True Ghost Story #4
The Front Door
Since becoming an adult I have never lived in one place more that six months to a year, and four of those houses were haunted.
I met hubs on Thanksgiving night 1999 and by late March was pregnant and living with him. We finally married in April 2002. I was 43 and he was 36,
neither of us had ever married, when we met. Everybody said it wouldn't last. Wrong. The month after we met he rented a doll house on a ribbon lane
in a rural oasis in town. I visited him several times a week, but he refused to set foot in my mother's house because my skanky baby sister called him a
Mexican mofo just for kicks and giggles.
That house wasn't haunted. It was just spooky. It was a four room box with a porch that stretched across the front and a tiny deck out back. It had a
napkin lawn and a huge backyard that stepped down to a bushy chain link fence. The left side of the house was a wood that stretched way off to a major
highway. There was a street light in front, but at night the backyard was as black as a bat in hell. I never went back there, never ever at night. No way.
Not me.
I was scared to death there anyway, at first, because I had mostly always been a city girl and it was spooky living out in these quasi boonies. I never
thought about ghosts because I didn't feel anything Other in that house. Hubs did have a habit of scaring the kabooky out of me, at times.
One night we were sitting in the floor watching a movie when I had to go pee. I got up, went into the bathroom and there in the shadows stood a man.
OMG! I backed out, closed the door, tore into the living room and said "THERE'S A MAN IN THE BATHROOM!" The living room was empty, no hubs in
sight. I was like Hmmmm. I turned around and there he was coming out of the bathroom. I don't know how he did it, but he had gotten up and beat me
to the bathroom.
Hubs, Nabo, was a frogman in the Mexican Navy for four years. His senses are so fine tuned he can smell a fart in a whirlwind and hear a pin drop
during a stampede. There were many many times when I would wake up in time to see him sit bold up listening to the dead night, having heard an odd
noise. Then he would lie back down and go to sleep and I would lay there starring at the ceiling. A Cherokee Indian war party could have road their
stallions through the house I would never have heard them.
The noises he heard always turned out to be nothing, maybe a rambling possum or a fox or deer. But one night the noise was a banging on our back door
and I slept through the whole thing. He didn't tell me about it until he got off work late the next day. There were just four houses on our little ribbon
loop of a lane. Our nearest neighbor was a trot next door and the other houses were some distance, one far to the left and one far to the right. Nabob
said someone started banging on our back door at around 4AM. He got up, opened the door, and there stood a strange woman, begging for money.
Something about her was wasn't right and he told her to git. Turned out she had been banging all the other houses' doors, too.
Hubs dearly loved that house. We were standing out on the front lawn one night and he turned to it, spread his arms and said to the house "I LOVE
YOU!" That was before he ever said he loved me. D'oh.
That first spring we planted a garden at the edge of the backyard. Summer squash, cukes, tomatoes, green peppers, and pole beans. We worked hard all
that season weeding and watering, and in July we began to harvest. I walked down to pick some of our crops one morning and part of a row of pole beans
had turned yellow. I had never had a garden of my own and couldn't think what that was about. I soon found out.
I got up one morning at the butt crack of dawn, looked out my kitchen window and spied what looked like a black bear way off on the other side of that
fence. Turned out to be a bull. Eeeek. Another day I saw his mama. Few days later I was driving down our lane and spied a cow patty on the side of the
road. Uh oh. I got home and there was that black bull and it's mama down in our garden munching our squash. That dang bull had been hosing down
our pole beans and that's what had turned them yellow. Ahggggggggggh!
About that time Nabo came home from work, took one look at that bull and spouted some words I won't repeat here. Now he loves animals of all kinds
but he had work hard on that garden, so he was mad as a hatter. I said "You want me to call the cops?" He said "No!" And then he took off running
toward the bull shouting "Shoooo, you! Shooo!" The bull met him half way. Hubs was trying to push the bull toward the fence and the bull was loving
on him, nuzzling his shoulder and licking his face. I stood there on the patio laughing my rear off. Haaaaaaaaaaa! So hubs looks at me and goes "Call
the cops!" He threw up his hands and stomped back inside.
Because I'm deaf, to make telephone calls I must use a relay service. At that time I used a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD). I had to
use one of those old fashioned phones so that I could place the receiver down on two transmission cups. There was a one line screen and a keyboard. I
would call the Georgia Relay Service, type in the number I wanted to call, and an operator would dial it and translate back and forth between my party
and me. First I called Animal Control.
Dispatcher: Gwinnett County Animal Control. How may I help you?
Me: There's a bull in my garden.
Silence.
Dispatcher: Do you live within the city limits?
Me: Yes, sir, I do.
Silence.
Dispatcher: We don't do bulls.
Click.
So I called the non emergency police number.
Dispatcher: Gwinnett County Police Department. How may I assist you?
