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cleolinda · 1 year ago

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My sister noticed

Previously on: I grew up in a haunted house and I didn't notice: So I told you a story about how a Count Chocula used to creep behind me at night when I was a child, and I described my very weird childhood home to you. I told you how my sister had Something Dark living in her bedroom, and I told you about the time she and I compared notes and realized that we also had the ghost of a young woman in the house. Maybe.

I asked my sister to read over the draft for me, maybe gather up the fortitude to fill in some details, and she texted back, "Oh, I'll tell you anything you want. But that’s not how it happened."

I am willing to believe her version for two reasons:

1) My memory has been shit after having covid umpteen thousand times.

2) I actually remember her version of the conversation we had, now that it's in front of me.

I also remember my version, is the thing—the one where I told her about Rebecca when we were younger. And that raises some questions about how independent, how uncompromised, our experiences were. But I think those questions are themselves the story. Can I trust my memory at all? I had such bad brain fog the first time I had covid that I could not remember how to scramble eggs. A lot of things are just mist to me now. There's what I remember and there's what actually happened, but what do I even remember? And that's before you even get into the idea that we're talking about ghosts we "felt" in the house. We saw no apparitions, no shadows, no odd movements.

This is not a story where I'm asking you to believe me.

There are things you experience, and things that happen. An example from the winter of 2016:

What I experienced was standing out on our deck one night and looking up at the stars. They were moving in a slight swirl motion, not unlike the painting Starry Night. I turned to my mom and said, "Well, the stars are moving, so if the world ends or something any time soon, here's our first sign." She stared at me.

What happened was, our upstairs heating unit had a leak, and I sustained mild carbon monoxide poisoning. (I like rooms to be cool, so I had used the heater less than most people would, at least.) This was only discovered during a routine furnace check, after my vision had been a little weird and I had been deeply fatigued for two or three months. I have had a CO monitor upstairs ever since.

Did I see the stars swirling? Yes. Were they? No. That's the distinction I want you to make while I tell you all this. Did my sister and I experience things? Yes. Do I know what happened? No.

So what I agree happened was, we were having Grownup Sunday Family Dinner a few years back, maybe 2019 or so. I had been really into Buzzfeed Unsolved, which later evolved into Watcher Entertainment, but my sister was refusing to watch any of it. She's a big fan now, but she only started watching the guys last year. Yesterday, we tried to piece this back together via text.

My sister ["MS" from here on out]: Like I feel like off and on for years you mentioned [Shane and Ryan's shows] and I refused

MS: And one day my argument was to talk about our own house

Me [let's go with Cleolinda Jones, "CJ"]: You said you felt like fake ghost shows were disrespectful to people who actually experienced [hauntings].

MS: YES I FEEL LIKE THAT WAS THE CONVO

I love paranormal investigation shows, whether they're patently fake or not, as long as I enjoy the people investigating, so I couldn't understand why they personally offended her. Pulling at this thread back in 2019 is how the the whole ghost story started coming out.

CJ: And I was like, okay, but here’s one show where they get, like, nothing, but I can promise you that it's real

(Because the Unsolved/Watcher shows pair a believer with an actual skeptic who still, lo these many years later, does not believe in any of it. I truly believe Shane and Ryan would not stage "evidence," for that reason. Shane makes fun of ghosts and people who believe in them, but he's honest about it, and my sister likes that.)

At this point, we go back to the first version of the story that I posted: my sister had told me that Something had lived in the Four Closets Bedroom with her when she was a preteen/early teenager. It felt very dark, very bad, and she had not told anyone else about it until that dinner. The way I relayed it to you, Dear Reader, was that she hadn't wanted to go into detail, and I wasn't sure what it looked like, or if it "lived" in the little witch closet, or what. That night at dinner, I had gone on to tell her that, you know, now that you mention it, I did feel like something used to follow me up there at night. And this was when "My sister started crying. Like just staring at me in wide-eyed horror, her eyes filling with tears" had come in.

1. Something Dark

CJ: So you were telling me about our house being haunted. Something in your room. How would you describe it?

