Ghost Guest Blogger

Hey Nic Fans! Shannon here from Love, Shannon. I'm honored to be one of her guest bloggers and only hope that I can keep your attention long enough to get through this post. I have to remember that not everyone is as fascinated by certain things as I am.

If I told you how obsessed I was with all things paranormal, you'd most likely have me admitted into a mental hospital. I'm going to dive into the deep end here and take that chance.

I'm not exactly sure what sparked my interest in ghosts and bumps in the night. I don't know what difference it would make if I did know, anyways. I have a very strong opinion on that age old question: Do Ghosts Exist?

While I'm not one to force my opinion onto another, I do enjoy sharing my experiences. I don't think that the controversy surrounding this issue is as big as it once was - now that there are bigger and badder things to debate on, the ghost issue kind of takes a back seat. Even still, I don't want to ruffle anyone's feathers, so please don't hold my opinions against me. Read on if you want to know my paranormal story.

I'm going to get all scientific on you here for a second. We all learned in Science Class that the law of conservation of energy states this:
"The total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant. A consequence of this law is that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. The only thing that can happen with energy in an isolated system is that it can change form, for instance kinetic energy can become thermal energy. Because energy is associated with mass in the Einstein's theory of relativity, the conservation of energy also implies the conservation of mass in isolated systems (that is, the mass of a system cannot change, so long as energy is not permitted to enter or leave the system). "
-courtesy of Wikipedia, thankyouverymuch.

So what does that mean? I took Psychology my Junior year of High School. I am almost positive I had one of the most awesome teachers on the subject. She had speakers come in all the time, and we always did neat experiments. One class, she had a leader of a local paranormal group come talk to the class. He has written many books and basically knows his shiz on the subject. He brought an EMF Meter, which is a scientific instrument that measures electromagnetic fields. He was explaining it to us, when he asked me to come to the front of the class and help him demonstrate. He asked me to stand across the room from him and slowly start walking towards him. I hadn't moved very far, when the meter started ticking up, up, and up some more as I walked closer. My energy reading was pretty high. He called another person up to the front and asked them to do the same thing. The meter didn't start ticking for them until they were almost half way to him. They had less of an energy field than I did. Here's where the law comes in to play. When we die, where does that energy go?

Enough of the scientific stuff. I'll move on to my experiences. I've had them ever since I was a little girl. I obviously can't remember every last one, so I will tell you the ones that made the biggest impact on me and fueled my fascination and obsession.

- I was about 7 years old. I had a daybed, and surrounding it on the wall were my favorite stickers and posters of cute puppies and kittens. One night I was dreaming that I was in a video game. I had to make my way through a haunted house, avoiding Count Dracula's, Frankensteins, and Werewolves. I was an actual video game character, and I was hiding in closets and under staircases. I woke up, thankful that this nightmare was over. I took a few deep breaths to calm down, and all of sudden, I started hearing a faint ripping sound coming from behind my head. I wasn't sure what it was, so I turned around and I watched as my stickers and posters started ripping off the walls by themselves. I closed my eyes to try and make it go away, thinking maybe I was still dreaming. But the sound didn't stop, and neither did the ripping. When I woke up the next morning, they were just as they were the night before. Ripped. To this day, I do not know the explanation.

- My family moved from Florida to North Carolina in 1994. As soon as we moved up here, my mom got a phone call that my grandmother had died. She never told us she was dying from cancer or that she even had it for that matter, and she had stopped taking her medication. She always had told my mother during my childhood, that she wished she were a bird that could watch over us all of the time when she wasn't around, and make sure that we didn't fight by distracting us with her beauty. She hated it when we fought. After my grandmother's death, my mom was very on edge all of the time trying to deal with her grief. We started fighting one day in the living room. In the middle of our heated argument, a bird flew up to the front door window, and just hovered for what seemed like minutes looking in. My mother immediately took me into a hug and we told each other how much we loved one another.

