My dad always told me I had a gift. I thought he had bought me something but it was not to be found. He said I would understand as I got older. As I got older I would ask him if I would get that gift now. He would only smile and say, “Not yet.” I think I asked him that every year that I got older. After a fashion I stopped asking. It was not like my dad to lie to me. My dad was a peaceful man. He grew up dirt poor, never had an education and had worked all of his life until he couldn’t. He died from ALS when I was 33. I took care of him the last years of his life until I could not. I miss him so much but I feel him with me.
I noticed things that other did not from a young age. Things I had no reason to know. I was only 3 when my Uncle killed himself, but I remember him sitting me on his lap telling me stories. One night my dad, aunt, uncle and I were sitting talking about old memories and my old potty chair got brought up. I told my dad I remembered sitting on it at the end of my bed. He told me it was impossible because he had gotten rid of it after I was potty trained. I described it to a T, colors and all and he could not believe it. I also brought up how I would fall asleep in the peddle car while sitting beside him as he watched tv. He said I was too young to remember that, but I did. When I was older it was said to me that I had something called hyperthymesia. Just what I needed, as if being dyslexic wasn’t enough.
I think I was around 9 the first time I vividly remember seeing someone I should not have been seeing. I had spent the night at a girlfriends house. During the night I heard my name being called. It took a while for me to wake up, then to focus my vision and that was when I saw my deceased foster grandfather standing at the end of the bed I was in. In his arms was his dog, Jack. I wanted to scream but instead, I stuffed the end of the bedspread into my mouth. I remember staring at him wondering why I was seeing a dead man. I was not close to him but I did love his dog. When I woke, I looked around the room. Lois asked me what I was looking for. I said nothing. For about a week as I laid in my bed trying to get to sleep, I kept the blankets over my head and every noise I heard shook me to my core. I didn’t even tell my dad at first. I certainly did not tell my mother. She would have loved having me committed.
When I lived in Waterville, it bothered my husband how I could tell him the phone was for him, who it was, and what they wanted. We would actually go back and forth about who should get the phone. After he answered it, he would just stare at me like I had a want about me. I was stalked when I lived there. I told my husband about this and he thought I was imagining it. Another couple of weeks went by and that is when I spoke to one of the librarians and found out this man had been unable to be caught where he had done this before because the other women that he had hurt, were afraid of him. The hang ups when I would answer the phone. Wherever I went, this man was always near. According to the police once this person had been booked, he had been driving up and down past my house. He had followed me as I walked into town. He knew where I worked, knew which church I volunteered at. And he knew I spent a lot of time at the public library. And somehow, he knew my landline number even though I always had unlisted numbers. When all was said and done, this man had terrorized many women. He would get them alone, he would rape them and he would cut them up. The police needed me to be the bait for them to catch this man. I was the only one who had not, yet. They did not have cameras in places back then. My husband said no. I said I would do it. There were 4 plain clothed police officers, my husband was there and myself. The librarians were told ahead of time what was going to happen. I had been told which aisles and floors to go to. I still remember very well that on the second floor, I pulled a book out to look at it and his eyes were staring at me. I admit, that startled me. What really bothered me is he was the spitting image of my dead brother in law.
Around 1981, my dad asked if I would sell up and move in with him to help him out. I thought that was odd because he never needed help. He was in his mid to late 60’s then. I went down to see him. He looked pretty normal but he said he had been having problems breathing. I noticed when he leaned on his knuckles on the kitchen table, it shook a little. I told him I had a lot to handle and it would take some time but I would move in. It took me a couple of months. I was back in the town I really hated but he needed me. He had always been there for me so it was only fair. I got a job teaching at the school about a half mile away. I could walk to and from with no issues. I helped him take care of the farm when I wasn’t working. That was when things really got……extreme?
Dad and my husband were watching tv in the kitchen while I went to my bedroom to make my class their flash cards. I had made them, cut them into the size I needed, and had stacked them in a pile which was about 3 inches high. My eyes were tired and took my glasses off to rub them. After rubbing my eyes, I looked and the pile has been splayed out. I had not hit the table or bumped anything. I put my glasses back on and went out into the kitchen. I told them I was going to bed and said goodnight. I went back into my bedroom and the flash cards were stacked up again. I admit I felt uneasy but tried to brush it off. I got into bed and I could hear footsteps walking ever so softly. I thought it was my husband coming to bed but the door had not opened. I kept my eyes closed and tried not to breathe all the while wanting to scream. I ended up pulling the blankets over my head as a child would. I heard the footsteps come right by my side of the bed. I could have screamed but I just laid there until my husband came in. He asked me why I had the blankets over my head so I told him what had happened. He laughed saying I must have hit something. I just let it go.
