My Paranormal Story - Part 3

By June Nixon

Around 2005, I was watching one of those ghost-hunting shows and thought, “Ugh. This is all fake.” The dramatic music, the gasps, the night vision, the person whispering, “Did you hear that?” after someone clearly bumped into a chair—it all felt like paranormal theater with bad lighting. I decided I was going to get into ghost hunting myself and prove it was all a bunch of hogwash. Which is a very scientific term, obviously.

By then, I had lost my puppy, grandfathers, grandmothers, brother, my father, and several great-aunts and uncles. If there really was something after death, I thought surely one of them would have found a way to let me know. A whisper. A dream. A flickering light. A penny in a weird place. Something. But there was nothing. No messages. No signs. No dramatic breeze through the curtains. Just silence. And silence, when you are grieving, can feel a lot scarier than any ghost.

So I started taking paranormal classes. One of them was taught by a man named Neil McNeill—yes, that is really his name, and yes, it sounds like someone named a paranormal investigator while trying to make a point. What I appreciated about Neil was that he did not try to force anyone to believe. He taught us to observe, question, and come to our own conclusions. In other words, he gave my skeptical brain a clipboard and permission to be annoying.

At the end of the class, we were invited to do a paranormal investigation at an old Victorian mansion in Port Gamble, Washington, called the Walker-Ames House. The town had once been owned by a lumber mill, and the managers of the mill had lived in that house, which was built in the late 1800s. It was beautiful in the way old houses can be beautiful—full of charm, history, and just enough creaking to make you reconsider your life choices after dark. I fell in love with it instantly.

While we were on the second floor, Neil told us not to go into a small hallway between the landing and the bathroom. The attic door was in that hallway too, which felt extremely rude of the house, because if there is one place in an old Victorian mansion that does not need extra creepiness, it is the attic door. Neil said he felt a strong presence there and thought we should stay clear of it. Naturally, the hallway immediately became the most interesting hallway in the entire world.

I was in a small room off the landing when I looked toward the hallway and saw a shadow on the wall. It had the shape of a short, heavy person standing there. The sun was setting, so I knew shadows were possible, but this one felt wrong. It did not stretch long like the others. It stood upright, still and solid, as if it had weight. As if it was waiting. I remember thinking, “That must be Neil,” because apparently my brain preferred logic over screaming.

So I started walking toward it. The second I moved, the shadow rushed toward me and vanished. It did not slide along the wall. It did not fade like a normal shadow. It flew at me and disappeared. One moment it was there, and the next it was gone. I stood there trying to convince myself it had to be a trick of the light, a person, a reflection, a rogue Victorian dust bunny with excellent timing—anything but what it looked like.

I hurried into the nursery room, where Neil and another person were talking, and interrupted them with the calm, dignified words of a seasoned investigator: “Uhhhhhhh… who was just in the hallway?” They both looked at me and said no one had been in the hallway. They had been in that room the whole time. I insisted someone had been there, that I had seen them, that they had moved toward me. But we were the only people upstairs.

I was shaken, but I was still me, so I immediately tried to debunk it. Maybe a leaf had fallen across the window. Maybe a bird had passed by. Maybe the universe had briefly projected a tiny, suspicious man onto the wall just to ruin my skepticism. I went outside, found a leaf, shaped it like a person, and put it against the stained-glass window to see if it could make the same shadow. It could not. Not even close.

The setting sun should have made every shadow long and stretched, but this one had stood straight. It had seemed to separate from the wall. It had moved toward me with purpose. I could not explain it, and that bothered me more than if it had simply scared me. Fear fades. Questions linger.  And wait a minute, Neil is really thin, the shadow had a very round body…That night, I had to admit something I had resisted for a long time: maybe the paranormal was not just smoke machines, dramatic music, and people whispering in basements. Maybe ghosts, spirits, shadow people—whatever we want to call them—were not as impossible as I wanted them to be. I always say you cannot make a skeptic believe unless they see something for themselves. Unfortunately for my skepticism, I saw something.