char *(null)="
whispery.folk
whispery.folk
From: gvh@GAS.UUG.Arizona.EDU (Gabriel V Hoyos)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: The Whispery Folk
Date: 1 Feb 1995 03:29:33 -0600
Hiya, ghost story lovers! This is my first posting of a story and
I hope y'all enjoy it. Just a brief background on myself -- I'm
a suffering graduate student in a dead-end major whose only pleasure
in life comes from film and Ghost Stories! I've been collecting
them for some time and even wrote my senior thesis paper in high school
about local hauntings in my hometown of Douglas, Arizona. I'm
going to be posting some of the better ones about once a week or when
I have the time. Feel free to critique (please critique!) and I welcome
your comments or e-mail chat! And so -----
The Whispery Folk -- as told to gvh by the Hernandez family.
It was March, 1987, and I had four solid stories that I would
put in my Senior Thesis [The Blue Robe, Apache Fathers, Cucui, and
Headless Soldier (four stories coming soooooon!)]. One Saturday
afternoon, I was punching away at my little Type-a-Graph when my sister
Liza came into the room and said that her friend Lizette had a little
ghost in her house. I asked her more about it and she said that Lizette
had had an imaginary friend when she was little named Monchi, a half-boy
half-mouse creature that hummed her songs from beneath her bed. Monchi
never scared her but her brother Jeremy, four years old at the time,
swears to this day that Monchi appeared to him and tried to strangle
him. After speaking with Lizette for a while, I called her big brother
Andy, who's a friend of mine and was going to school with me, and asked if I
could come over to his house. I went over to his house, a newly remodeled
ranch house in a neighorhood in Douglas known as the Apple White
district which was built over an old apple orchard (several apple trees
still grow along the streets). I remembered an old story about the Apple
White district from my aunt who said that about a hundred Mexican soldiers
were buried in the Apple White area following battles during the Mexican
civil war of the 1840s. Later, I checked this with two books and a
local historian (and, thanks to me, ghost enthusiast) and all three did not
mention it or have heard of a mass grave in this area.
Anyway, so I arrive at Andy Hernandez's house and we head into
his room and chat away and BS for about an hour or so. In fact, I almost
forget why I'm there! So Jeremy comes into the room and throws a football
at me. In an instant, I remember Monchi. I ask Jer about it and he freaks
out! I explain to him that Lizette had mentioned it earlier and calms down.
And so Andy and Jeremy sit down and tell me about all the bizzare goings on
they experienced in 1978, the year they moved into the house. Andy was
8, Lizette was 7, and Jer was 4. In the beginning, the events had seemed
to center around the two boys and the parents scoffed at stories of a man
standing outside their window and to voices coming from the ceiling. Andy
remembers one night waking up to a shadow figure floating a few feet above
him. The figures swirled like liquid in the air and a murmuring in Spanish
was heard at his ear. He shut his eyes immediately and the figues vanished.
Jer remembers one day a man in a tan suit and shiny shoes tried to take
him by the hand and take him down a hole in the wall. After several
months of this, the two refused to sleep in the house and spent nights
at grandparents' homes. Andy remembers his Dad scolding him for lying
about the activities and how he eventually became reluctant to tell his
parents about seeing "whispery" (his words) people sometimes in
white, sometimes in black, walking around in his room and in the backyard.
Andy's Mom and Dad, who have been overhearing us talk about the
happenings, come into the room and ask why I'm so curious about ghosts. I
explain my Senior paper and we chat about parapsychology and such for a
while. They invite me to stay for dinner and after we ate, we sat around
the table and I was told more of the story. So Albert and Elsa (Dad and Mom
Hernandez) tell me that they temporarily fixed the problem by moving Lizette
into the boys' room and move the boys into her room. Lizette never
experiences anything in the house (other than Monchi, a not-so-imaginary
friend, I suppose). Jer experiences awful nightmares and eventually sleeps
with the parents. Suddenly, just as we were finishing dessert, Albert
admits that saw things in the house during the first few months of living
there. He would usually wake up at four in the morning for his early
morning shift (he's a cop, worked with my grandpa) and have some coffee
and wait for the paper. Almost every morning, he would see and/or feel
a presence watching him. One morning, he swears he saw a figure emerge
from the boys' room carrying one of the boys. He ran to the room, turned
on the lights, and saw the two boys sound asleep (Andy faintly remembers
this). Another day, Albert drew his gun at what he first believed was a
burglar trying to jump out the front living room window. He remembers
trying to grab the figure but recalls it vanishing in an instant. Yet
another morning, he recalls someone giggling behind him. He turned around
expecting to see his wife but instead caught a faint glimpse of the classic
image of a woman in white. I asked him if the image was "whispery" like
a foggy image or like spider webs or torn shards of silk. He said that
was a fair description of the figure he saw. A few weeks later, Albert
upon hearing Jer's nightmares about Monchi and about the "man in the wall"
decided that the house should be blessed. A Sunday later, the house was
blessed and nothing was ever seen again.
What was particularly odd about this haunting was the suddeness
of its halt and the fact that no women viewed or experienced any of the
phenomena that the males did. No aunts, grandmas, or other females ever
felt any presence or odd sensations. At first I suspected a "succubus"
or strong female spirit haunted the home. But what was the deal with
Monchi and "the man in the wall"? I aked the guys if they ever experienced
anything sexual aobut the occurences. They laughed at me at first but
then Albert recalls that the times that he felt was being watched truly
intimidated him (imagine a 6'5", 250 lb, veteran cop being scared of being
looked at!) and he felt as if he was in danger. Nothing has being seen
or heard in the house since 1979 when Andy woke up to a grinning phantom
telling him his brother is dead. Today, Andy says that it might have
been a dream, but he really cannot say for sure.
___________________________________________________
Well, that was fun.
Cheers,
Gabe
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