It was about a year later that something frightened me so much that I wasn’t sleeping. When my dad bought his house, the first owner had built a fireplace for his wife, which she had asked for. The owner made the statement that if anyone who bought the house, tore down the fireplace, he would haunt them. After that man moved out, his daughter lived there and my dad bought the house from her, Inez. I never saw the fireplace. It was taken down before I was born. I had always heard footsteps on and off but never thought too much about it. I think I talked myself into believing that it was the house settling, being an older house. One night I got up to pee in the middle of the night. I saw my dad sitting in the easy chair he had in the kitchen and said, “Daddy, it’s time to go to bed”. I said it again and got no answer. I went to the bathroom and in the middle of having a pee, my mouth dropped open and my eyes bugged out. My dad did not have a beard. You talk about having a panic attack. I stayed in the bathroom a long time and had to talk myself into having balls enough to walk back to my bedroom, as if I could sleep. I opened the bathroom door and looked at whoever was in the chair. I wanted to get closer to see if I had imagined the person having a beard and it was just my dad. It was no imagination. I turned quickly and walked to my bedroom and crawled into bed, shaking. I said nothing for 3 days. My dad told me I looked like hell and to get some sleep. On the 3rd day I was so exhausted that I just flopped into one of the kitchen chairs. My dad thinking I was ready to pass out asked me what was wrong with me. That was when I told him what I had seen. He only stared at me. He asked me to tell him again and I did. He said nothing more about it and cooked supper that night where I was exhausted. The story did not end there.
The next day as I was walking home from work, I could see dad had a visitor. It was someone on a tractor. As I got to his driveway, I saw it was Tildon. He said something told him to stop in to see my dad. Then my dad asked me to tell him what I saw. It was Tildon’s grandfather that I had seen. Now I knew who I was “seeing” that would be walking across the backyard near the farm pond with his hands in his pockets with his head down, down by the chicken houses or out in my dad’s huge garden, but I never saw him in my daddy’s chair again. The question of why was I seeing him bothered me. Why was he here. I think I found out soon enough.
About 5 months later my dad had just had his load of chickens picked up to go to the processing plant and he and Bruce, a neighbor were down by the grain bins. I had just gotten home from school and sat on the end of the bed, taking my work clothes off, changing into my farm work clothes when I heard a soft high pitched sound. It sounded like a woman crying or a man with a higher pitched voice. Talk about wanting to shit ones self, I froze with half of my work pants on one leg and my school pants half off the other leg. I kept listening to the soft sobbing wondering who or what it could have been. I know his mother died a young woman. I also knew his youngest brother had killed himself after coming home from WWII. Or was it an animal in the cellar even though I knew one could not get in there.. Was it a breeze sneaking through a crack in the trim of a window. We had no windows in the cellar. I thought of everything it could have been while thinking why in hell he left the grates in the floor after he tore out the furnace. I could not figure who else it could have been. I knew who had lived in this house before and wondered if something bad had happened here. I remembered my uncles voice and it could have been him but I had never heard him cry. And my grandmother, I had never met. Panicking as I was, I finished getting dressed and went out the front door. I was not walking by the cellar door.
I would soon learn why John Loren visited his old house. It was his last time seeing the old homestead he once knew before it going into another’s hands which would not be family. This was when my dad’s health issues went from bad to ugly. First it was his breathing, then his fear of not daring to drive where he shook so bad. He said it was if his muscles were not working for him anymore. He was put on proventil and theo24. It didn’t help much. He had other test that was available back then, done. He had to stop driving. He would never raise chickens again. I would have to change the channels on his tv for him. He could get himself to bed and to his easy chair he kept in his large kitchen but that was it. His doctors had no idea of what was going on. I contacted my doctor when his could not be reached and she took over my dad’s health care. That was when I was told after further testing that he had ALS. I took care of him until I could not. He had to have a feeding tube put in. The last few months of his life, he spent in the hospital He was transferred from the hospital in Belfast to the one in Bangor. And that is where he passed. I would go up when I could. Traffic was busy with construction so many times I would take my bike because with a bike, I could take shortcuts where a car could not. He could no longer talk so he had to write everything down on paper, if one could read his scribbling. It was very hard for me to see what was once a strong man, still alert unable to breathe on his own or speak let alone unable to walk. I was going up one Saturday but got called into work so figured I would go up Sunday. I got the call at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning that he had passed. Then the guilt set in. I felt I had let my dad down, not seeing him before he left. I had not had my chance to tell him how much I loved him and to say goodbye. He did pretty good I felt. His health issues started when he was in his late 60’s. So now I understood him wanting me to sell up and move in. He knew. I figure he had been having symptoms for at least 6 years. Most die within 3 years and there have been some who have lived 15 years or longer with ALS but at that time, in a small town, I think he did pretty damn good lasting that long. His funeral was full of people. I sat away from my siblings. I was his favorite. They knew it and I knew it. It hit me the hardest. After viewing him in his coffin, people walked by me, reaching out for my hands and holding them. I had slipped some cash in his pocket of his suit and kissed him goodbye for the last time. My world, as I had known it, was over.