MS: I think it more lived in the attic

(our pal the dark fucked-up attic room)

MS: but would roam the entire floor so I felt it in the peach room [my (Cleo's) old bedroom and then later, my sister's] but more so in [the Four Closets Bedroom] as it was closer to the attic

MS: The best way I can describe it is just never feeling like I was alone. Feeling like something was always behind me. But I refused to turn around to look. It felt like a darkness that almost oozed behind you in a way that was almost suffocating.

CJ: What I find interesting is that we both describe it as Just Feelings, and never feeling alone.

My sister texted me at this point that she used to sense Something upstairs whether it was day or night; "even in the day, it didn't feel safe." But night was worse.

MS: There was one night in 3rd grade when I was reading and had like my first panic attack because I was newer to living upstairs and I felt it come in the room at night for the first time

MS: I also used to feel compelled to keep the AC running all night like it was never cold enough.

Here's the weird thing: when we moved to the house where I currently live and our rooms were on the same floor, we always fought over the thermostat. My sister hated her bedroom being too cool, whereas I get hot. I remember one night, we were arguing over it, and she was weirdly on the verge of tears: "Why do you have to have it so cold?" In 2023, my sister texted me at this point that she didn't want our childhood home to be cold; it was like the thing wanted that temperature, even if she hated it.

You often hear that ghosts make rooms cold, that's a big ghost hunter show thing—but whatever was up there couldn't lower the temperature on its own?

CJ: "If you can’t make it cold yourself, storebought is fine"

CJ: And you don’t have a visual impression of it, I’m not just blowing past that?

MS: I refused. REFUSED to look. Ever. For any reason.

CJ: I did too, so that’s interesting

CJ: I describe it as a Count Chocula, which should tell you how much it didn’t bother me. Which I find weird

(Truly, there is a reason I titled that post "I grew up in a haunted house and I didn't notice.")

MS: I can’t tell if it was truly terrifying. Or if the amount of data I was getting from it was just so overwhelming that that alone was terrifying to a child. I wish I could answer that now.

CJ: Yeah, in some way I think we’re saying the same thing. I was seven years old and I couldn’t comprehend what it was, either, so I just imagined a silly vampire

CJ: like I can’t overstate how cartoonish it seemed to me at the time, while still being very DON’T LOOK BACK

Part of the problem, she added, was that she felt compelled to go turn down the air conditioning... and the thermostat was next to the (carpeted. shag carpeted) bathroom. And then she had to race back to her bedroom... the same way I used to, as quick as she could.

MS: I also felt like I could NOT run. Like the way you shouldn’t run away from a mountain lion. It would create the need for it to chase me.

MS: What is so strange is that [learning about paranormal investigation] has not changed my perception of my experience in the slightest. Whether that’s the reality or not. It is still something I find dark and terrifying.

CJ: I think you would answer this differently now than you did then: what do you think it was?

We discussed this by text for a while. I mentioned being intrigued that Something Dark wanted to be cold (but apparently was not able to make the room cold). My sister—having agreed to be quoted here—said, "I kinda hope to avoid someone being like 'you had a demon in your house,'" as she doesn't really feel like that's what it was. Her gut feeling (and, bear in mind, we are working off nothing but feelings here) is that it was a spirit or ghost: something formerly human. We agree that it seemed male in some way (again: a Chocula).

And you're probably thinking, This is total bullshit. And it probably is! I'm not claiming any of this to be real evidence! I just find it interesting that we somehow came up with the same bullshit.

CJ: It just fascinates me that I did not experience 90% of this, and yet I got a strong enough whiff of it that I’m like, yeah, I can see it

But what about the female presence, the one I went off to color with in the middle of the night?

2. Rebecca

MS: I didn’t find out you had done the ouija board until we were adults. You didn’t tell me when we were kids

MS: That’s why I was SO shocked when we talked at the dinner table.

See, I was convinced that I had told her about my ouija adventures when I was a teenager, and "What about Rebecca??" flowed really well in the first post. That conversation was already a bit fictionalized in order to condense it from what I remembered—that's how memoirs work, really, unless you have actual transcripts of your life and room to include them. You're telling a story. I thought I was telling a condensed version of a true story. And yet, I do remember how shocked my sister was at dinner that night. And she would have only been seven or eight when I was messing around with that shit. Those two things do support the idea that I wouldn't have told her.

MS: You did tell me skeletons lived in my closet tho

I told you I was kind of a shit.

