GHOST HUNTERS

My family moved into Aspen Grove when I was a little toddler. The sights and sounds of the house to me were perfectly normal. Children adapt to realities, like tossing your ball in the air results in it coming back down every time and the sound of a sister screaming at the other sister in another room can be heard through even the thickest walls. When we first moved in, our family dog, King (a Collie/German Shepherd mix) had some issues with-- nothing . My mom would watch the dog growling at the wall, backing off from the center of the room, snapping at something not there, then jumping as if he had been kicked, tail between his legs, howling and rushing off, nearly going through the closed side door. My mother eventually got spooked by his reactions to what seemed to be something he was aware of that she was not. Eventually, King would not come in the house anymore and remained the rest of his 15 years outdoors. We set him up a sweet doggy place in the shed, but he would not go near t...

( Above: Graves in the grass, house in the distance ) Across from the summer home was a cemetery. When we were kids, we'd forget it was there because the grasses would grow up and no one would cut them back. Each summer we'd arrive and rediscover it as if we forgot it even existed. There weren't many headstones, but they were scattered out and if you ran through the grass and didn't know it, you could whack into one and knock the wind right out of you. More than a few times, I would get tackled by one. In the evening around twilight when it was more dark than light outside and the lightning bugs cradled the pecan trees outside the turret bedroom, I would sit there and brush out my long hair and sit on the bed, studying the direction of the cemetery. It didn't happen all the time, but upon occasion, a blue ball of light, perhaps the size of a baseball or softball would float around in the graveyard, going up and down, weaving in and out of the grasses, obscured by a ...

The New Point-Comfort Lighthouse. It was a favorite sneaky getaway. Whenever we could hijack someone with a motorboat to ride us, we kids loved this place. The lighthouse was abandoned at the time, just sitting atop a rock island in sad and sorry state, but still a magical retreat! One time, my brother and I sneaked away to it. We climbed the steep stairs with no railing. We'd put a hand on the wall to guide us as we climbed up, our eyes turned skyward in wonder of the more narrow passage as we got near the top. I remember as a kid, sitting there at the top, my brother playing lookout for pirate ships, when I would hear the heavy steady footfalls up the stairway. It almost reminded me of the footsteps at Aspen Grove, but the boots were different, not hard on the bottom, perhaps rubber soled and the steps were taken in a steady cadence, without missing a step. It took some time for the sounds to come up the winding stairway, but they would always end before coming to my perch at the...

( Above: Old vintage picture of the summer home in New Point-Comfort, a quiet town on an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay near a dock on a place called "Doctor's Creek." ) ( Above: Not much different when we owned the place ) My father was retired from the Navy, having been in the Asiatic Fleet during WWII and Korean Wars. He was a water-loving boy from Norway. He needed to be on the water. So, my parents found this charming Victorian home on the southern part of the Chesapeake in Virginia, complete with a dock and a 37-foot cabin cruiser called the Vixen II. ( Above: Vixen II ) The home was interesting. It was on some stilts which was a good thing because a few times we went down to board up the home for a hurricane and ended up having to sit it out inside. When we bought it from a well-to-do older bachelor, he let us having the contents of the house too which was furnished with amazing antiques and a library filled with books from the 1800s. The floors were all yellow pine. ...

Kiddies, this is the final installment. Next week, there will be a 3-parter about my summer home when I was a kid, which also had some haunting features... We sold the estate when I was 15 and my siblings were 20, 21, 22 and 28. We moved to Arizona because father's heart was bad and the cold weather and the work on the estate was just too much. He only made it a little over a year before he passed on. I was 16 and arrived home from a sleepover to find an ambulance outside. I rushed in and saw the paramedics working on my father on the kitchen floor. They announced he passed on and my mother ushered us outside to weep when about 4 minutes later, the paramedics rushed back to say the paddles worked and they brought him back. As they wheeled my father past me, he smiled. "It was beautiful. I was at a fiord" (father was from Norway) "all my family was there, mother, father, aunt, uncles, and there were flowers that don't exist and colors that don't exist." H...

( Above: When we got snowed in, dad would take the old McCormick tractor and tow a car hood behind it with us kids piled up in it to pat down the snow and make it navigable ). ( Above: The little cottage ) ( Above: The Barn ) ( Above: The Big Cottage ) ( Above: My mom on the day we moved in ) The home was taken over by the North during the Civil War and used as a field hospital. Later, the South wrestled it back and used it for the same. Both sides died in there. The wood floors were still stained black with their blood. We dug up and archived an enormous amount of relics in a showcase. We found plenty of arrowheads, dolls, bayonets, bullets, guns, medals, horseshoes, wagon parts, and so much more. For my mother, the haunting realization began as soon as we moved in. She heard the sounds of booted footsteps up the stairs at night, traveling down the hall to the middle bedroom, resting on an old floorboard in front of the iron radiator. When father was back in town from a trip, he menti...

