Introduction And Small Incidents

I've had this stuff happen to me all my life. Most were just little things. As I'd told my wife before we were married, I WISH the stuff DIDN'T happen, but it has. I suppose I'll start by sharing a few of the small things that have happened over my 54 years in Mississippi.

I suppose the earliest event that was totally inexplicable, was when I was around 12-13 when my Mom and I were sitting up watching The Tonight Show after my Dad has gone to bed.

The house was built by my parents so there had been no "history" in that house prior to our living there. The den where we were sitting was on the opposite end of the house from the formal living room. My Mom was super anal about that room and really didn't want anyone spending any time in it because she kept it in a state of perfection (in her mind, anyway).

Anyway, to the point, we heard a loud CRASH coming from the living room which we both commented afterwards we'd been certain was this heavy large punch bowl which had been sitting on her huge antique dining table. We both looked at each other, immediately, with that "WTF?!" expression on our faces. Expecting to see the punch bowl in umpteen pieces on the floor, when we opened the door and turned on the light. Of course... Nothing. Nothing whatsoever was broken or appeared out of place. Later in life, more than a few things happened in this house, but I'll get to some of those in later stories.

Let's see, the next small type event or events I can recall happened before my first wife and I were married and we were living in a very small rented house in the Bellhaven area of Jackson, Mississippi. It was just a tiny four-room house.

Well, long story short, several times during the four months we lived there, we'd hear a murmur of voices which sounded like they were coming from the kitchen. It was not loud like a group of people were ACTUALLY in the kitchen, but as if it were a distance away with source of the sound centered in the kitchen. The sound was clearly a group of people talking, as if at a gathering of some sort, but you could never make out distinctly anything that was being said. Whenever we walked into the kitchen to check it out, or even walk around the outside of the house to find it, the voices would just become inaudible. My ex told me that there had been some sort of untimely death of young people in the house in the 1960s, but that's been so long ago, I don't recall what it was she said was supposed to have happened. I have no way of knowing where she'd heard that story or anything concerning the veracity of the statement.

I don't really recall anything else happening there while we were at that house. The house was torn down sometime in the 1990s and though I drove by there recently, I don't recall what is there now. Nothing impressive, obviously.

So many little things to tell at different locations but the events themselves were isolated and not impressive enough to justify setting up the background to get to the point.

The ex and I moved to a small rural village south of Jackson about 40 miles and moved into a turn of the century home that we worked on restoring / renovating while we lived there. It had been burned down at one time and was rebuilt from, as I was told, the wood from an old hotel in a mid-18th century boomtown down the road that eventually died away when the railroad bypassed it.

I'll share a couple of more interesting events from this home in a subsequent story, but for this introduction, I'll keep it short. We were standing in a hall that runs lengthways along one side of the house and heard a huge CRASH that was obviously breaking glass. From where we were standing, it obviously came from the kitchen which was the room at the very end of the hall. Being poor at the time, we were dreading finding a broken window (which is exactly what it sounded like). Again, when we got there,... Nothing. Also smelled strong lilac perfume in this house quite often, but I'm pretty sure that was just residual from the many years an old lady had lived in the house. Probably just the humidity or air pressure or something would cause it to ebb and wane.

Finally, in the early 80s I was in a band that shared a loft in a commercial building on State Street in Jackson with about 2-3 other bands to split the rent. There was a straight stairwell from the street that led up to the loft on the right side of a landing. A commercial screen printing business was on the opposite side of the landing.

When you first went into the loft, there was a single larger room that everyone would leave equipment / instruments in, and further behind it was an approximately 6 x 8 opening into a practice room. There was no door between the practice room and the first room. When you were in the practice room (or with your back turned to the entrance in the first room, for that matter), I don't know what it was about that loft, but you could just tell when someone walked in. The sound would change, or maybe the air pressure changed - who knows, but you could feel it when someone came into the loft (someone picking up equipment - visitor / guest / whatever).

Well, anyway, I'm sure everyone who ever spent any time up there was familiar with the experience of practicing in the practice room and knowing someone had come in, only to look around through the entrance and no one was there. We'd joked, "It was the ghost", but I never even entertained that seriously for a moment. I can conservatively say that I shared that experience with band members more than a dozen times over the 2-3 years we used that loft.

One day, my guitar player told me that he ran into someone who worked at the screen printing place who asked him, "Have you met the ghost?" Supposedly, employees at the screen print shop were familiar with poltergeist type activity such as machine (s) turning on by themselves, lights turning off, and a door closing and locking on its own. I never experienced any of that, though.

The story from the employee was that a notorious gambler in the 1940s had been having an affair with a married woman and was killed in the building. Again, I have no way of knowing whether anything concerning that tale is true or not. The entire building was destroyed in the early 90s to create a parking lot.

Okay, lots of other little things over the years, such as seeing an ashtray fly off a window sill and just running across my deceased Mom's Thanksgiving Day menu on Thanksgiving day 10 years after she'd passed, but those stories are not really worth the setup to get to the punch lines (which I just gave away, HA!), so I'll leave these here for now with 2-3 more involved and meaningful stories to come.