(This is terribly long, but I wanted to get the whole thing out while I was motivated.)
After I got rid of the items in question, it stopped. But first, let’s talk about what led up to that point. These are true things that happened to my husband and I in 2006-2008.
The first happenstance we remember was something simple and kind of funny but really unexplainable. I’d been searching all day for a ring of sentimental value to me. I’d run out of places to search and things to look in and under. In desperation I turned to my small Pekingese and teasingly implored him to find it for me. We headed out for the evening and when we returned, I immediately spotted the ring– on the dog’s pillow! We definitely would’ve noticed had it been there earlier and there was no logical reason for the ring to be on the pillow to begin with. We laughed it off as our dog being amazing and maybe psychic, but didn’t think on it too much.
The next thing that happened was a lot harder to laugh off. My husband collects bobble heads and had a Spiderman one on his desk. The desk was against the wall and the bobble head was on the side that butted up against the wall. We were in the living room watching television when we heard a crash from the home office. We both jumped up at the sound and found the bobble head smashed on the floor- on the opposite side of the desk! It had always sat securely on the far side of the desk and, to have fallen where it did, would’ve had to have been picked up and thrown. This was alarming as we really had no explanation for it and it was such a forceful act.
The next experience was even more baffling. Again we were in the living room when something shattered in the kitchen. I went to investigate and found a mug smashed on the kitchen counter. I glanced up to see the cabinet door was firmly closed. (These are old cabinets that stick shut. You have to give a good tug to open them.) I tested the cabinet door and it was completely closed, and yet there was the mug smashed on the counter as if it had fallen off the shelf – through the door! This was when we started to take notice and wonder if there was something unseen in the house doing these things. There was no logical explaining it. No one else was around- our young son was asleep in his crib.
Weeks later, there was another crash in the middle of the night in the bathroom. I assumed my husband had gotten up to use the bathroom and had knocked something off the sink counter so I just went back to sleep. The next morning I was confronted with our bathtub soap dish smashed in front of the sink. However the sink is not next to the shower and the shower curtain was pulled closed. The soap dish would’ve either had to travel over or through the curtain and past the toilet to end up in front of the sink.
What is strange to me is that with all this going on, we never felt a presence and we never felt in danger and we never felt the need to call someone to investigate. There was a feeling of waiting: was whatever it was going to move on or were things were going to continue or even ramp up more? It was more curiosity than fear at this point.
The kitchen was again the site for the next disturbance. I had a slim pottery tray that held some odds and ends and sat far back on the counter. I came home one day to find it smashed on the ground. I felt annoyed and aggravated, but what took my breath away was that everything that had been in the tray was strewn across the counter as if it had been flipped over and then flipped onto the ground. No one was home when this happened. We do not have central air or anything that could have even blown all that stuff out of the tray. It was utterly unexplainable, again.
One of the eeriest moments was the morning we woke to find a cluster of helium filled balloons stuffed into our shower. The night before my husband had securely anchored them in the kitchen to keep them from drifting into any of our ceiling fans. He had done this after everyone had gone to bed and our son was still small enough that he slept in his crib and would not have been out during the night. Yet, come morning, the balloon bunch was in the shower, curtain pulled, bathroom door only slightly cracked open.
Even though I had concerns about my son being around something destructive, whatever it was seemed more mischievous than malevolent, even with all the broken stuff. My son’s special sleep toy is a small half bunny, half blanket toy. It had been missing several days much to his dismay and our frustration. One Sunday morning, as we were preparing to go to church I glanced into the crib and the missing toy was on his pillow. Not tossed or thrown as a child would have done but placed sitting up on his pillow.
Another incident having to do with our son’s toys happened during the holidays. We had a little nativity that we let him play with. We would re-set it up every night for him. One night two of the pieces were missing. We looked everywhere and it was as if they had just vanished into thin air. The next morning the figures were sitting in front of the nativity facing each other. My husband thought that I had found them but when he asked I had no idea what he was talking about. Again our son was too small to be out of his crib. There was no one wandering about at night except for our geriatric Pekingese. (It was always strange that he never growled or barked or showed any indication of any presence either. )
Around that same time I came home to find a bowl had seemingly been snatched off the counter, flipped and thrown into the cabinets below. This was a very heavy bowl and I did not keep it or other breakables near the edge of the counter because my son was beginning to pull himself up on things. And- had it somehow been on the edge and fallen, it probably would have cracked into a couple of pieces. It was a thick pottery bowl, over a foot in circumference. It looked like it had been flipped and slammed into the cabinets below. There were marks on the cabinet door and the bowl had smashed into small shards. This really scared me and again my concern for my son continue to grow but I wasn’t sure what to do.
My husband and I are Christians and this sort of thing is not something you bring up in Sunday school class. I’m still not sure why I didn’t think to reach out to paranormal investigators or even someone at the church. I do know I didn’t want to talk about this much because I didn’t want people to look at us differently or think we were kooks or, even worse, attention seeking liars. And this stuff was unreal- if someone was telling me these things I might have thought they might be exaggerating. My husband felt that at least, because we are Christians, we had some sort of protection from physical attacks against us. And it is true that we never felt threatened and nothing ever touched us or even physically appeared in front of us.
I did do some research on our house, a solid little Florida ranch built in the 1950s. I could not find any news or reports or anything that indicated that anything violent or bad had ever happened at our address. I had a strong feeling that it was not the house or anything to do with the house that was the cause of this.
The final incident happened a few days before my parents were due to visit. I had a small tabletop cabinet that I kept in the kitchen. It had a magnetic closure that kept it very securely closed. When the doors were opened, there was a distinctive squeak. There were door pulls that would also swing and make a little clattering noise if you open it quickly. I heard the cabinet door squeak and so I looked around the corner to make sure my son wasn’t messing with it. The door was swinging in wide arcs, the pulls bouncing against it. No one was there. My son was asleep and my husband was not home. At this point, I did feel fearful and just desperate for some explanation and for this to stop.
It began to occupy my mind more and I would feel a sense of dread when I walked in the front door at what we might find next. It was still fresh in my mind when my parents came and I started telling my mom all about the strange things. She suggested I tell my dad about it.
My dad is a very educated man and good at reasoning things out. My parents have lived overseas for a while and have encountered many different cultures and unusual things in their time abroad. As we sat talking, he looked around and pointed out several art pieces that had come from India and Thailand and Indonesia. I definitely only saw them as art, but he informed me that they were carvings of deities. He went on to explain that a lot of temples and “holy people” sold things of this nature. Sometimes before offering them up for sale, objects will be ceremonially blessed and have spirits invited to inhabit them. He suggested that perhaps we were dealing with some thing or things that had attached to one or more of these items. He suggested we get rid of them immediately.
I took his advice and sold them as quickly as I could. (Yes, I mentioned to the new owners that it was possible that the items also came with “friends”. This was not a deterrent to any of them.) And- as I started this whole story- once the objects were gone, things stopped happening.
As we look back on it, and this was over ten years ago, we find ourselves in disbelief that this happened to us. These were things that both of us witnessed. This wasn’t a case of one person’s active imagination or staging things. There has been pounds of broken ceramics and pottery as proof. As it was going on, we mentioned it to just a handful of people but this is the first time I’ve written it all down. I wish now that we had had the presence of mind to take pictures, but this was before the Instagram age. I also kind of wonder what would’ve happened if we had tried to contact it with a Ouija board. A previous experience as a kid with a Ouija board has made me very averse to them and I’d vowed never to touch one again so that didn’t even occur to me as an option. While I remain a collector and dealer of vintage and antique things, I absolutely stay away from anything that could be temple artwork or artifact!
