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October 31, 2007
New Spirits Added to Paducah’s Guest List of Ghosts
Stella, you ain't all that. Any ghost can dump salt and pepper shakers on tables at C.C. Cohen in the middle of the night. But how about ones who leave a trail of cigarette smoke and crank up Zydeco music in the middle of the night? Finish painting their own portraits? Or cause smoke detectors to beep - just once?Whether you're a believer or not, you have to admit that these four firsthand experiences are awfully hard to explain.
Written by a West End resident who wishes to remain anonymous - she doesn't want folks to think she's wacky. Believe us, she's not!
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| Photographic proof: Helen pays a visit! |
Right after I bought my house in 2004, the son and daughter of the previous owner came to visit me. They live out of state now, but wanted to meet the person who would have their childhood home. Their mother, Helen, had passed away just a few weeks before I purchased the home.
After talking for a few moments and realizing how excited I was about my new home, the daughter teared up and exclaimed, "Our mother has hand-picked you! She just wanted to be there, in her house, and smoke her cigarettes. And she has chosen you to be the one to have her home."
I found that very sweet but, also, a wee bit disconcerting. I had already pondered how easy it had been for me to acquire the house. I just walked in and said "I'll take it" and it happened seamlessly.
So, time passed, and my excitement at acquiring my cute little cottage soon became the stark reality of the task upon me. It was antiquated and, to my surprise, saturated with nicotine. That alone made the remodeling job 10 times harder.
The nicotine had to be dissolved with Awesome cleaner, scrubbed, rinsed, primed and then painted, sealing in any remnant of its past odor. It was a lot of work but paid off beautifully by my little cottage becoming my very own.
I mentioned to the daughter, however, that I would occasionally be taken aback by what smelled like someone smoking in the house. This was nothing like stale nicotine, which at this point had been removed and painted over. This odor was just what you would smell if you walked into a room where someone had just been smoking.
I would smell it only briefly, it would burn my nose and throat and then just as quickly, dissipate! Upon hearing this, the daughter didn't miss a beat! "It's mother! If anyone could return to their home as a ghost, it would be mother because it was the only place she ever wanted to be. And if she could return, what would she do? She would smoke."
All of this made me smile but did not make me feel threatened in the least. If she were paying me ghostly visits, at least they were friendly visits.
It happened again and again…and others smelled it too. I remember going home for lunch one day and unlocking the front door, stepping inside and being blasted with fresh cigarette smoke! In seconds it was gone, and I even went back outside and stepped in again to test it. Nothing…Helen's visit was over for the day.
A little later, the daughter returned to Paducah, and took her own daughter to visit Helen's grave. Helen's young granddaughter suddenly exclaimed she "saw" her grandmother sitting on a park bench "in a gold pantsuit."
The mother was alarmed that the young girl would be so adamant about having seen her deceased grandmother. She soothed her, but maybe she did not convince her entirely?
They then decided to come by my house to see what I had done to the yard and so forth. They took a photograph of the front of the house and headed home. When they developed the photos, they were quite surprised to see an apparition in my driveway…dressed in a gold pantsuit!
The daughter sent the photo to me and sure enough there was "someone" in my driveway superimposed over the front fender of my friend's pickup truck - someone in a gold pantsuit.
There is no explaining that photograph. It has been examined by countless individuals, some even with a magnifying glass, and no one can explain what they see. I have even run it through various software programs to get other views of it. Even with special effects applied, it always prints out as something there in front of the truck.
I still have "smoke visits." And I have some other unexplainable things from time to time. My stereo will occasionally come on full-blast in the middle of the night. Is that just a power surge or is it a ghost surge? Helen seems to like my Zydeco music.
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| Julie Shaw wasn't alone at Aphrodite Gallery. |
Time For You To Go
When I moved here at the end of 2004, I would be up in my bedroom and I would feel this ghost. She was female. I could see the tail end of her dress or nightgown as she'd go by me. It happened about a dozen times. She was always on my left.
She didn't scare me, but finally I said out loud, "It's time for you to leave. You need to go into the light. You don't belong here. It isn't your home anymore." And I haven't seen her since.
Awhile later, Margie Cissell, who lives a few streets over, asked me if I knew about the ghost in my house. (Editor's note: More on this below!)
I had a psychic visit me awhile back and she told me that she couldn't spend the night in my house because too many ghosts in LowerTown were pulling at her. So I had to take her out to a hotel near the mall.
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| A case of the vapors on Fifth Street! |
Where There's a Smoke Detector, There's a Ghost
My brother lived in Julie Shaw's house long before she bought it. It used to have four apartments. His downstairs neighbor was Mary Duncan Deihl.
