Who doesn’t love a good ghost story? In this post, I am sharing a few of my encounters.
When we were in the market for our first home in Canada, we visited several houses, but there was one that stuck out the most. This house had a presence. It was so heavy, and there was a terrible smell. There was no love in that home. My 2-year-old Eli ran to us and said we should leave the house; he begged us to leave immediately. He felt whatever was looming in that house.
Good Energy vs. Bad Energy
The opposite resulted when we visited the home we later bought; the owner was there. She was a lovely lady; she and Eli started chatting right away. She told the real estate agent she wanted us to have the house, and above all, the house was so light. Love and peace poured from the walls, so we put in an offer, and here we are six years later, enjoying love and peace. I am a firm believer in feelings and intuition. If my spirit is not feeling something, I cannot go ahead with it, and often when I go against it, something untoward always happens.
The Parallel Dimension
Speaking of a presence, have you ever wondered about the energy in a space? What causes it? Some people say when someone is treated poorly or killed; their energy lingers wherever the act took place. It may seem like a nancy story (Guyanese for tall tale) but is it? Folklore is a part of many cultures, including mine. Many people take it at the surface, but some have experienced it. This story might seem like just a story, but it’s an account of my encounters. We grew up on several sugar estates that may have previously been plantations during the period of enslaved Africans.
The Energy Still Looms…
Guyana’s first colonizers were the Dutch in the 1600s and the British in the early 1800s. Slavery needs no explanation; it was horrific, and people were oppressed and killed in the most heinous ways. I’m sure many energy sources lingered from the injustices meted out to the enslaved. This is not a scientific explanation; this is my deduction. I have heard things, and I have seen things, not just me, but my family. We had so much fun growing up. During the day, we climbed many fruit trees, had several bush cooks (this is a meal cooked on an open fire outdoors), played games like hopscotch, saul out, ketcha (tag), hide and seek. It was a rich upbringing. But something lingered at night, a presence.
The Blue Haunted House Mystery
The first sugar estate we lived on was called Uitvlugt Estate. This was an interesting experience. There was an empty house next to ours; I think we called it the Blue House (because it was painted blue) or the Haunted House; I cannot remember which, but at nights there was so much commotion at that location, inexplicable because we all knew that no one lived there. Around 6 in the evening, there was a sound like someone was scooting (riding a scooter) on the road. The sound was so loud, but we would ignore it. Whatever it was, it was not bothering us, so we just continued about our business. When we moved to another estate, the family that moved to the house we previously occupied asked my dad if we ever had trouble in the house. So, it was not just us or a figment of our imagination.
The Clip-clopping In the Street
We next moved to La Bonne Intention Estate (LBI) and had similar experiences. The house next to ours was empty, but we would hear chairs dragging loudly. My brother was so terrified to sleep in his room by himself that he would seek refuge in one of our beds most nights. On the Sugar Estates, we moved every five years depending on the needs of the Estate. We later moved to Diamond Estate, and it was the same thing. In the wee hours of the morning, I would hear a horse or something clip-clopping through the streets. Every morning at the same time, there was no way there was a horse out at that time. I would lie in bed in almost a cold sweat, waiting for the sound to pass. I was so terrified that whatever it was could hear my heart beating and then find me.
A Ghost Story: The Parallel Dimension
My final encounter came when I started my working career. A few years before I started working at the Company, one of the employees became possessed. My colleagues related that the employee picked up a safe that weighed at least 300 pounds and tossed it like a twig while he howled wildly. It could not be explained. A priest, an imam, and a pandit had to visit the location to perform a ritual called “tying down” to exorcise whatever possessed the individual. We all had a good laugh about it, and we would occasionally make fun of the situation. Then one night, when we were working late, there was a power outage. We had to abort our work but started the process of backing up data; the servers were connected to a backup system, so all we had to do was start the process and let it run.
The Mysterious Moving Chair
So, a power outage created the perfect setting for a jumbie story (Guyanese for scary ghost story), so naturally, we started laughing about the story of the possession again. Then everyone left me alone in the department to lock up. I was sitting in the dark doing my work, and then the chair next to me started to move like someone was pushing it to sit next to me. The floor was level, the chair was not on an incline or anything, and yea, I’m not the type of person you see in the movies with the flashlight yelling, “Hello, is anybody there?” Usain Bolt had nothing on me that night; I made it out of there in a nanosecond. I cannot remember if I told any of my colleagues that story, but it was the most frightening feeling.
Conclusion
Who knows what causes a presence to linger? I sure don’t know, but I know what I felt and what I have experienced and while this sounds like something straight out of Unsolved Mysteries, this is my truth, or is it?
Do you have a Ghost Story that you would like to share? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