Me: There's a bull in my garden.
Dispatcher: Ma'am, do you live within the city limits?
Me: Yes, ma'am.
Silence.
Dispatcher: You have a cattle in your yard? In the city limits?
Me: Yes, ma'am.
Silence.
Dispatcher: Give me your name, phone number, and address, and I'll send out an officer.
Not long after a patrol car pulled into our paved driveway. I walked out to meet him. He climbed out carefully, and I saw him unhook the thingy on his
holster that keeps his gun in place.
It was after sunset by then and his face was as pale as the moon. I explained the problem, and told him about the cow patty I had seen on the side of the
road. He allowed as how he had seen it in the beams of his headlights.
We walked down the drive and stood on the side patio. No bull in sight, little did we know. We were talking when said bull hopped onto the patio,
swaggered up beside the cop and licked his face. Said cop jumped and hit the sky. Said bull whirled and ran for its life. Cop ran after it. Hubs came
sprinting out of the house after said cop and said bull. Somehow they got the bull herded down the backyard and through the broken in fence. Cop
ordered the owner to fix the fence. The owner patched it up the next day, and the problem was solved--not. We saw the bull and cow out eating kudzu
behind the house next door. We walked down to the garden and discovered the bull had eaten all of our squash, all of our tomatoes, and all of our green
peppers.
All we had left were the cukes and the pole beans, which he must not have found tasty and peed on them instead of munching. It wasn't long after the
cattle disappeared.
By 2004 we had been living in that house for close to five years; the longest time I had ever lived in one place as an adult. Amazing.
In early February of that year our landlady put the house on the market and we moved into the house on Blackhead Road. Said house was a double wide
trailer which set on a hill beneath a canopy of giant oaks.
It was haunted, let me tell ya.
It was on a private lot with a small deck off the front door and another off the back. The front yard was a wood of giant trees; the back yard was private,
with a barrier fence running across the edge. It had two small bedrooms, a big master with en suite and exit foyer, hall bathroom, galley kitchen where
the backdoor was located, dinning room with patio doors, a huge great room, an entrance foyer, a trio of shadow men, and at least one ghost, maybe two.
Or more.
The details concerning my seeing the shadow men are including in the third true ghost story, and are not relevant in this one. What is relevant is the
ghost vibes I felt in general and what hubs saw at our front door in particular.
Up until the day he spied some thing on our front porch, he didn't believe in spooks. No way, uh uh. He knew of my experiences and would just
patronize me, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. Little did he know.
After I saw the trio of shadow men and the man thingy walking up my next door neighbor's driveway, things settled down, months sped by, no
paranormal activity, and then BOOM it cranked up big time and stayed that way until we move in 2008.
My office was an extra bedroom until hubs put up a wall and door to create a new office along the east end of the great room. My desk was pushed
against the eastern wall, with a picture window to my left and the arched cutout door to the foyer at my right. The foyer was the side of a medium
bathroom, closet at one end, which I could see if I turned my head that way, and the front door at the other end, which was blinded to my sight by a two
foot wide wall. I was in that house alone all day, all the neighbors were at work or at school. I kept our three doors locked tight. I mean, since I can't
hear at all, someone could have come in on me and I might not have known it until it was too late. So I kept the house locked tight.
Along about 5PM one afternoon I was sitting there at my desk using my computer when Nabo came dashing in from the back door in an almighty uproar.
"Why didn't you come get me?" he asked. "I called and called and called me."
Every afternoon I sat on the phone waiting for him to call me to come get him at work. I can't hear to use the phone, but would get his number off the
caller ID. We checked the caller ID and his number was not on the missed call list. Not at all. Strange.
The he goes "Who's been here?"
"What do you mean? No one. I've been here alone all day long. What's going on, baby?"
Silence.
"When you didn't pick me up, I walked home, me. And when I was close enough to see our front porch I saw a man standing there at the door..."
"And?"
"He...um...he opened the front door and came in here."
My mouth dropped open and we were silent for a few seconds, and then we ran to the front door and tested the knob. It was locked, just as it always was.
And I had not set a foot out there that day or in I don't even know how long. We searched the house. No one was there anywhere, of course, no one we
could see, at any rate. Even if the front door had been unlocked there is no way someone could have come in and walked past me without me feeling the
vibrations of their foots or actually seeing them, because I could plainly see the whole foyer arch cutout out the corner of my right eye.
That man was a ghost. There is no other explanation for it. And today Nabo is a believer.
Thereafter the man ghost was loose in my dang office--at least I think it was him. It could have been some Other. I don't know. What I do know is
that I could feel the vibes of his footfalls in my office. There many times when I'd be sitting there before my computer and I could feel him leaning over
my shoulder, as if he were looking at the monitor screen.
After living there for four years, in 2008, we moved out, right smack dab into another haunted house where we live at this writing, August 4, 2009, but
that is another true ghost story.
