Spirits Are Very Real

My name is Randall,

It was the spring or early summer of 1973. I was fifteen years old at the time, living in the coastal town of Pacifica in central California, with my three siblings, my father and his new Hawaiian girlfriend that also had several children. The three youngest lived with us.

I'd just gotten home from school, and was anxious to sit down and read a book that I'd gotten from the school library. Not that I'm a big reader. It was just one of very few books that actually ever caught my attention. Since no one else was home at the time, I sat down at the kitchen table and started reading. I quickly got so into the storyline of the book that I was soon visualizing the scenes and characters, and seemed to even become consciously unaware of the words on the pages.

Then without warning, a young Indian woman stepped into the doorway of the kitchen, in my peripheral vision. She was dressed in an all-leather buckskin outfit with leather tassels. I could clearly see her long braided dark hair, which had thin strips of leather tied at the ends of the braids. I could also see she was wearing some turquoise jewelry.

The event didn't startle me nor scare me. Though it was something that I never expected to actually happen. You see, up to that point in time, I'd had several very brief encounters. So brief and illusive that I questioned that maybe, my mind may have actually just been playing tricks on me. Also, when we'd first moved into the town of Pacifica, some of our neighbors told us that our neighborhood had been built over an Indian burial ground.

The neighbor woman from across the street even stated that she'd walked into the bedroom to check on her infant and saw an Indian woman standing at the crib looking at her child. At the time, I totally thought those stories had most likely been provoked by people's fears about the burial ground. Yet, here I was having a similar event, at a moment when I hadn't even given the subject a single thought, and was preoccupied with a book that I'd been reading.

I hesitated to look right away, because I'd learned from previous events that when you just look, nothing is ever there. It's as if engaging your physical senses blocks the receptibility of your soul, which is what I think is seeing the image and not your eyes. Anyhow, even when you don't look quickly and try not to activate your physical senses and brain, the event is still quite brief and illusive.

I couldn't help but ponder the whole event and its detail, questioning why it might have happened, and especially to me. I questioned, that if it was a ghost of someone that has passed, then why could I see its body? And more than that, why was I able to see her clothes and jewelry, since they're inanimate objects. With that, I drew what I considered to be a more rational conclusion. That most likely there was a spirit there with me, simply trying to get my attention and wanting to gage my reaction or receptibility. I believed it chose the image of a person, knowing that I was there alone, thus, knowing it would be a bit more alerting to my consciousness. And chose an Indian woman to get me to think ghost, thus also knowing that I'd then think spirit, especially after seeing the inanimate objects.

About a week later, I had a test to do at school. One that I was very concerned about doing well on. The day of the test. I arrived on the school grounds just a few minutes late. I was walking briskly with books under one arm when the bell rang for everyone to go inside. My classroom was the one at the far-left end of the building. As I was walking briskly that direction, a ball came rolling out towards me, as if someone had kicked it. I didn't want to take the time to get it, but just knew that one of the yard-duty teachers was most likely going to ask me to get it. Knowing that I wanted every minute possibly to do my test, I avoided looking or going towards that ball. But to my surprise the darn ball kept rolling at an angle towards me. And ended up rolling right up to me, to the point that I shifted my books from my right arm to my left, bent over and started to put my hands around it to pick it up. As I then put my eyes directly on it, it vanished. I quickly stood back up, looked around to see if anyone had just witnessed that embarrassing event.

I then walked to class to do my test. I quickly realized that the spirit that I'd pondered, just a few days earlier, might have had the ability to project images of people and inanimate objects at me, just proved it boldly by projecting only an inanimate object at me that was so real that I tried to pick it up. That told me that both events were in fact very real, and that that spirit was in fact reaching out to me for some unknown reason. A reason that I'd learn much more about years later.