Student share strange stories

With the eerie tales of Ms. Hudec and Mr. Lynch in play, it is now time to hear what students of Walsh have to say.

Let’s start off with a tale of sensations. Although no apparitions materialize in this account, uneasy feelings arise out of the shadows throughout… the types of feelings that make the back of your neck prickle and your heart beat just a little faster.

Junior Meg Resweber lives in a quaint house in Copley. When first walking into her house, one’s eyes are drawn to the antiques: stoneware jars lined up in rows, faded pictures in worn frames, wooden containers with many drawers hung on the wall, a simple rocking horse adorned with delicately-painted designs.

“My grandmother collects [antiques], too, so my mom inherited the trait from her,” Meg explained. Her mom has been collecting these curios for over twenty-four years.

An old superstition claims that antiques carry the souls of their previous owners. “I don’t know if that has anything to do with it or not, but there’s been some weird occurrences,” Meg said.

In the living room, “the windows will shake … without any wind or anything,” Meg stated. At another area on the ground floor, Meg could occasionally hear tapping in a vacant corner.

She noted that many of the unsettling occurrences take place in her older brother’s room, which lies at the end of the upstairs hallway. It remains shrouded in shadows even with the lights on.

Meg  described times when she would walk out of her room and be met with an uneasy sensation. “I’ll be facing this way, but I’ll feel like there’s something standing [at the entrance to my brother’s room.],” she said.

Another unnatural occurrence has been happening in one of the upstairs bathrooms. “Recently, I’ll be in the bathroom, and I’ll leave … and then this door will be propped open, even though I swear I closed it,” said Meg. Normally, a cupboard door accidentally coming ajar would not be unusual. But this one is magnetic; it can’t open by itself.

Specific objects elicit unexplainable sensations as well. One is a particular picture in the upstairs hallway. It is a painting of a young girl, holding a playhouse and doll with one hand and using the other to pull a toy lamb by a string. “This picture gives off the weirdest vibes. I don’t like it,” stated Meg. The same can be said for an old standing mirror in her mom’s room. It’s made of carved wood surrounding the clouded, oval-shaped glass.

The next tale invilvess a single vision that led to nightmares in the dead of night. Freshman Lily Fratantonio told the story from when she was in kindergarten. “I woke up and I saw a girl in the hallway, and she was wearing one of my dresses,” Lily said. She noted that the girl was wearing a pink dress with stripes at the bottom.

For years, Lily was told that the little girl she had seen was merely the result of a nightmare. “I was so scared because I thought it was a really, really bad dream, and apparently I told my mom about it a few different nights,” Lily said. But a short time ago, her mother discussed the experience with her again. “Back then she told me it was fine, but [recently] she told me about how she thought it was ghosts,” Lily explained..

“She bought this ghost detector … She used it, and it said that there were spirits in this other bedroom and downstairs.” The detector was an EMF/ELF Meter used to measure electromagnetic fields.

The experience had scared the kindergarten Lily. Fortunately, “Nothing else ever happened again except for that one time,” Lily concluded.

The last tale, however, involves a reoccurring experience that unfolded over a number of years in junior Ke’-Turah (Keezy) Allen’s home in Garfield. She started  with a story she had been told about something her uncle Terrell did when Keezy was young.

Uncle Terrell would stand between the kitchen and dining room in their house and utter a chant. “He’d say something like ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, what do you hear? Jimmy, Jimmy, what do you fear? Jimmy, Jimmy, running water’ and then the water in our bathroom would cut on,” Keezy explained. At one Thanksgiving gathering when she was older, she bet her uncle he wouldn’t be able to do it again.

Her uncle waited until 10:30 that night and recited the chant once again. When nothing happened immediately, Ke’-Turah was frustrated, because she had gotten her hopes up for a supernatural experience. However, “as I was talking, the faucet cut on. It cut on, and it cut off, and I was spooked,” she said.

The family wanted to make sure the flow of water wasn’t just due to a leaky faucet. “We got the pipes and stuff checked for drips, and everything was fine,” said Keezy.

Later on, when Ke’-Turah was fourteen, her friend Taylor brought a ghost detector to the house in an attempt to discover any presences. The girls waited until the witching hour, between three and four, but after a while they grew tired of waiting for a sign. Keezy remembered thinking, “I’ve been standing here saying ‘Jimmy’ for thirty minutes … we might as well just give up.”

Right after she finished her thought, the light on the detector started blinking red near the bathroom and turned off when Taylor moved away from the bathroom. “That’s the only time I ever brought a ghost gadget into the house,” Keezy noted.

Afterwards, Ke’-Turah’s sister decided to do some research on their house, hoping to find a possible explanation for the experiences. She discovered that only two families had lived in the house prior to the 2000’s and that “there was a report that the family right before us had a son named Jimmy, and he had drowned in [the basement bathtub],” Ke’-Turah said.

On the day before her thirteenth birthday, Keezy experienced sleep paralysis, a phenomenon she was already familiar with. But this time was different. “I remember having sleep paralysis and opening my eyes … and seeing a little figure [near the bathroom].” She went on to describe the boy as young with short hair and wearing a plain shirt and cargo shorts.

A couple of times her mom’s friend, Carmella, who is a medium, would come over to visit. Whenever she would ask questions about the house, “she kept steering towards my room, my closet, and then the bathroom,” recalled Keezy.

During one of these visits, Carmella said she felt an odd presence coming from the closet. Her comment seemed to answer a question of Keezy’s. “I can’t sleep facing away from my closet. I physically and mentally can’t … I figured it was because of something,” she admitted.

Although her family experienced some strange occurrences throughout the years, Keezy concluded her story by saying that “not much has happened besides that … hopefully he’s moved on.”

As for the bathtub where Jimmy unfortunately met his end, Ke’-Turah said, “It is still there. We should probably take it out. Maybe that’ll knock the anchor loose.”