char *(null)=" poltergeist.story

poltergeist.story

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From: jhawk@yang.cpac.washington.edu (Jane Hawkins)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: Re: Be firm with a ghost - a true story
Date: 31 Aug 94 00:51:12
Organization: University of Washington
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In-reply-to: edb@cnj.digex.net's message of 30 Aug 1994 15:31:01 GMT



Edward Betancourt writes:


   The following story is not my own but my fiance's. Intrigued by some of
   the stories I had d'led from this group, she wanted to share one of her
   own. Enjoy!


(Snip: Good story about haunting from when she was a teenager)


   After two weeks of this I had had enough and my early instincts about 
   these things must have kicked in, for one day I marched into my room and 
   said something like,"Whatever or whoever you are, I've had enough of 
   this. I want you to leave and never return." After that, I had no more 
   problems and everything returned to normal.


   Was it a poltergeist? At the age it happened its highly probable. I was 
   experiencing those oh so wonderful teenage problems and angst that is an 
   ingredient in poltergeist phenomena. 



   Eileen


That is *strikingly* like how I got rid of my poltergeist.  


I think I was around thirteen when it started.  Much of that time is
very confused because I was in the classic situation for a
poltergeist, an adolescent girl under great stress.  I have found over
the years that when you say, "My mother was crazy", people don't
envision quite the right things.  However, when you say, "She didn't
always know who I was when I came home from school and once called the
police because this girl she didn't know wouldn't leave," they get a
little more accurate idea than I'm not using the word "crazy" loosely.


I can't now recall exactly what started when, but the usual things
were stuff moving around, my bed shaking, and my clothes (*only* mine)
getting knotted up in the hamper.  Virtually everything that happened
was confined to my room, except that the hamper was in the bathroom
and my sister later told me things sometimes moved on her desk, which
was the other side of the wall.  If film stayed in my room over night,
the pictures fogged.  (No interesting patterns, just murk.)  I woke up
once to hear a lot of crunching and tearing.  The next day an entire
magazine had had each page pulled out and the pages wadded into little
balls.  Sometimes there would be a mumbling voice, no words that I
could hear but definitely in the room with me.  A couple times the
covers were jerked off me.


These sorts of things happened a couple times a week for several
years.  At first, I was completely terrified.  I can remember lying in
my bed as it bounced so hard I was nearly, but not quite thrown out,
and sweating and crying.  After a while, I began to feel that my fear
was somehow feeding things -- that the worse I felt the more active
and wild the poltergeist was.  I started trying hard to control my
fear.  


I was very into number theory in those days, and found that if
I could call up a proof and start running through it, the activity
would slow or even stop.  If I was too scared to concentrate on that,
even multiplication tables helped.  A true number freak *never*
forgets 7x7.  ;)


After a year or so, things slowed down to a couple times a month but
continued happening fairly regularly.  I think I was sixteen when it
ended.  I woke up one night and my books were coming off a high shelf
and dropping to the floor, one by one.  It had never messed with my
books before.  I was furious.  I said, "You leave my books alone!"  I
think I also told it to get out and leave me alone, but my memory is
hazier about that.


Anyway, there was a very odd feeling.  Like a whoosh directed toward
the window, yet not a sound at all.  And then the room was quiet.  It
felt *empty*.  I went back to sleep.  


And that was it.  No more waking up to find everything in my room
moved around, no more being shaken awake in the middle of the night,
no more clothes knotted up in the hamper, and film kept in my room
came out as perfectly decent ( or terrible!) snapshots.  


Well, not quite completely it.  Maybe a half dozen more times in the
thirty years since, things have happened which I ascribe to the
poltergeist.  I still don't tell the story very often, out of a
feeling that thinking about it much might call it (whatever it is!)
back.  I think I said some of this here a couple weeks back, though
not in as much detail.  Sure hope nothing moves in my room tonight!



It is very startling to me that Eileen's poltergeist or whatever went
away under such similar circumstances.  I have also heard more classic
ghost stories in which a very firm but polite request to leave stopped
a haunting.  








--
**           Jane E. Hawkins, jhawk@cpac.washington.edu            **
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