Mesa, AZ... Historic Homes Tour - January 2015 (I've included this intro to preface stories from each of the active locations on the tour.)
This year I had the opportunity to go with a good friend of mine on a tour of historic homes and landmarks in my hometown. I'd been hoping to go for years, though this tour was second to the haunted homes tour done in October. Still, this was quite a treat as many people were willing to open their homes to curious and interested people, and there were a few exceptionally old locations belonging to the town museum that would only be open for tours this one day a year.
I am an empath, and this is something I've had a hard time accepting. I feel the presence of spirits, often with their moods, emotions, and occasionally a message. More rarely I receive an impression of gender, their lifetime, and age they project. These encounters affect me physically, and because of that I often hesitate to join these tours as interesting as they are.
There were several homes on the tour, but only a handful had any activity. This is one of the active locations.
Cozy Personal Home (address omitted here for owner's privacy):
The best part about historic home tours is that owners of private residences open their living space to visitors to admire and enjoy. This was what my companion on this tour liked best, and she was very happy to see this particular house.
Some of the houses on the tour had been thoroughly gutted out and rebuilt inside with modern lines, fixtures, and art. I'm not a fan of this trend, personally, and the cluttered coziness of this home was warm and inviting. This was the kind of place where artistic people choose to live. It felt a bit like a cozy nest of interesting things to look at, where a living room is crowded with only five people in it. In every corner and shelf, there were books, art pieces, warm lighting, and collected items. While it wasn't a "haunted" piece, there was a framed "golden ticket" and first edition copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in a gilded shadowbox up on a shelf. Nifty things like that were everywhere!
Anyway, the house was small, but by no means felt inadequate to a family's life there. I was so absorbed with looking around that I was distracted from any energy around. This is a testament to the calm nature of the location, if it doesn't assert itself right off. It could also have been obscured just from the sheer number of people trying to squeeze through a hallway meant for only one person (or two to pass snugly). That's probably more likely, now that I consider it.
My friend and I passed through the hall into the back living area, also a cozy little area, but when we came out and everybody naturally took a step down into the living area, I found my gaze drawn the opposite direction. The tiled living room with plush seats was to the left, but to the right, on a raised floor of burnished wooden planks, was a reading nook filled with overstuffed chairs, small crammed bookshelves, and soft reading lamps that leaned over the backs of the chairs. There was a window up behind them that looked out into a portion of the yard. I loved this spot! Something about it was warm, beautiful, attractive, and idyllic... But not wholly welcoming.
Odd, that such a spot wouldn't immediately make me want to jump into a chair and cozy up with a book, but the chairs felt taken. The space felt taken. It was then that I paid a bit more attention to the floor, and the marked separation between the wood dais and the tile set a few inches below it. Trying not to attract attention to myself (which would be difficult to explain), I stepped on and off the wood a few times. On the wood floor was energy and presence, and on the tile there was significantly less.
I rejoined my friend as she met someone she knew. As I listened to their conversation, I learned this was the gentleman who had led the haunted tours a few years before. My friend had written large article on the tour on the year she participated, and he was pleased to share a little more history of this particular house when she asked. I had no idea beforehand, but this was one of the homes on the haunted tour. I was interested to hear that the wooden floor (and step down to the tile) marked the addition to the original home, and that the wood floor was actually original to the home. He shared that the hallway (the crowded one mentioned before) was where the owners heard footsteps in the evening, always around 10 pm, but that they didn't hear it if they went to bed before this hour.
This was news to me. I'd never been in this home before. I had no idea this was included in the haunted homes tour. All this didn't change the emotional response I felt from that corner of what had been the original home, though if I lived in a place that had such a fantastic reading nook, I'd be a bit peeved that I'd have to share it with spirit equally enchanted with the space.
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