Mary was waiting for her father to come home, but he never did because he died too.
In the winter of 2009, I moved into a house in Bloomington, Illinois with my ex-wife and our infant daughter. It was built in 1929 and was approximately 4,500 square feet of grandiose rooms with traditional moldings, custom railing and iron vents, and other intricate details stamped in from bygone times.
It had the typical old scary basement that made strange noises with bugs lurking everywhere, a large playroom, fireplace and den, a large dining room with beautiful molding and antique furniture, and a worn, albeit updated, kitchen. An antique custom bannister wound its way up the half-spiral stairs to the second floor, which had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office and a roof deck.
The first thing I did was mount Old Glory on a front porch column.
Soon after moving in, strange things started happening, and walking through the house it sometimes felt like a ghost was right in your face screaming at you to get out.
If you’re a non-believer, like I was, then your mind will change real fast when it happens to you. You just know when a ghost is standing right in front of you. You can feel and sense it with every fiber in your being.
I was stopped dead in my tracks by the invisible occupant on many occasions. Terrified, I would immediately turn around and start yelling at it to get out. Some nights, especially in the kitchen, things on the counters or in the sink would get thrown at us, and we once found the gas turned open on all four burners and filling the kitchen up.
Not knowing how to deal with a ghost or even what its problem was, we started researching online about using sage sticks to chase it out. Smudging the house just made it angrier. It started pushing us and our dogs down both the spiral and the basement stairs, tripping us as we walked and haunting us as we slept.
We sought help from local spirit cleansers and psychics, and one of them visited our home and told us that the spirit died in the backyard during a storm when the garage blew over on her and two orphans. I thought it was crazy so I grabbed my shovels and sure enough I unearthed a sidewalk, driveway and garage foundation.
The psychic also claimed that I angered the ghost by putting the flag on the front porch because it blocked her view of the stairs and window in the front door. Apparently, the ghost liked to stand on the spiral stairs’ landing and look out the window waiting for her father to come home.
Doing research at the local courthouse and library, I discovered that one of the daughters did in fact die there and that her father, who originally bought the house and raised the family there, had died the same week by drowning in an oil well. As spirits, it’s possible that neither of them would’ve known the other was dead or that her father could’ve crossed over but she could’ve remained waiting for him.
The psychic explained to the ghost, Mary, the younger daughter, what happened to her father and that he would not be coming home again. And, according to the psychic, Mary said she hated my guts but now regretted how she treated me and apologized. She said we were welcome to stay in the house and that she would be watching over us from above.
Then the psychic used candles and rocks, apparently from the Vatican and Dead Sea, to perform a ceremony that helped Mary cross over to Heaven.
For a brief second before her presence left, it appeared as if a long rainbow road pulled her down through the trees and then beamed her into the sky like when people tell stories of alien abductions. It only lasted for a split second but everyone saw it.
Later that summer we moved to Washington, DC and I joined Maryland Paranormal Research and served as lead investigator for many years.
Do you have any paranormal experiences? Feel free to share them!
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