I met hubs on Thanksgiving night 1999 and by late March was pregnant and living with him. We finally married in April 2002. I was 43 and he was 36,
neither of us had ever married, when we met. Everybody said it wouldn't last. Wrong. The month after we met he rented a doll house on a ribbon lane
in a rural oasis in town. I visited him several times a week, but he refused to set foot in my mother's house because my skanky baby sister called him a
Mexican mofo just for kicks and giggles.
That house wasn't haunted. It was just spooky. It was a four room box with a porch that stretched across the front and a tiny deck out back. It had a
napkin lawn and a huge backyard that stepped down to a bushy chain link fence. The left side of the house was a wood that stretched way off to a major
highway. There was a street light in front, but at night the backyard was as black as a bat in hell. I never went back there, never ever at night. No way.
Not me.
I was scared to death there anyway, at first, because I had mostly always been a city girl and it was spooky living out in these quasi boonies. I never
thought about ghosts because I didn't feel anything Other in that house. Hubs did have a habit of scaring the kabooky out of me, at times.
One night we were sitting in the floor watching a movie when I had to go pee. I got up, went into the bathroom and there in the shadows stood a man.
OMG! I backed out, closed the door, tore into the living room and said "THERE'S A MAN IN THE BATHROOM!" The living room was empty, no hubs in
sight. I was like Hmmmm. I turned around and there he was coming out of the bathroom. I don't know how he did it, but he had gotten up and beat me
to the bathroom.
Hubs, Nabo, was a frogman in the Mexican Navy for four years. His senses are so fine tuned he can smell a fart in a whirlwind and hear a pin drop
during a stampede. There were many many times when I would wake up in time to see him sit bold up listening to the dead night, having heard an odd
noise. Then he would lie back down and go to sleep and I would lay there starring at the ceiling. A Cherokee Indian war party could have road their
stallions through the house I would never have heard them.
The noises he heard always turned out to be nothing, maybe a rambling possum or a fox or deer. But one night the noise was a banging on our back door
and I slept through the whole thing. He didn't tell me about it until he got off work late the next day. There were just four houses on our little ribbon
loop of a lane. Our nearest neighbor was a trot next door and the other houses were some distance, one far to the left and one far to the right. Nabob
said someone started banging on our back door at around 4AM. He got up, opened the door, and there stood a strange woman, begging for money.
Something about her was wasn't right and he told her to git. Turned out she had been banging all the other houses' doors, too.
Hubs dearly loved that house. We were standing out on the front lawn one night and he turned to it, spread his arms and said to the house "I LOVE
YOU!" That was before he ever said he loved me. D'oh.
That first spring we planted a garden at the edge of the backyard. Summer squash, cukes, tomatoes, green peppers, and pole beans. We worked hard all
that season weeding and watering, and in July we began to harvest. I walked down to pick some of our crops one morning and part of a row of pole beans
had turned yellow. I had never had a garden of my own and couldn't think what that was about. I soon found out.
I got up one morning at the butt crack of dawn, looked out my kitchen window and spied what looked like a black bear way off on the other side of that
fence. Turned out to be a bull. Eeeek. Another day I saw his mama. Few days later I was driving down our lane and spied a cow patty on the side of the
road. Uh oh. I got home and there was that black bull and it's mama down in our garden munching our squash. That dang bull had been hosing down
our pole beans and that's what had turned them yellow. Ahggggggggggh!
About that time Nabo came home from work, took one look at that bull and spouted some words I won't repeat here. Now he loves animals of all kinds
but he had work hard on that garden, so he was mad as a hatter. I said "You want me to call the cops?" He said "No!" And then he took off running
toward the bull shouting "Shoooo, you! Shooo!" The bull met him half way. Hubs was trying to push the bull toward the fence and the bull was loving
on him, nuzzling his shoulder and licking his face. I stood there on the patio laughing my rear off. Haaaaaaaaaaa! So hubs looks at me and goes "Call
the cops!" He threw up his hands and stomped back inside.
Because I'm deaf, to make telephone calls I must use a relay service. At that time I used a Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD). I had to
use one of those old fashioned phones so that I could place the receiver down on two transmission cups. There was a one line screen and a keyboard. I
would call the Georgia Relay Service, type in the number I wanted to call, and an operator would dial it and translate back and forth between my party
and me. First I called Animal Control.
Dispatcher: Gwinnett County Animal Control. How may I help you?
Me: There's a bull in my garden.
Silence.
Dispatcher: Do you live within the city limits?
Me: Yes, sir, I do.
Silence.
Dispatcher: We don't do bulls.
Click.
So I called the non emergency police number.
Dispatcher: Gwinnett County Police Department. How may I assist you?
Me: There's a bull in my garden.
Dispatcher: Ma'am, do you live within the city limits?