- My brother used to have this electronic toy car that made the most annoying noise. He had the controller, driving it around the house all afternoon and it was really starting to irritate me. I took the controller from him and hid it behind one of my mom's house plants. That night, my dad was awakened by that sound. Thinking my brother was playing with it, he got up to tell him to go to bed. When he came into the living room where the sound was coming from, the toy car was spinning in circles, with no one - or the controller in sight. The next morning my dad asked me about it. I told him I hid the controller and got it for him. He took the batteries out of the car and controller, turned the switch on the car to "off", and we never thought of it again for the rest of the day. That night, my dad was awoken by the sound of the car again. This time, when he came into the living room, the car was going in circles and then stopped and went straight for my dad. It stopped at his feet. We still do not have an explanation for this one.

- My grandmother's house was given to my mom in the will, but due to certain circumstances, we could not move in. My mom's sister moved in, and that's when it was almost like the house came alive - well, if that's what you want to call it. It was more like the house became "dead". My grandmother's house was perfection. Everything was in it's place all the time. That house was one that you almost didn't want to sit down because you didn't want to mess up the couch. Once my aunt moved in, things started going terribly wrong. The walls started leaking water. A 3 inch thick real marble dining table (in excellent conditon) broke in half completely, with nothing around it to cause the break. The grass started dying, and nothing would keep it alive. My mom had to do inventory for the will, and she stayed the night by herself to do so. She was unpacking things in the kitchen, and heard voices and laughter, glasses clanking, and music playing. She thought maybe she left a radio or tv on in another room so she went to investigate. Nothing. Each time she went to a new room, she would hear it coming from a different room. Then, she heard a knock at the door. When she went to answer it, no one was there, and a flower that had been cemented into a wall decoration, was lying on the floor. When she went to sleep in her childhood bedroom that night, she laid there, listening to the grandfather clock in the hallway. Then, she saw her breath and felt ice cold. This is in Florida, remember?

These are just a few from my childhood. Once I "grew up" into a young adult where I started living on my own, weird things were happening. When you're young you move around a lot, right? Roommates and relationships take you to different places.

-My 3rd apartment I lived in with my girlfriend and her sister. It was an apartment complex that had a fire at one point in it's history. An older man accidentally started it. The unit we lived in was a two story townhouse. At any given time we were downstairs in the living room hanging out, you could hear footsteps walk all the way from the top of the stairs, through one of the bedrooms, into the bathroom. We had 2 puppies at the time, so we kept all the upstairs doors shut so they couldn't get into things. One day, all 5 doors burst open at the same time. Not just ajar, but had to go from the closed position where you need to turn the knob to open it, to completley wide open. No one was anywhere near the doors.

-We eventually moved into an older home in an established neighborhood. We even had a preacher and his family that lived across the street. The house was built in the 70's and by the interior design, you could tell. We started getting super creepy vibes and activity, and so we invited a friend over to come check out the house who was a "medium" of sorts. However, we did not tell her the real reason we needed her. She seemed to really like the main floor as we showed her around. The second we walked downstairs, her whole demeanor changed, and she literally started tearing up. We asked what was wrong, but she just kept shaking her head no. Eventually we pulled it out of her. She said a young girl, our age, had killed herself in one of the downstairs rooms. She said it was not a "pretty" suicide. This really freaked us out and so we all left the house. The next day my girlfriend and I went to the library to do some research on the house. We couldn't find anything in the books, so we decided to ask the preacher across the street if he had ever heard of anything. We didn't go into any detail, we just wanted to see if he knew anything. He told us that it used to be a half way home for young girls, and that ever since they shut it down, everyone that's moved in has moved out within a month or two and broken the lease. This set off a major red light, considering that our friend said it was a young troubled girl. After talking to him, we went straight to our realtor. She didn't have many answers for us though. We moved out and don't know what's happening there now.

I think I've pretty much made my point as to why I believe what I do. I haven't even gotten into my experiences with Bloody Mary, but I'll save that for another post.