Fred and Wilma

While Fred and Wilma were mostly pranksters over the years, things changed once the baby was born.  My brother's girlfriend gave birth to my nephew and moved in with us.  Naturally, we made several changes to the living situation and the un-living made their own changes.  Firstly, I had been living in the garage, which had been partially converted to a living space.  Not the entire garage but at least a good 2/3rds of the space was walled off, drywall was hung and a window was cut into the back wall.  Was it up to code?  What, are you kidding?  You think dad was going to bother with permits much less doing anything the legal, proper way?  But that was my 'bedroom' for a few months, and as I mentioned, once the baby was born, I swapped the larger room for what had been my old bedroom in the house where my brother and Cynthia had been living in before the baby.  

The first instance I can CLEARLY, VIVIDLY remember when Fred and Wilma were watching out for the baby was sometime in late spring.  Cynthia had just come out of the room, I was sitting in the living room watching TV and she asked if I could just listen out for the baby while she ran to the bathroom.  As she said this, I heard the baby briefly cry out and was quiet again.  Cynthia briefly stopped, looked back towards the room and turned back to head to the bathroom again.  When you gotta go, you gotta go.  The only reason I remember this all in such great detail is because of what happened once she came back out.  

As I mentioned, I sat watching TV the entire time, not a peep from the baby and Cynthia steps back into their room, takes a few steps in, then turns around and point blank asked me if I had gone into their room.
"No, I've been sitting here this whole time.  What's up?"  I get up and start walking towards her and their doorway.  She turns and points to the baby, who's laying in the middle of the bed, sucking on his bottle.  She goes on to tell me that she was about to feed him when she ran off to the bathroom.  But she left in such a rush that when she heard him cry, she knew it was because he was hungry but she really had to go.  
Mind you, the baby was laying in the center of the bed, still too small to turn himself over, never mind crawl, and she had left his bottle on the corner of the bed, far out of his reach.  And when she got back, he was still in the same spot but happily sucking on his bottle.  Right then, I knew it had to be our other residents looking out for the baby.  

Another event with the baby, he was in his walker bouncing around the living room and he got too close to this record cabinet dad had in the living room. It was just big wooden monstrosity, super dark brown, almost black, that kind of brown. It was also up on caster wheels because dad wanted to be able to move it around if mom wanted to rearrange things. Which just looked so bad and I guess he thought all that effort to even install them wasn't as bad as just taking the records out to move the thing. Anyway, this was up along the wall between the house and garage. Sitting precariously on top of that was a large wooden cassette tape organizer. I'm sure you know the kind I'm talking about if you owned any tapes in the 80s to mid 90s. So dad was sitting on the couch, still in his bathrobe since it was still fairly early morning still. I was sitting at the dining room table half reading the paper, half watching whatever it was dad had on the TV. Rob was bouncing along right up to that record case monstrosity and hit it just hard enough that it got both mine and dad's attention. We both just saw the wooden cassette case start to wobble from the impact and we jumped up. But it was too late, the case started to topple over, right above the baby. And it somehow missed him completely. 

From the position it was sitting at and the angle of the drop, by all accounts, it should have fallen squarely on top of the baby below. Instead, the whole thing tipped forward father than it realistically should have, hit the armrest of the couch and then dropped to the ground right next to it. The entire thing barely even grazing the bouncer. Despite the baby's safety, dad was already worked up thinking the worst had happened that he swore at the cassette case, grabbed it and somehow managed to open the front door at the same time and flung it halfway across the yard, screaming, bellowing, swearing at the thing. Scaring the baby. I just looked on in shock. That the only reason the baby was even crying was because Grandpa's rage startled him. There's no way the baby could have, should have been unharmed. Yet, here we were. 

Still another time with the baby was probably the most concrete to me that would suggest we had more than just our family living in that house. 

I was sitting in the living room, on the couch, wall side so to my right was the hallway leading to the bedrooms. The baby was just strong enough to sit up, hold his own head up, so I was playing with him in my lap, holding both his hands in mind. More like his hands wrapped around my fingers lol only for the roles to be reversed for the next several years haha. So I'm playing with the baby and the only thing behind me is the wallpaper. Suddenly, he stops bouncing and turns his head to the left, looking down the hallway. And slowly, he kept turning to his left, to his shoulder, reaching back as much as he could before he reversed it and went to his right side and then kept turning, looking until the was looking at the end of the wall as it lead into the kitchen. He was watching someone or something walk through the room. That's the only logical reason for what he did. He was tracking an object from one side of the room to the other. 

Shortly after that happened, we ended up moving. No, it wasn't Fred and Wilma that ran us off. Financial reasons and we moved into a rental in a quiet cul-de-sac. At least street was quiet, the house itself was another story. 