I got done my job. I needed a long time to deal with my dad’s passing to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I got a lot done on the farm and inside of the house. I stayed mostly to myself. I knew what was coming up, having to deal with it. It seemed it took years to deal with probate and his property. Once his will was handled and all monies was being invested at Smith and Barneys until I would reach the age of 50. I never thought about it. My only thought was that I lost my daddy, the only stability in my life, at the age of 33. So now I had to build my own stability. A few years went by and that was when I had an email from someone asking me what my signature meant.
I had been a member of a newsgroup of people that lived all over the world. That is where this person had seen my posts. It was my signature that drew him to me. The sender of that email and I talked via email and via the telephone.
My son was going for his drivers license. I was stressed out about that because I knew how my son was and I just pictured how things would be going after that if he did indeed get his license. I thought I would mow the lawn figuring the exercise from that would help alleviate my stress. I was down by the road where there was a dip in the lawn. It had rained a few days before so there was a bit of a puddle but I continued to mow. I started to get stuck in a spot or two and with the stress I felt, I just wanted to leave the damn mower there and walk off. It was then when I heard my dad say, “Give her some gas Rhettie.” I must have been in a real pissy mood because I looked up to where I heard the voice come from and there was my dad, standing, leaning against my mustang. One hand on my car and the other in his pocket which was his usual. My dad in his green chinos, gray t shirt and his Mork and Mindy suspenders on that I got him. I remember telling him to shut the fuck up. It was then when I realized I had actually seen my dad and looked up to where I had seen him. He was gone. I gave the mower more gas and finished what I started. I noticed my stress had gone and I had a smile on my face.
The man who had sent me an email, was the man I would end up marrying years down the road. The funny parts were as we were discussing our parents, I told him about how my dad would be checking him out. I think he thought I was just telling him porkies as he would say. It was 9 pm one night when I got a call. He said he was in bed sleeping and all of a sudden the wardrobe doors burst open and scared the shit out of him. I asked him if they were not fastened properly. He replied they were never used, that his mothers old furs and clothes were in there and the doors had never been opened for anything where it was more for storage but it was chuckablock full. That is when I told him my dad was indeed waking you up to some things. I had all I could do not to laugh picturing him jumping out of bed and standing, staring at that wardrobe. After the call, I was laughing my ass off. I have to add that after living there for a handful of years, that wardrobe never opened while I was there and it was chuckablock full. I am surprised the items inside did not fly out of there but why did the doors fly open that night………..
The years went by and we had moved to the states. I figured where I chose would be good job wise. Within a week I had found a job, a vehicle and a house to rent and ended up buying it. A lot was going on with setting up a new house. The furniture, the transferring of monies from hither and yon. Things were not the same for me in this city compared to when I left years ago from a country farm. I was like a fish out of water.
One morning my husband asked me if I had heard that noise last night. I told him I had not. I was struggling with PTSD and to get some solid sleep was well advised by my doctor. I asked him if perhaps the plow picked up a rock and it hit the house. He said no. I asked if it was something else and again he said no. He said it sounded like a gun. I then asked if he thought it was a backfire. Again, he said no. I left for work. It was about a mile if that, so I walked, no matter the weather. I didn’t think much about what he heard that night until one day when I noticed that spot of the side of the house. I stopped to look at it and it did look like a bullet hole. That weekend we both went out to look at it. That was when my neighbor came down to ask if we wanted the police involved. He was always nosy no matter what we were doing. I told him no. He said it was a bullet hole and should be looked at. That piece of siding was replaced and it was left at that. I cannot say who would have made that hole but I had a real good idea who was behind it. A little time after that I went down to the police station and had a talk with an officer. IF it was a bullet, it remains stuck in probably a stud. There were no more problems after that.
