The Haunted Trunk
There is something I’ve been struggling to define when it comes to my personal beliefs. I do not really believe in ghosts, BUT I don’t necessarily not believe in ghosts.
Let me explain. As a child, I was like many of my friends, strongly believing in their existence. I loved and believed the Ouija board really communicated with spirits. Then I grew up. I stopped believing in ghosts. Watching those ghost encounter shows on TV with the bad acting, random noises, and calling every trick of shadow a materializing ghost just made me giggle.
Still. Something happened about 13 years ago that makes me wonder.
During a trip to West Virginia with my best friend to sight-see and visit her brother, we toured the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville. It is reportedly very haunted. We heard stories of ghostly noises, unexplained shadows, and brutal inmate uprisings. The three of us had very different perspectives on touring a prison, haunted or not. My friend worked as a nurse at a maximum-security prison at the time. Her brother had served time in the past. I had only seen the inside of a prison on television.
As part of the tour, we were allowed to go into a cell one-by-one to see just how small it was, and they closed the door on us. It was all bars, so we could see out. My friend refused to go in. Her brother went in and laughed about it bringing back memories for him. I went in and posed for my friend to take a picture.
That night at the hotel, the pool that had been just fine the night before was now infested by flies. They were dropping down, dead, all around us. We joked about Amityville Horror and my friend insisted that a ghost had followed us from the haunted prison. If you haven’t seen Amityville Horror, a fly infestation was a sign of evil spirits in the house.
When we got home from the trip, my friend emailed me the picture of me in the cell, pointing out the orb of light on my shoulder, a sure sign that a ghost had been sitting there if you believe in such things. I laughed about it, did some photoshop to turn that orb into a tiny Casper, and emailed it back to her.
A week or so later, strange things started happening at my house. The light in the guest bedroom would turn off and on by itself. The laundry room door, which is always kept closed, would be found open multiple times per day. I lived alone, unless you count my cat, and I know I wasn’t leaving that door open. The final evidence that a ghost followed me home was when I came downstairs in the morning and found a streak across the middle of the kitchen floor about three feet long that looked exactly like someone took three fingers and dragged them in a serpentine path across the floor. The smell confirmed that the swirling streak was poop. I couldn’t really blame the cat for two reasons. One was that she refused to go anywhere near it. The second was that it was such a quantity that her little body would not have been capable of containing it all. I scrubbed with bleach, burned sage, and invited the spirit to leave, opening the front door wide. This last bit was what Google recommended. After that, all issues stopped.
I had started not believing in ghosts again until December this year. I was in the process of moving. To prepare the house for showings, I moved an antique trunk from the living room to the basement and took down my Ring camera. I stored the camera in the trunk, wrapped in towels. Nothing displayed on that camera for three weeks and no alerts, of course, since it was in a closed trunk. Then, the day after I signed the offer to purchase, I started receiving motion alerts from my Ring camera. I got five alerts the first night between 1am and 4am and three the next night between those same hours. I thought maybe it was the last gasp of the battery dying, but it was still at 20%. Sadly, or maybe thankfully, there was no video showing anything.
When I moved to the new house, I hadn’t figured out where to use the trunk, so it was stowed in the basement at my new house after taking out the Ring camera. Both of my cats, for four consecutive nights after moving, glared at the basement steps and refused to go down them. Attempts to carry them to the stairs resulted in hissing and scratching. One cat would sit looking at the stairs and growl with a deep rumble multiple times per day. I burned more sage and invited the spirit to leave. I wanted to sage the trunk as well. When I tried to open it, something I could always do easily with one hand in the past, it put up a fight. I had to put down the sage to use both hands and even then I broke out in a sweat with the effort. This spirit wasn’t about to leave without a struggle. I finally got it open and finished my saging. There hasn’t been an issue since.
I’ve been trying ever since to get rid of that trunk. There is no way I’m keeping it in my house, belief in ghosts or not!