( Above: From the roadway. Best damn sled run ever, except you ended up in the creek! ) ( Above: How it looked when I grew up there ) ( Above: how it looked in the 1890s ) ( Above: How it looked in the 1860s post Civil War ) ( Above: How it looks today ) ( Above: The grounds in the wintertime ) ( Above: The grounds in the springtime ) ( Above: Only a small portion of the artifacts ) A wonderful blogger with a blog about southern spirits mentioned an interest in the story of my upbringing at Aspen Grove. It could be a book, so I'm going to put it into parts each day. Gather around, kiddies, for a southern tale best told by a gal who grew up in a very idyllic setting, although with a good deal of ghosts and a family that, well, I swear Pat Conroy wrote about in "Prince of Tides." This will be a multiple-part series this week and next week I'll do one about our Victorian summer home on the Chesapeake. Aspen Grove was built in the mid 1700s. My mother told me it was a fo...

This story takes place at my family's summer home in Newpoint-Comfort, Virginia on a quiet inlet of the Chesapeake. This Victorian home had some strange things about it, but the area around it was much more haunted. The house faced a cemetery. I grew up hanging out in cemeteries. My mother being and artist and historian loved to study the headstones. I thought of them as boring parks with awesome shade trees. I wasn't spooked by them or uncomfortable. In fact, I paid little attention to what they represented, like most kids do. I would often go into the little bedroom in the "turret" of our summer house, an odd shaped curved room. My sister had a beautiful little vanity table with a hair brush set I loved to use. It was all romance with sheer curtains and a poster of Romeo and Juliet on the wall and the smell of fresh rosewater penetrating the humid bedspread. At night, I would curl up on the little bed while my siblings listened to the radio or read in the library do...

Every ghost hunter has a moment when they truly want to run in panic. Mine occurred at the age of 14 when we were preparing to move from our manor home to the big bad awful west-- Arizona . I wasn't happy about the move. In fact, I tried to make ghostly sounds to scare away perspective buyers with no luck. Still, the house sold. We'd boxed up our things to have them unpacked the next day. We had several plaster ceilings just simply dump onto the floor all at once. Disconcerting events, but not unheard of in that house. We had film crews there who watched the wallpaper peel off the walls as they walked by, so it wasn't off the charts. I had a high tolerance so I found it more or less amusing. Then, one day when my father and brother were looking for a rental house in Arizona and the reality of the move became real, my mother, oldest sister, and myself were home alone. We sat in the breakfast room on one end of the house having lunch and discussing how we hoped they'd fin...

For those of you who haven't read my "Alone" series, I put it on the right hand bottom area of my screen. It's about places I've been alone in that people don't usually like to be alone in. Hope it gives you chills . Today, another in my series about My Childhood Haunts--encounters I had growing up with ghosts: Having five kids in the family could be a curse, like riding in our Cadillac together, piled into a mess in the back seat, or a blessing like when it rained and we could enjoy penny poker with plenty of players. We had an odd phenomenon from time to time that occurred when I was growing up. When I was really little, I didn’t think much about it because my mother smoked so I was used to smoke being around the house. The smoke I’m going to tell you about, however, was something quite different. On the cool marble coffee table in the front room, we would sit on the sofa and play penny poker. Right behind the sofa was a huge bloodstain from the Civil War (w...

When I was growing up, we had a creek running through our property. The Pohick Creek to be exact, a small tributary of the Potomac ( although we always called it ‘Po’hick’ as if it were some kind of Southern derogatory name for a poor hick ). The creek was fascinating. I spent most of my childhood following it into the woods where it meandered with fallen trees for bridges and mossy banks, snapping turtles, frogs, and fish. We even named parts of it that were especially beautiful like “Queen’s Throne” and “Witch’s Hollow.” I spent a lot of time too making my Barbie dolls dive off the stone bridge that spanned the driveway and creating jumps for my sled when winter came, only to break through the ice and get wet. The creek was lined by heavy willow trees. There were five of us kids and the three middle ones were all a year apart. My mother was exhausted with their antics. Even having all that acreage, they still managed to get into trouble. One time, she told them to go to the willow tr...

This is another in my series of my childhood hauntings. Expect a new installment on Wednesdays. I was never scared or threatened by the haunting at Aspen Grove. In fact, as a child I determined that the ghosts of soldiers missing their families had just attached to my large family and were walking the halls at night to guard us. There was, however, one haunting feature that so disturbed me that if I were home alone, I’d stay outside on the swing set. My parents’ master suite was an original part of the house. The largest upstairs room. Of course, used by the most important people living there. I like to think that included the troops who had set up shop in the house during the Civil War and were performing surgery on its floors. It’s the only explanation for what happened in that room even a hundred plus years later. We had three huge Waterford crystal chandeliers downstairs in the house; one in the music room, one in the dining room; and one in the living room. They were multi-tiered ...

Imagine living on an estate with two enormous boxwood mazes. Then, imagine having five kids in the family and parents who, no matter how well they were doing financially, didn’t buy their kids toys. They wanted them to be creative and resourceful. The land and its outbuildings alone had more than enough to work with, from building tree forts to using leftover furniture in the barn to turn it into a playhouse. One of our favorite activities was flashlight tag. It was especially fun on a hot Virginia summer’s night with lightning bugs competing for attention. The back boxwood maze was more mature in height and an ideal place for a great game of flashlight tag. The ancient birdbath with the naked cherub statue in the center was our starting point. Usually my brother wanted to manage (or is that micromanage?) the game, so he would begin by being “it.” The rest of us would scatter like buckshot throughout the winding maze of English boxwoods to find the perfect strategic point to make our w...