The Shadow Knows - Vol. II

 The next time I could recall seeing a shadow person...  You know what, I'm just remembering from my youth in playing Dungeons and Dragons that there were shadow people in the game but they were called Shades.  Humanoid characters that had entered the Shadow Realm.  I think I'm going to use that term to describe these things from now on.  It sounds better than just "Shadow People."  
So as I was saying, the next time I saw a Shade was after we had moved to Riverside.  The house mom and dad had bought was a few steps up from a shack.  Yes, it was four walls and a roof, 3-bedrooms, front and back yards, the whole shebang.  But there was no insulation and it was raised on short pillars.  Which meant heat waves and cold breezes ran under the floors, which in turn made summers unbearably hot and the winters, bitterly cold.  The one gas heater in the hallway did nothing to warm the house in the winter.  And the only AC in the summer were two window units that had been installed into the walls at opposite ends of the house.  That first summer we moved in, my brother and I would spend most of the day laying on the floor in the living room under that AC unit.  And THAT house had a number of unexplained events occur in the years we lived there.  

Within the first few weeks of us moving in, everyone in the house had dreams of dogs or wolves surrounding the house.  In Mexican culture, pre-Columbian era, dogs are considered to be guides for the departed, leading and protecting our spirits on our journey to the afterlife.  It's no coincidence that Dante was Miguel's spirit guide in the Pixar film, Coco.  The Xoloitzcuintli breed has a long, deep history in the Aztec religion.  Also, I LOVE that Dante is the dog's name.  Overt reference to Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.  A story where he, the author, is taken on a tour of the afterlife. Granted, teenage me didn't know about the dogs as spirit guides at the time but I do recall it was an unusual thing to be hearing family members all talking about seeing dogs in our dreams shortly after we moved in.  

But it was during our second, possibly third summer living there when we saw it.  And by we, I mean it was both my sister and I at the same time.  We were sitting in the living room watching whatever it was on TV.  It was summer break so it was either Price is Right or a Soap Opera.  I blame our brother for getting us into One Life To Live for a while there.  The room setup was: the couch was a giant L-shape and coffee table, all facing the console TV.  My sister was sitting on the side that was resting against the wall.  I was sitting opposite side with my back to the dining room table behind me.  
I'm not entirely sure why I looked, could have been that feeling you get when you just know, can sense, someone else in the room.  But I turned to look to my right, behind me towards the dining room table.  And that's when I saw the Shade.  Just a dark shadowy figure, I couldn't make out any features other than it was an adult-sized figure, not even dressed in black, literally just a shadow but it was a very defined shape.  It stood there for a brief moment before it suddenly reacted, like someone who got caught looking, and dropped behind the couch out of sight.  I immediately jumped up off the couch and ran around the arm rest to the dining room.  No one there.  From the dining room it was a clear, straight walk to the kitchen dining area, no more than 20 feet or so from where I stood to the sliding glass doors, which were closed.  I quickly crossed that distance and looked around the kitchen as well.  
Mind you, the house was pretty sparse with its furnishings.  There wasn't anywhere for anyone or anything to hide.  But there was no one there.  I slowly walked back to the living room and looked at my sister and just asked, "Did you see that?" 
"The man standing there looking at us?" I nodded, "and then he hid behind the couch."

It's one thing for a person to claim to have seen a Shade when they're alone in the middle of the night.  Could easily be dismissed as a pile of clothes sitting in a chair and you couldn't make out what you were looking at in the dark.  And even my previous encounter with a Shade that again, someone could dismiss as a shadow from outside being projected in.  But there's no reasonable, logical explanation for two people, to see the exact same shadowy figure, in the middle of the day, in the middle of summer and behaving as it did.  Reacting to our presence with conscious effort.  

I had another Shade sighting in that house before we moved out.  Although, that one was a little more nerve wracking/unpleasant and I've never talked about it before.

But for the most part, the unexplained phenomena in that particular house was more playful.  Keys missing from where you left them until you returned and they were right there the whole time.  The toilet flushing at odd hours, lights being left on when you know you turned everything off before you left.  Little things like that.  We even started to call them Fred and Wilma.  I don't know which of us kids started using those names for them but pretty soon we all just accepted Fred and Wilma were going to be part of our lives while we lived there.  But it was once the baby was born, my oldest nephew, that Fred and Wilma really became more active and took on a protective role in the house.   

The Shadow Knows

 I've retold this tale many, many times over the years.  It's become a common topic the more ghost tours and investigations I've attended so the story has become old hat to me at this point.  But it does lay the groundwork for what's become my personal history in the realm of the unexplained.  

