Paranormal Factor

I remember, back when I was a teenager, how difficult it was to get most of my school friends to come to my house for any longer than just in and out.  Their trepidation stemmed from weird occurrences that were common to me but intently frightening to them.

This is one experience I recall when a friend I will call “C” had decided to forgo the strange within my house and actually spend the night.  My parents had gone out for the night leaving her and I in charge of my younger brother and several foster and adopted kids who lived with us at the time.  It was 11 pm and everyone but her and I were in bed fast asleep.  I remember we were sitting at the dining room table playing a game of Rummy, all of the lights were blazing; as I always insisted on them being, and the room was quiet except for our occasional banter about the game. 

Midnight chimed on the grandfather clock in the livingroom and just as the twelfth chime rang a picture of my older brother, who lived elsewhere, flew off the top shelf behind us and landed hard against the old phonograph/eight track cabinet across the room.  The picture had soared over our heads and we both were instantly startled as the radio in the cabinet began to play, switching stations with an eerie static. It was one of the kind that had to be switched from radio to eight track to phonograph with a toggle-like switch inside a heavy lid that concealed the players and radio within.  This was the first time something like this had happened, mostly it was just things disappearing or phantom shadows that only I laid witness to.

Both of us were severely frightened by this. Although I had encountered other strange happenings, my friend ‘C’ had no idea about the things that just seemed to go on in my house.  (And shame on me if I had purposefully withheld that information in the hopes that nothing would happen while she was there, I was only 13 at the time.) Of course, I had told the stories but she had dismissed them as my imagination.
I begged her not to call her dad to go home, and it took much finesse to calm her down.  Finally, she consented to stay the rest of the night and nothing else happened, thankfully.

The following morning my mother called us to breakfast and we overheard her talking to my father about the midnight arrest of my brother; the one whose picture sailed across the room and caused the radio to eerily play on its own.  My friend and I exchanged glances.  I decided to divulge the previous night’s happenings to my parents and I don’t really think they believed me.

I haven’t talked to ‘C’ in many, many years, and I wonder if she remembers this occurrence?  From that day on not one of my friends from school would come to my house except one, my friend Patti who lived across the alley. Patti was the only fearless friend I had, and still have today.  Seems like we have had more than enough of our share of hauntings over the span of our lives.  Maybe that is why our friendship has lasted all these years; because we share a link with some otherworldly realm that has reached out to us over and over as we grew up. 
              

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