From: Mselkirk2@aol.com
Subject: shadow people
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 01:53:16 EDT
To: shadowpeopleorg@comcast.net
Hi!
I taught music in my home for several years, and there was an entity that showed up for lots of my students' lessons. It always appeared as an old woman standing at the end of the hallway, or walking across from one room to another as if trying to spy on the lesson without being seen.
My wife & I had come to accept the presence, as she seemed perfectly harmless and she only appeared when I or my students were playing our horns. Usually, she would disappear as quietly as she appeared, but on one afternoon, my prize student gave a particularly good performance, and she came closer, seemingly mesmerized by Ben's playing. He stopped and she darted into the guest bedroom. Ben looked puzzled- he knew we were alone, but he turned to me and asked, "Who was that? Is your mom here?"
She appeared regularly for Ben's lessons, showing up almost weekly for about two years, and when Ben moved out of the country, she seemed to lose interest.
I had all but forgotten about her until last night, when my new dog jumped up from a sound sleep and started barking toward the end of the hall. The older dog just lay there looking and wagging her tail as if she were seeing an old friend again.
Ask any canine behaviourist, and they'll tell you that dogs don't wag their tails at inanimate objects: not at toys or places or concepts, but at things that they recognize as living beings. I got up to look down the hall, and caught -once more- just a glimpse of an old woman ducking into the bedroom at the end of the hall. And y'know, I'm sorta glad to have her back!
She's never spoken to me, though I'm pretty sure I once heard her chuckle at a student, but she seems eager to listen, and I can often "feel" her listening to me. And no, I've never noticed any smells associated with her. There was the month or so of the same book leaping off the shelf six or eight times, but I'm not convinced that she had anything to do with that.
-Mark Selkirk
Note: Web-hostess, Krickette, writes to Mr. Selkirk and asks some questions regarding the house and the book that falls off the self. The following was the music teacher’s reply
We did check into the history of the house, and don't believe the ghost is connected to the present house: it was built in the late 70s, and we know both former owners. Neither of them claims to have seen anything out of the ordinary here. The area where we live does date to pre-civil war times as a large plantation, though, and many of the original buildings are still standing only a few hundred yards from our house. The original Plantation House is a massive granite mansion, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine slaves living on the property where we now live. I have never been able to really see detail of the entity I told you about. It's just that the way "she" acts reminds me a lot of my grandma sneaking around when she lived at my parent’s house. The kids seeing a "woman" in the hall I suppose just cemented my opinion that it must be a female ghost. I need to pay attention to the details next time rather than the experience so that I can discern what type clothing she wears. Right now I'm feeling a floor-length dress, but I don't want to let what I think interfere with what's real, so I'm not going to claim any specific clothing period or style.
Of course you can feel free to use my story in whole or in part on your website. I'd love to hear from others who've had similar experiences.
About the book: There's a bit more than what I told you, but then you knew that and that's why you asked, right!? I don't know the title of the book, but it was about Vampires. I bought it for my wife who was interested in factual tales of Vampirism, and she placed it on the bookshelf at the end of the hall right by the spot where we always see our ghost. The second night the book was here, it flew off the shelf while we sat in the living room 40 feet away. It landed in the floor a good three feet from the bookcase. We thought nothing of it, assuming that she had just laid it precariously balanced on top of the shelf, and she put the book back on a shelf, this time making sure it was upright and firmly placed between other books. Middle of the night, something went "bump," and I stepped out of the bedroom to see what it was, and the book lay there in the floor in front of our door. I'm not sure, but I think it hit our bedroom door on the way to the floor, which meant it came off the shelf, made a 90 degree left turn, then hit the floor. At least four more times over the course of the next month the book flew off the shelf, once right behind my wife as she walked down the hall. We finally put it in the top of the closet in our guest room, under a pile of other books. When it banged into the closet door in the middle of the night, then turned up on the floor, leaving the books that had been on top of it undisturbed. We decided it was high time to get rid of it, and it went to the dump. Never since then have we had a book fall off a shelf.
If you have any ideas, I'm all ears!!! Post that story too- I'd love to hear what anyone has to say about the flying book!
-Mark
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