I called to her from the porch, “Hey, stop that!”
She either ignored me or was unaware of my presence, because she never even turned to look in my direction. She just continued to peel off caterpillar after caterpillar from her upper body and place them gently onto the trunk of the tree.
“What are you doing?” I yelled again. This time she did acknowledge me. She turned and glared at me in the most terrifying way, and I almost fainted on the spot. I was prepared to just rush back into the house and let her strip every last caterpillar off of herself as she seemed intent on doing, rather than confront her again. But before I could move she backed away from the tree, still wearing hundreds of the caterpillars on her arms and body, and slowly retraced her path back down the street.
Twice she turned and glared at me again, but she finally reached the intersection and turned the corner out of sight. I felt weak with relief. And as quickly as the clouds had set in and the sun had disappeared, the day was bright and beautifully warm once more. And all the usual noises filled our street again within the split second it took me to leave the front porch and re-enter the living room to pick up my daughter from her playpen and hold her close. I was even relieved to hear the chainsaw in my neighbour’s backyard again. I talked calmly and reassuringly to my baby, but I was shaking like a leaf.
After knowing she was all right, I put her in the playpen again and headed back out to the boulevard with a broom in my hand. I knocked as many caterpillars off of the tree as I could reach, but many more had already climbed too high into the tree’s limbs. And, no wonder, we did have a terrible infestation of tent caterpillars in that tree that year. My husband knew that was true, because he was the one who dealt with that difficult situation along with his usual yardwork that summer; but I know he could never really comprehend this story I tried to explain regarding the cause. I don’t know that I could have truly believed it either, though, if I hadn’t experienced it myself.
Everything about it was so eerie and surreal. My daughter was too young to retain the memory, but at the time I was grateful for her company. Her wide-eyed amazement validated everything I also was experiencing that day. I know it wasn’t a dream or hallucination, and really did happen just as I have described. I just don’t understand why or how.
Haunted Neighbour
My neighbour’s house was haunted. It was built on an empty lot, and the house had just been built when they moved into it when I was a teenager. Their son was my age, and we were friends.
He always preferred to be at my house instead of his, and at first I thought he liked the commotion of being in our large family’s home filled with lots of people, unlike his quiet home where he was the only child.
But one day he told me that he was scared living in his house and wanted his parents to sell it and move, but they wouldn’t. He even asked if he could go and live with his grandparents in another city because he hated it there so much, but they wouldn’t let him do that either.
He told me he had seen and heard ghosts in his house, but his parents wouldn’t believe him and got mad if he talked about it. I asked what he had seen, and he listed off a lot of things, but I remember these two the most. An old lady walked into his room one night when he was reading in bed and sat down in a nearby chair and smiled at him. He said he screamed and she disappeared and then his father yelled at him for scaring his mother. Another time a little girl was sitting on the floor in his kitchen when he got home from school. No one else was home. She looked at him for a couple of seconds and then vanished.
Looking back now, I wish I had realized and been more sympathetic to how badly this was affecting him; but I was just a kid too, and unfortunately was more fascinated than sympathetic. I thought it was great, like something out of the movies, and wanted to see these ghosts too. So I started suggested going to his place whenever we got together from then on.
It was a while longer before I saw anything there myself, though, and I was starting to wonder if he had been making it all up. But one time (the last time) I spent the night at his place we stayed up late watching TV. Finally, after he fell asleep and the TV was turned off, I lay there still wide awake and heard someone walking down the hall with heavy footsteps. At first I assumed it was one of his parents, because their room was across the hall from his. But I knew they had both gone to bed long before we did, and I hadn’t heard anyone leave that room since. I could see from the space under the door that the hallway was still dark (I figured they would have turned on the hall light). And the footsteps came to his door, not theirs.
I could hear (and sense) someone on the other side of that door for quite a while. I was a pretty cocky teenager, but I’ll admit now that scared me, and I wanted to wake up my friend, but kept straining my ears instead, hoping to hear the footsteps walking away. I could hear the muffled sounds of someone leaning or brushing against the door, and I can still remember how it made me feel lying in the dark, not knowing what I was hearing on the other side of that door.
Finally, I heard what sounded like muttering, and then the loud footsteps went back down the hall again.
I didn’t sleep for the rest of that night. Next morning I told my friend what had happened. He just nodded his head and told me he had heard that same thing before too, many times.
To his relief his parents finally sold the house a few months later.
No More Denial
I admit I am currently living in a haunted house. I was in denial about that for a while when we bought this house last year. It’s our first house. My wife and I have been married two years, and we thought it would be a great investment and get us onto the property ladder. It was priced right and didn’t need too much work to be inhabitable. Mostly just some minor repairs and updates in the kitchen and bathroom and some coats of paint have turned it back into a nice-looking house. But how it looks and how it feels are different things.
The first thing I tried to ignore were the smells. Cigar smoke and very strong perfume seem to combine into a pungent odour that suddenly hits you in two areas of the house: the upstairs hallway and near the back door by the kitchen. I don’t know why this is contained to only those areas, but it is.
Our two cats and boxer pup seem pretty nervous (skittish, as my wife would call it) in the house and are always following something with their eyes, unseen by us. They will focus on something about six feet above them and keep whatever it is in their sight as if it’s travelling around the room. If it appears to come to close to the animals they will open their eyes wider in fright, and then race out of the room and go and hide somewhere. It’s hard to describe how creepy this actually is, watching how the animals react to this. I just thought they were having a hard time adjusting to their new home at first, but this is still going on, and they should be used to it here by now, especially the pup who was bought after we moved into the house.
Once my wife let out a scream, and when I went downstairs to see what was wrong she told me she thought I had come up behind her and tickled her waist, but when she turned around no one was there. We both started to feel a bit less comfortable living here after that.
My car keys are always moved whenever I leave them near the front door. We have a table near the door, and I always toss the keys there out of habit when I enter the house. But they are never there when I go to leave again. Sometimes they are even upstairs or in the basement, areas I hadn’t been to during that interval in the house. Once I purposely put them there and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. They were on that table all day, exactly where I’d put them. But when my wife came home and I greeted her at the door they were gone by the time I turned toward the table to show her they hadn’t been moved.
I found them on the counter in the kitchen that time. No idea how they got there, but I stopped leaving them on the table after that and