Being a new home, the noises are something one has to get used to whether the house is new or not. Why I could hear whispers is anyone’s guess. There were times when it got to me and I would turn off the PC or tv and go to bed just to hopefully fall asleep quickly. It sounded like the room I was in had a million people in it, all whispering. Even my little dog would wake, crawl out of her bed near me, growling. My husband, who still did not believe in spooks as he called them, asked me if I could shut the dog up. I just gave him a look to let him know it was not happening. She was not barking, just growling while dragging herself out of her bed, on her belly, along the floor.
We had 2 cats. Their litter box was down cellar. I used to go down there every day after supper to clean it. Being tired I would clean it not thinking about the light being blocked so I could not see what I was doing. The light was behind me and off to the side a bit but I could see if I was getting all the litter clean. I sat on an old stool while doing it. All of a sudden, everything would go black then the light would be back. I asked hubby if he had been playing with the light but he had not. Besides, I could hear him in the back room. It wasn’t until the weekend when it happened again and I had set a little mirror against a post so I could see the light while cleaning the litter box. The light did not go completely off but there was a shadow that kept moving back and forth in front of it. I went upstairs and typed what I just wrote and shadow people popped up. I have never heard of it. What first caught my eyes were the words that shadow people wanted to cause harm to one. That was all it took. I did not want to hear about it. Nuff said. I started to clean the litter box in the daylight.
I had started a job as a custodian at a large corporation. It was 7 floors I had to take care of. I would go in at 3 a.m. I would gather all the trash first on all the floors. Then it would be dust mopping and vacuuming the rugs. I did that, especially in the offices before people started to pile in. One night I watched a horror movie with my husband and when I went into work that next morning, I was terrified to go across the room to get to the hallway. Let me explain that the large building was completely dark. I would unlock the back door and had to use my swipe card to get anywhere else in the building. That morning, I froze just inside the back door. The door across that large floor kept banging. It didn’t open but it just kept banging. I was not about to stand there until Kevin came in at 4:30. I had work to do. What made things worse was the company had erected cubicles all over the floor. I finally went to that door without anyone jumping out from the cubicles to get me…lol. The door was jammed and did not close correctly. I was okay then but I have to admit I was jumpy all day long.
On another morning I started in doing my work. I grabbed the large trash tub and went up to the highest floor and worked my way down, fetching the trash. I got off the elevator on the 3rd floor and noticed a man sitting all alone at one of the tables. I said, “Good morning” to him and got no answer. I spoke a little louder and said it again. Still nothing. I said to myself that I must have pissed him off somehow and I had not even met him at all. He must have been new here. I went all around the 3rd floor then came to the room where he was. I fetched the trash, wiped the tables and walked right up to him and said good morning again. Still nothing. That time I figured he was just being an ass or he was so engrossed in the article he was reading in the newspaper so I finished my work. After fetching all the trash on all floor, as I was going out to the dumpster, Kevin was walking in with his usual 2 cups of coffee along with his donuts. I said to Kevin, “You must have a new guy working here. I saw him on the 3rd floor, said good morning 3 times, even standing right beside him and nothing.” Kevin just stood there. He said he did not hear of anyone new starting and asked me what he looked like. I told him he was in his 40’s, brown hair, medium build and wearing a blue button up shirt and that he was reading the Bangor Daily. Kevin just stared at me. He said he had to go to the bathroom and for me to wait until he got back.
We went out to have a smoke and he asked me to describe this person again. He said he had to throw some cold water on his face to wake up. When I described the guy again, I also said he would not even say a good morning back to me and asked Kevin what I did to piss him off. Kevin was hemming and hawing, then he said that the man would not be saying anything to me. I asked him why and he told me the man was dead. I thought he was joking but he was not. I went back to work. Kevin had told Pat on the 3rd floor what I had told him. I guess it spread like wildfire. I felt like a fool but Pat told me I was not the only one who noticed “things” around there. Come to find out, this person that I saw, his name was Paul. He loved working there. He had also developed cancer. He had treatment and he was well enough to come back to work but the company did not want to have to keep paying for his treatments so they told him he was done. The people that worked there said they thought that was what ended up killing him. I could not say. He had died long before I worked there.