I've mentioned for years that we grew up poor and it wasn't until I was a teenager did our family finally live in a proper home and I had an actual bedroom rather than a converted garage to sleep in.  Yes, dad worked at a patio construction shop so he had access to construction materials that could almost pass for something real but when the 'walls' that separate your bedroom from the living room and the bedroom next to yours are just thin particle board and honeycomb paper, you really don't have much.  But it was in this living situation, the converted garage at grandma's house that I saw my first 'entity' and realized something was amiss even then.  

Now, grandma's house had stories.  Oh, so many stories since as far back as I could remember.  Unusual dreams were the most common among anyone who lived or even stayed there for any length of time.  And in one of the bedrooms on the opposite end of the house, family claimed to have felt people tugging on their feet in the middle of the night.  But what I experienced when I was probably about 8 or 9 years old, I'll never forget.  

I was sleeping in my 'bedroom' when I awoke in the middle of the night.  Not a clue as to what time it was other than it was dark.  No bedside clock to even look at.  From where my bed lied, I could look out the opening that made up the door that lead into the living room.  And from there, I could see pretty much the length of the room, from the front door to a curtained alcove dad made up as a closet for the family.  It was that darkness where there's a blue hue to everything, the only real light coming in from a window along the wall opposite the door.  And it was in this darkness I made out a figure in front of the closed front door.  Totally in black, which considering the hour of night and lack of any light, didn't seem out of place. The figure looked to be a female form, dressed in what looked like a robe and atop their head, a bundle that could be described as a turban, similar to a woman with her hair wrapped up in a towel.  So my mind immediately assumed it was mom coming in from having showered in the main house.  
I watched as she walked from the front door to the closet area, behind the curtain and then nothing.  Dad had set a pull-chain lightbulb and that was the only light available back there.  But the light never came on.  It felt like minutes that I kept waiting for the light to shine from the gaps in the curtain.  It may have only been seconds but it struck me as odd what mom was doing back there in the total darkness.  Finally, after what felt like forever, I started to call out to her. 
"Ma!"  nothing.
"Ama!"  silence.
"AMA!"  I called out again hoping to get some kind of response.  Still nothing.  What is she doing back there in the dark?!  I called out a couple more times before dad responded from their bedroom. 
"Que quieres, mijo?"  What do you want, son?
"Donde esta mi ama?"  Where's mom?
"Aqui dormida.  Que quieres?"  Right here sleeping, what do you want?

I don't even think I replied, I just pulled the covers over my head and forced myself to try and sleep.  But obviously I've never forgotten about that night.  

Naturally, anyone who will deny the existence of shadow people has likely never seen one.  Or if they have, they've attempted to rationalize away what they actually saw.  But even my young mind realized what I saw had no explanation.  There wasn't anything outside the window that could have created any sort of shadows that appeared to move, like a human would, tracking that distance in that space of time and actually pull the curtain back before going in.  

That also wasn't the last time I would encounter a shadow person.  But the next time wasn't in the middle of the night and I wasn't alone when I saw it.  

Baby Steps

 Welcome to my first foray into documenting both my own personal history with what one might consider the supernatural or paranormal.  I'm sure like many of you, there have been events, occurrences or activities that just don't have a clean, definitive explanation.  My life and those of my family, both immediate and extended, have been filled with unexplainable phenomena.  What this blog is intended to do is both catalog and dissect some of those events. 
Also, I'll be charting my own personal progress into a more detailed approach to exploring what's out there.  I know even using the phrase, "scientific method" rubs some people the wrong way because "There's no proof ghosts exist!"  That's true, you can't publish papers or have anything peer-reviewed because tracking these, for lack of a better word, entities, has been a crapshoot at best. 
And at this point, I'm going to clarify that the majority of my topics are going to be about the supernatural.  I will not be actively discussing UFO's or alien life, unless something drops out of the sky on the news tomorrow.  I also will not be going over cryptids because of the sheer number of them and how they're predominantly location based.  

As for how the site got its name; "I would have gotten away with it, too!  If it weren't for you meddling kids!"  Many of us grew up watching the Scooby-Doo Mysteries and for all the run-ins they had with ghosts and the supernatural, they all came down to Old Man Withers chasing kids away from his run-down amusement park.  There weren't any ghosts to speak of.  So, in that spirit, (HA, see what I did there?)  I'll be as discerning and discriminatory as possible when I do come across some claims.  I can think of a handful of YouTube channels dedicated to the mysterious universe and how laughable their claims can get when their proof is a 2-second blurry video clip without any background information that shows a door swinging open.  ~oooohhhh...~  

Please bear in mind that these are my first steps into cataloging these events so I might be all over the place at times.  And with that, let's see what's out there!