CJ: when I told you about Rebecca, what was your reaction?

MS: That’s when I went white. Bc I realized we had had a similar experience and I wasn’t just crazy

CJ: The thing is, I WOULD HAVE SWORN I had told you about Rebecca when we were younger

MS: If you did you didn’t name her and that’s why it was nuts when I realized 2 decades later we pulled the same name and we both remembered it.

We did it again, too—I posted briefly about putting this whole saga together, and how my sister asked me to give the ghost a pseudonym (ghosts deserve privacy too). And in trying to think of a good replacement, we both came up with "Rebecca."

CJ: so how did you know the [original] name?

MS: Ouija board with [best friend, redacted] in the playroom when I was like 13. She cried the whole time. We both thought the other was moving [the planchette].

You'll remember the weird, windowless, sky-blue playroom with the scary door from the previous post.

MS: But she was crying so she wouldn’t have been. And I would have never pulled out the name [Not Actually Rebecca]

MS: There was part of me that wonders if I did it but I would have NEVER chosen Rebecca

CJ: So did I bring Rebecca up first in this conversation [at dinner in 2019], or did you? I did?

MS: You said it first. I would have never [told you first] cuz I would have thought you were placating me. Like I’d never really know if you weren’t just agreeing with me

And that's when my sister had "stared at me, saucer-eyed, pale. Like I'm not sure I had ever seen anyone 'go white' until that moment." And I had told her about getting up at midnight and going to color in the weird playroom, and someone else being in there with me, no big deal.

After all this discussion, we do think that Rebecca was briefly my "imaginary friend," but our mom told me to stop talking about that. Not because our mom was spooked, but because she felt like it was rude for me to talk about someone I was presumably making up in front of company. So that stopped. Thinking back on it, I just felt like someone was sitting next to me on the couch. I didn't feel anyone next to me; when I looked, I felt like I could see where... someone was not? The space that someone invisible was taking up? It felt like something reasonably friendly. "Chill" is the word I keep using. Not super eager or possessive, just like a girl who was a bit older, maybe a teenager, a babysitter age, who liked me well enough. There was some dark shit in the attic, apparently—it did feel very oppressive in there—but I would get a sense that a metaphorical desk lamp had been turned on. A presence that stayed back, relaxed, but emanated "hey, I'm here."

What my sister and I agreed on was that we remembered how these "feelings" were both vague and memorable. I can't remember events or chronology accurately, but I remember the actual sensations and presences very, very clearly. They resist reinterpretation. I can't sit here and say, "Oh, Rebecca was totally a guardian angel, I see that now." The Something Dark sounds functionally demonic, but my sister doesn't feel like that's accurate. (If anything, she gets a sense that this could have been a malicious uncle—not father—of some kind to Rebecca, if the two beings were related: particular in their vagueness.) These two presences just... were. My sister says she primarily sensed Rebecca outdoors in our backyard, when we were pretending (were we?) to play with fairies. I didn't sense Rebecca there—but then, I wasn't aware that what I sensed was a someone, not for another thirty years or so. My oblivious ass was up at midnight filling in my She-Ra coloring book with a ghost like, "Yeah, I'm alone in the dark for no reason, this is normal." It's only in retrospect that I recognize atmospheric feelings as things that actually took up space, and I don't know how I didn't see it at the time. I can't explain that, and I can't ask you to believe it. All I know is that my sister still feels very traumatized by her experience of it—and I can't explain why I don't.

I think one of the reasons paranormal investigation shows don't scare me a whole lot is because so much of the "evidence" is random knocks and creaks and movements and vibes, and I'm like, yeah, I've lived in two houses now like that. The door of my current bedroom opens and closes on its own all the time. It's probably a draft from the ventilation system (which does not have CO leaks anymore) (probably). I've seen something at this house that a lot of people might call a shadow person, but I was probably imagining it. So many of these ghost shows just have things that I grew up with and didn't even think a whole lot of at the time; I seem to be protected by a +3 Sphere of Sure, That's Fine. Is my current house also haunted? I honestly don't know. Would I notice if it was?

#part two of two #story time with cleo #long post #the haunting of jones house #spooky season #halloween everyday #me for some reason #first look on patreon

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