While working there I had those shadow people around a lot. It bothered me. I always found myself looking behind my back. One thing that happened, I had heard that saying of one’s heart in their throat and I never thought much about it until it happened to me. I was on the 7th floor and had put the large trash container then myself in the elevator. I pressed the number 6 button to go down to the next floor and all of a sudden the elevator dropped. It stopped on the 2nd floor. I can say that it is true, one’s heart does feel like it is in one’s throat. I wasn’t afraid but it felt like any organ I had inside of me was fighting to come out of my mouth. I was only there for a couple of years but I had had enough of different happenings to last me a lifetime. I left to be employed at a larger company.
I had my own business plus working my 40 hours. I had 2 clients on Silver Road and one in Veazie. The first place I did, her name was Irene. She worked for a bank before retiring. She had been widowed for a long time. She was well ahead of her 90 years. Still sharp as a tack and what would drive her family wild would be to see her driving her 1988 Nova going down Broadway Ave. She was a spry old lady and still had all of her marbles. One morning she had bought me a muffin and while we were eating them, she told me I was a doctor in my previous life. I found myself sitting there just staring at her wondering what in the hell. I picked away at the muffin and then she said that I knew too much. She then proceeded to tell me she was a Japanese prisoner of war. I was still in that what the hell mode. I had never thought about reincarnation before but she filled me in with her thoughts. I asked her if her husband every visited her and she said yes. She lived alone but was never alone. One time I was over there and she was so excited telling me something and someone kept tapping me on my right shoulder. I would shrug to get rid of it but it kept up and kept up and I turned to look and I told whoever it was, “Do you mind? She’s talking”. After I turned to get back to the conversation, Irene was smiling looking at me. There were times when I could smell cigarette smoke in her kitchen. I knew she didn’t smoke. Her husband had died from smoking when he was in his 90’s so I knew George was still hanging around. Irene passed a year later. I know he was there waiting for her.
I was in Walmart one day wanting to buy some beans. While in the bean aisle, an elderly man came up to where I was and started talking to me about the different varieties of beans. As he started to talk about different things. He had said a few things that I did not put two and two together with. It was personal things that only my dad and I knew. I must have stayed there with him for a half hour then I told him I really needed to get home. I said goodbye and started down to another aisle. That was when it hit me that, could that have been my dad using that man’s body as a way to talk to me like we used to talk? And the personal things he had said. I started to run back to that aisle and he was gone. I rushed all over the store and by the check outs and he was no where to be seen. It was not like he moved quickly because he didn’t so why could I not find him. I really felt defeated so I cashed out and as I neared my truck, I noticed pennies all in a line right up to where the drivers door was. As defeated as I felt for not finding that man again, I had a smile on my face because it had to have been my dad. We had this thing about pennies and how he said he would leave them for me to find so he would know he was okay and still watching my back.
At this time in my life, My husband passed and I have heard the kettle turn on and off. I swear that I used to see him walking from the living room to the kitchen numerous times. I also have times when I turn my head to the left to look at him as if he were going to come around the corner to ask me a question. Right after he passed, I heard a crash, and the picture of an outhouse I had hung in the bathroom had landed on the floor. There was no reason for it to fall. I had the nail pointing towards the ceiling and the hook on the back of the picture was a complete circle so there was no way it should have fallen. I picked up the mess then went down cellar to fetch a piece of glass from another frame and put the picture back up and it hasn’t fallen. Same nail, same hook on the back.
It makes me wonder why I had heard all that whispering years ago. I knew my dad visited me often. I’ve been able to tell when my dad had visited me. He raised chickens so I could smell chicken shit. He chewed Copenhagen snuff. I could smell that at times. I could smell his pre shave at times. There are sometimes when I have smelled a woman’s perfume. I only wished others could hear what I do. If this is the gift my dad said I had, I don’t like it and I don’t want it. When he knew what I know now, he would tell me to use it to my advantage. Whatever in the hell that meant.
I have to admit that in the few years since my husband has passed, the sounds have more or less stopped. The whisperers as I call them are gone. I wonder if they were all watching over me living with what I had. I also think that is why I don’t sense my dad anymore. He always had my back no matter where I was. If anyone has ever asked me if I believe in angels, I do. I can only imagine my guardian angel has spent many hours shaking her head at the things I have done. I believe we all have someone who watches over us.
LexiMe - My journey of faith 