Me: Yes, ma'am.
Silence.
Dispatcher: You have a cattle in your yard? In the city limits?
Me: Yes, ma'am.
Silence.
Dispatcher: Give me your name, phone number, and address, and I'll send out an officer.
Not long after a patrol car pulled into our paved driveway. I walked out to meet him. He climbed out carefully, and I saw him unhook the thingy on his
holster that keeps his gun in place.
It was after sunset by then and his face was as pale as the moon. I explained the problem, and told him about the cow patty I had seen on the side of the
road. He allowed as how he had seen it in the beams of his headlights.
We walked down the drive and stood on the side patio. No bull in sight, little did we know. We were talking when said bull hopped onto the patio,
swaggered up beside the cop and licked his face. Said cop jumped and hit the sky. Said bull whirled and ran for its life. Cop ran after it. Hubs came
sprinting out of the house after said cop and said bull. Somehow they got the bull herded down the backyard and through the broken in fence. Cop
ordered the owner to fix the fence. The owner patched it up the next day, and the problem was solved--not. We saw the bull and cow out eating kudzu
behind the house next door. We walked down to the garden and discovered the bull had eaten all of our squash, all of our tomatoes, and all of our green
peppers.
All we had left were the cukes and the pole beans, which he must not have found tasty and peed on them instead of munching. It wasn't long after the
cattle disappeared.
By 2004 we had been living in that house for close to five years; the longest time I had ever lived in one place as an adult. Amazing.
In early February of that year our landlady put the house on the market and we moved into the house on Blackhead Road. Said house was a double wide
trailer which set on a hill beneath a canopy of giant oaks.
It was haunted, let me tell ya.
It was on a private lot with a small deck off the front door and another off the back. The front yard was a wood of giant trees; the back yard was private,
with a barrier fence running across the edge. It had two small bedrooms, a big master with en suite and exit foyer, hall bathroom, galley kitchen where
the backdoor was located, dinning room with patio doors, a huge great room, an entrance foyer, a trio of shadow men, and at least one ghost, maybe two.
Or more.
The details concerning my seeing the shadow men are including in the third true ghost story, and are not relevant in this one. What is relevant is the
ghost vibes I felt in general and what hubs saw at our front door in particular.
Up until the day he spied some thing on our front porch, he didn't believe in spooks. No way, uh uh. He knew of my experiences and would just
patronize me, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. Little did he know.
After I saw the trio of shadow men and the man thingy walking up my next door neighbor's driveway, things settled down, months sped by, no
paranormal activity, and then BOOM it cranked up big time and stayed that way until we move in 2008.
My office was an extra bedroom until hubs put up a wall and door to create a new office along the east end of the great room. My desk was pushed
against the eastern wall, with a picture window to my left and the arched cutout door to the foyer at my right. The foyer was the side of a medium
bathroom, closet at one end, which I could see if I turned my head that way, and the front door at the other end, which was blinded to my sight by a two
foot wide wall. I was in that house alone all day, all the neighbors were at work or at school. I kept our three doors locked tight. I mean, since I can't
hear at all, someone could have come in on me and I might not have known it until it was too late. So I kept the house locked tight.
Along about 5PM one afternoon I was sitting there at my desk using my computer when Nabo came dashing in from the back door in an almighty uproar.
"Why didn't you come get me?" he asked. "I called and called and called me."
Every afternoon I sat on the phone waiting for him to call me to come get him at work. I can't hear to use the phone, but would get his number off the
caller ID. We checked the caller ID and his number was not on the missed call list. Not at all. Strange.
The he goes "Who's been here?"
"What do you mean? No one. I've been here alone all day long. What's going on, baby?"
Silence.
"When you didn't pick me up, I walked home, me. And when I was close enough to see our front porch I saw a man standing there at the door..."
"And?"
"He...um...he opened the front door and came in here."
My mouth dropped open and we were silent for a few seconds, and then we ran to the front door and tested the knob. It was locked, just as it always was.
And I had not set a foot out there that day or in I don't even know how long. We searched the house. No one was there anywhere, of course, no one we
could see, at any rate. Even if the front door had been unlocked there is no way someone could have come in and walked past me without me feeling the
vibrations of their foots or actually seeing them, because I could plainly see the whole foyer arch cutout out the corner of my right eye.
That man was a ghost. There is no other explanation for it. And today Nabo is a believer.
Thereafter the man ghost was loose in my dang office--at least I think it was him. It could have been some Other. I don't know. What I do know is
that I could feel the vibes of his footfalls in my office. There many times when I'd be sitting there before my computer and I could feel him leaning over
my shoulder, as if he were looking at the monitor screen.
After living there for four years, in 2008, we moved out, right smack dab into another haunted house where we live at this writing, August 4, 2009, but
that is another true ghost story.
| In Memory Of Shirley Armstead |
