping an eye on you.
Like their living counterparts, ghosts can take on all number of manners and personalities. Some appear very brazen, displaying raw emotion of delight, anger, fear, or protection. Objects may disappear only to manifest in an oft-searched area located in plain sight. Others, like the scenario described above, are much more subtle.
Both scenarios were met with a home located on 8th Avenue North in St. Petersburg. Activity started the day the sale closed on the house: Oct. 31, 2001. The new homeowner planned to do some remodeling of the house. She went in to snap a couple of quick photographs as reminders of the “before” image. As she held up the camera, she felt it being slapped out of her hands. It slid across the room and a wall, shattering.
Still undeterred, she continued with her plans to renovate and move in. However, several times she arrived to find the construction works near the verge of panic. They felt that they had an unusually high number of on-the-job minor accidents, and sustained higher rates of scratches and scrapes then normal. Several walked off the job.
A cleaning man called the homeowner one morning to inform her that a large glass door from her entertainment set flew off the console and slammed into the floor. It was lodged so tightly that it took the construction crews to pull it out.
More disturbing was the reaction of her computer equipment in the in-home office. Though it worked well before the move, in this house she had gone through three hard drives and 2 DVD players on her stationary computer, and her laptop was in a state of needing constant repair. Yet, upon taking it to be fixed, the computer repair technicians never found anything amiss.
She witnessed her elderly dog sit up in bed late at night, wagging her tail as if greeting someone who had come into the room. She saw shadows out of the corner of her eyes, but turned to find no one there. Her keys vanish, and locked doors appeared to unlock themselves.
During the investigation few images were captured, though the team sensitives felt the presence of a kindly old woman. She seemed to stay upstairs where her bedroom used to be. Research showed it might be the former homeowner who, with her first husband, bought and built the house. After her husband died, she remarried and continued working on the house, with the biggest addition being the garage out back.
The garage also contained a male presence. Sensitives felt him asking about the whereabouts of a tree that he had liked. The homeowner explained later that the tree was sick when she bought the house and she had to have it cut down. Yet, his intimate knowledge of the house led the homeowner to conclude from her own research that he was related to the old woman, either as a husband or as a grounds keeper.
We also thought there may be a third presence related to the house, perhaps that of a wandering ghost. Some had sensed him as they arrived at the house, but he remained mostly outside. He came in only at night, when no one was awake and it was he who interfered with the computer equipment.
The homeowner is taking this in stride. She set up a TV set in the computer room to keep her wandering guest occupied and away from her equipment. She has asked the entities to stop unlocking the doors and taking her things.
The homeowner now reports that life within the household has resumed its normal hectic pace, spiced only occasionally with supernatural circumstances. The computer glitches from time to time, and an odd door or two may be unlocked, but things are much calmer. Those dwelling within the house’s walls — both living and non-living, have formed a symbiosis, content to leave each other be in peace.