The Old House

I had so many “goosebumps” stories this month, I had a hard time narrowing them down to only one a day.  So this bonus post will be my actual Throwback Thursday.  With Halloween only one day away, I thought a haunted house story would be most appropriate.

I was seven and a half years old when I wrote this.  I was in the third grade, and while we didn’t use cursive writing yet, we had the cursive alphabet on a border around the classroom.  When I was little, I thought cursive was just the fanciest writing ever.  (Which is funny because after years of longing to learn how to write cursive, I now almost exclusively print.)

Anyway, thankfully, my handwriting improved, and my storytelling did, too.  This “story” (if you can even call it that!) is hilarious!  As a little kid, I apparently had a knack for setting up the story and concluding it, but there was never a middle!  (Nowadays, I struggle to keep the conflict and resolution under 95,000 words!)

Anyway, in case you can’t read my “chicken scratch” as my teacher would’ve called it, I’ve typed out the translation below, and I’ve also corrected “scull” to be “skull.”

One other thing of noteworthiness, please take note of how I used an excessively bold, fancy, O in “Once” at the beginning of the story.  When I was little, if a book had the fancy O, I just knew an awesome story would follow.

Once upon a time, there was an old house.  Nobody lived in it for it was haunted.  A skull [scull] was in it and old bones, too.  And whenever anybody went in it, the bones came together and ate [eat] the people or else a ghost spooked them out by saying, “BOO!” because they didn’t want anyone in their [there] house.  They knew how to do everything.   Ghosts and spooks lived there because it was a ghost town.  Then the ghosts did not spook anymore people.

They could live there now and everyone in Ghost Town wanted to live there and the ghosts and them made friends.  And they lived happily ever after.  The End

Let’s talk…  Did my story make you laugh?  Did you used to notice the fancy O at the beginning of “Once upon a time?”  Would you have been afraid to go in this old house before the ghosts made friends with everybody? 

I See Dead People

Alright, so we already know that my last month’s “Games” theme was a big, fat FAIL.  But that’s okay, because for October, I have something so cool in mind, it’ll give you goosebumps.  In fact my theme this month IS “Goosebumps.”  Actually, it’s “Things That Give You Goosebumps.”  I’m talking about dream predictions that come true, paranormal experiences, instincts and gut feelings that pan out, messages from the “beyond,” déjà vu, visions, feelings of dread, etc.  With Halloween coming, I thought this would be a fun one.

Before I start, I have to give you a little prologue to my stories.  Many of you know I’m Autistic.  (I have Asperger’s Syndrome.)  People with Autism are hypersensitive to many (if not most) things, such as sounds, light, textures, tastes, and smells.  It’s  also a fact that we also have a higher instance of food allergies which I personally believe is because our digestive systems are also extra sensitive to certain food proteins.

Most people with Asperger’s Syndrome have a lack of empathy.  However, there are occasions such as in myself where we are actually exceptionally empathetic to the point that we actually feel the pain of others or feed off the energy of others which causes emotional drain among other things.  Usually when this happens, such people are known as “empaths.”

And if you believe in ghosts, you already know that they are made of energy.

That being said, I personally believe that either my Asperger’s Syndrome and/or my being an empath is the reason I’m sensitive to so many things such as dream predictions that come true, paranormal experiences, instincts and gut feelings that pan out, messages from the “beyond,” déjà vu, visions, feelings of dread, etc., that turn out to be right on target.  I think we’ve all experienced instances such as dreaming about someone we haven’t thought about in ages, only to run into them the day after the dream.  But while we all have these, I’ve been told throughout my life that I apparently have these instances more frequently than a lot of the people I know.

And one final tidbit of information, I’ve also shared with you that I’m a Christian.  So without getting too preachy, I just want to say that I do not want to be misconstrued as someone who takes on or seeks out things that are not of God.  That said, I’m also not claiming to have a charism or anything like that.  Throughout my life, whenever I’ve had such things happen, I’ve just called them “angel messages” and assumed that God let me see them for a reason.  ‘Nuff said.

And now, on to my stories…

When I was very small, I “played with dead people.”  A lot of people think that very young children are able to sense things like this and grow out of it later.  But my grandma used to always get irritated when she couldn’t find me, and almost always when she did, I was sitting in my closet with the door closed, talking.  And when she’d ask who I was talking to, I’d reply, “Dead people.”  (Don’t forget, my grandparents raised me.)

At the time, I truly did “see” the people I was talking to.  It wasn’t until I was older that I realized how bizarre this was.  My grandparents had a child that died when she was fourteen years old, long before I was born.  And one day in church, I announced to my Grandma that, “Aunt Dawn is here sitting beside us.”

Grandma just shushed me and told me to be quiet and pay attention until I told her that Dawn said not to feel bad about leaving her in Tampa and that it had to be that way.

Grandma turned pale and didn’t speak of the matter anymore until I was older.  She recalled the day and said it gave her goosebumps.  You see, there was no way at three years old that I could’ve known that Dawn died at a hospital in Tampa and that Grandma didn’t want to leave after they told her she was gone.  And that she frequently had nightmares about it for years afterward.

Several years later, when I was seventeen, my grandfather died.  About a year later, I had an extraordinarily vivid dream of my granddaddy and my Uncle David (who was alive).  They were in a restaurant in Manhattan, and Uncle David was choking on food.  He was clutching his throat and making gurgling sounds.  Granddaddy told me to tell Grandma and make sure she stayed calm and to tell her that he’d be fine.

The next morning, I woke and felt a cold chill pass through me as I was reminded of the dream. I went to the kitchen and found Grandma.  I told her I had a dream about Granddaddy last night, and she said she did too.  (We came to find out later that when he “visited” one of us in a dream, we usually both dreamed of him simultaneously.)  I told her my dream about Uncle David, and she just nodded and told me that was weird.

Late that evening, Grandma got a phone call.  Apparently Uncle David was visiting in New York City for a job, unbeknownst to her (or me), and he’d been in a restaurant when he had a mild heart attack (or some sort of “cardiac event”).  And when this happened, as you can imagine, he probably clutched his chest and made some gurgling noises.  And after a brief stay in the hospital, he was indeed fine.

So, while I may have misunderstood the “message” and confused what I thought looked like choking to really be a heart attack, the end result was the same.  Granddaddy came to me in a dream and showed me a prediction that came to pass.  And once again, I gave Grandma goosebumps.

Talk to me:  Do you believe in ghosts?  Have you ever had dreams that came true?  Have you ever been visited in a dream by a dead person?  Do you think you’ll like this month’s theme?