The House Where Evil Lurks: A Review

I have to admit that I am a sucker for ghost stories.  I like the historical factor that is associated with them.  The idea that the energy of an event or a person can consciously or unconsciously linger over time is intriguing. 

I just finished reading The House Where Evil Lurks: A Paranormal Investigators Most Frightening Encounter by Brandon Callahan. My mind is muddled over what to think of it.  The book is written in first person, and in some ways feels a little bit like a movie script. I don’t know if that is because of the way the story unfolds, or if I have watched too many episodes of Ghost Hunters /Most Haunted and can visualize what each scene would look like.  The events that unfold are interesting and can keep the readers interested.  By the end of the book, I tended to wonder about the cats, but that probably has more to do with me being a cat person, than any intent on the authors part. 

Overall the book is about as frightening as an episode of Most Haunted or Ghost Hunters.  It gives you enough history for your mind to make certain leaps and jumps, but not enough to leave the average reader shaking in their boots.  If anything, the picture of the cover is a bit more sinister than the recollections of the paranormal investigation.  

I am sure that some people would want to take every word seriously, but seeing that I was reading for pleasure and not to expand upon paranormal investigation skills, I found it was easy to skim some parts with out losing the gist of what was happening.  It was an easy beach read, that kept me amused as I was slowly roasted by the unrelenting solar rays.  I enjoyed the book, and would lend it out if someone was interested in that sort of genre.  If I were to give it a rating it would be 3 stars out of 5 stars.  A good beach read, with low investment of mental energy to enjoy. 

Getting Closer to Batman

How many bats does it take to become Batman?  This is the question the question of the week in my house.  It is kind of like the question of how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop.  

Last year there was a bat in the house while I was at work. It is easy to think what I would have done at the time, but it is hard to really know what I would truly do.  A year later from the last bat incident, we were revisited by the brown bat. 

Dib was no help with the bat and Iggins hid under a bed.

It started simple enough. I was puttering around the guest room talking to Laura on the phone when I noticed something at the window.  I didn't have my glasses on, and it was a dusky twilight in the room, so I couldn't immediately identify what was going on.  Less then a minute later, it became clear as a bat flew out of the window and at my general direction. 

Oh, did I scream.  Down the stairs I thundered, hollering about a bat as the winged menace followed me.  My husband was less than thrilled about the nocturnal nightmare fuel that now inhabited the kitchen. My husband and father in law collaborated in the bat removal.  I did my part and screamed every time it flapped around and laughed maniacally when not screaming. The bat was released back into the night air. The whole event was kind of like the thrill of a roller coaster, you don't really know what the next turn is going to be, but that rush of adrenaline makes your giddy with anticipation and makes you silly.

In a moment of silliness, it made me contemplate if I am one step closer to becoming Batman. There is some serious bat trauma that has to happen before Bruce Wayne lost his parents that helped shape him.  I have had some not so serious bat trauma. How many bats does it take to become Batman? 

Power of Suggestion

My dad came out to visit me for the winter holidays. It was great, I hadn't seen him in years, and despite being a bit under the weather, we had a great time. One morning while he was out here and over a cup of tea, he asked me about the lady doing ironing. I had no clue as to what he was referring to.  My blankness must of shown on my face, because he explained that at the foot of his bed it looked like there was a lady doing ironing.  I inquired about what she looked like, and all he could tell was that she was in a long dress and she was ironing and paying no mind to him.  I do not have any hired help at all. I do not iron if I can help it, and I certainly would not be ironing in the guest room where my father would be sleeping in the early morning. I asked him if his cloths were pressed, and sadly they were not, so we joked that she wasn't doing a very good job at ironing and we went on with our morning routine.

It is now a couple months later and I am seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye. At first I wrote it off as the cats. I have two healthy cats that some times treat the house as their own personal play ground and it would be really normal to see the cat move out the corner of my eye.  Then I noticed it started happening when the cats were not in the room or  when they were directly in front of me.  Just a little something off to the side the would move quickly and be completely out of focus.  The thoughts of the "Lady Doing Ironing" came to my mind.  And I started to think about it in more detail.

I live in an old house. It was built early 1900's and has had a fair number of occupants prior to my husband and I purchasing it. It still has a lot of original woodwork and stain glass windows along with the pocket doors and hardwood floors. I do not use the guest room that my father stayed in. I have never slept in that room the entire time I have lived here. My husband and I sleep in the room across the hall that is slightly bigger and gets the morning light.  As far as I know there is nothing wrong with the guest room. It has plenty of windows  for natural lighting and bed is comfortable seeing at it was our old bed before we upgraded to a bigger bed. The few people that have slept in the room, have normally done so out of exhaustion or out of excess of libations and aren't able to be aware of the their surroundings. The "Lady Doing Ironing" certainly could be there, but not a person would know, and my cats could care less unless the "Lady Doing Ironing" unless she turned to the "Lady That Feeds Cats"

I will admit that I am open to the suggestion of ghosts, mostly because I know that I don't know and understand everything and I am not going to in this lifetime. Who really knows if there are ghosts or displaced dimensions that over lap? I have been on several ghost tours, and I have a love for interesting history. I have never noticed anything strange about my house. No strange noises that can't be explained by cats and old hardwood floors. My dad is one of the few people that I can just talk to about all sorts of stuff including ghosts, astral travel, and parallel dimensions and not worry about offending his delicate sensibilities on religion and philosophy.  It probably comes from spending a lot of time with my dad watching the SiFi Channel and reading science fiction and history novels and just throwing a bunch of "what ifs" into our conversations.

It struck me today as to what was going on and why I was seeing things out of the corner of my eye. It was because there  really was something moving in peripheral  vision. I was in the kitchen chopping cooked chicken for a meal I was making and the cats are positioned in their usual begging positions for scraps. A couple of months ago I cut my hair fairly short to frame my face. It has been slowly growing out, and I am not to the point where I can pull it in a pony tail and have just some bangs framing my face. While I was moving around more of my hair slipped from its tie since it was still a little short to be pulled back, but I need to have my hair pulled back when cooking. I hate getting hair in my food.  It wasn't until about five minutes later that I needed to fix my hair, because it was getting in my way that I realized that what I saw was my own hair and not anything supernatural.

Part of my feels really silly, that because my dad suggested that I might have a ghost in my house, that I came up with ways to prove that he might be right and in the process spooking myself at a little bit of nothing in my own hair. The other part of me is amazed that how a small comment can get a persons mind turning in all sorts of direction and it is always the comments that you never expect that stick with you.

"The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion."-Friedrich August von Hayek