She had a trust fund but would always borrow $5 from my brother before her money would come at the end of the month. She had very long fingernails. She'd put them all together and peck on his door seven times, so he always knew her knock.
Around 1985, she moved into the Irvin Cobb Hotel and soon died. My brother was getting ready for work one day and he heard that same knock. Is scared the bejesus out of him when he opened the door and no one was there.
She then started opening the refrigerator and getting into his freezer. One time he was napping and he could feel her coming too close to him. He yelled at her and could hear her take off.
He moved out, and then the house was auctioned off to the Chumlers. They inherited Mary. Later my brother asked them if they'd experienced any weird activity. They said that someone was getting into their refrigerator.
And then Julie bought the house and encountered her, too. I think Mary's gone now.
We have a ghost of our own. We built our house two years ago and installed a smoke detector. The first month we moved in, the alarm would let out one piercing squeal - just one. Usually, when smoke alarms go off, they keep sounding until you get up on a ladder and poke the reset button. But ours would just go off once and stop.
It happened about 100 times - sometimes two or three times in a day, sometimes in the middle of the night. So we had the whole system replaced, but it kept happening, even with the new system.
Finally I sat straight up in bed and said, "Now knock it off. No more during the middle of the night, and you can stay."
The alarm continues to squeal - just once - a few times a week. But the ghost is keeping our agreement. The alarm doesn't go off at night anymore, and I am not calling Ghost Busters. -I was not. But I don't know how else to explain it. Ghosts are vapors, so I think the smoke alarm was catching the vapors.
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| Multiple unsolved mysteries make the Fitzpatricks believers. |
Fitzpatrick House Home to Mischievous Visitors
My husband bought this house in 1957, and I've lived here during the entire 42 years of our marriage. There are at least two ghosts here. I've heard them talking once, but my husband has heard them several times. They're usually laughing. They're very happy ghosts.
Not long after I moved in, my husband was painting a portrait of a girl who had been killed in an accident. He was painting it from a photograph. He was almost finished, but having trouble with a particular area, so he took a break to walk the dog.
When he came back, he asked if I had been working on the portrait. I told him I had not been near the portrait. Then he said, "Well, it's finished." He was convinced someone had finished it while he was gone. I don't know - maybe it was the girl herself.
That was the first of numerous mysterious incidents, but I'll just tell you about a few.
About 12 years ago, I had a very bright yellow sheet of paper printed with the schedule for the Fox Theatre. I kept it on top of all the other papers in my top desk drawer because people often called to find out what was playing, and I liked to have it handy so I could tell them. One night someone called, and I went to get it from the drawer, but it wasn't there. I took everything out - I even took the drawer out - but it was gone. I told the ghosts that I wanted that paper back. The next morning, I opened the drawer and there it was, right on top as usual.
About five years ago, a client came in to have her hair done and she set her large gold earrings on the counter. When she went to pick them up, one was gone. We looked all over for that missing earring. I searched throughout the room even though, if the earring had just dropped from the counter, it couldn't have gone very far. I even looked under the grill cover of the cold air return. It just wasn't anywhere to be found.
About two years ago I was painting that grill cover, so I removed it to clean inside the duct, and there was that earring, plain as day. The grill slots were only slightly larger than the earring, so it had to have been carefully dropped in there. It just couldn't have haphazardly rolled in.
The ghosts seem to have a real affinity for white. One time I had just put a Kleenex down on the bedside table. It lifted up in the air on its own. It went up, curved backward and disappeared. I looked all over the floor, under the bed - it was nowhere. It was like an invisible hand plucked it up. I know it sounds impossible, but it's true.
The ghosts always come around when I'm making changes to the house. One time I was making draperies for our living room windows and was using white thread, plus red thread for certain areas. When I exchanged one color for the other, I placed the other spool of thread on the table to the right of the sewing machine. Every time I'd reach for the white thread, it would be gone. I lost five spools of thread before I hid my last spool upstairs. I finally said to the ghosts: "If you take all of it, I'm going to have to go someplace and buy more because I am intending to finish this." I guess they got the message because they stopped taking the white thread. The red thread wasn't taken.
Our refrigerator went out last December, so I bought one of the only two models I could find that fit back into the same space. It was available in gray or black, neither of which I liked, but I had to choose something, so I decided on black. Three days later, there were white jagged cracks in the freezer door. The store replaced it. Three days later, it happened again. I didn't know if the ghosts were showing their disapproval of the black color or if the black paint could possibly be flawed, so I reluctantly asked to have it replaced with the gray model.
As soon as I saw it, I knew I couldn't live with the gray color, and I asked the store to pick it up. However, just in case the damage was a prank by the ghosts, I decided to hide the gray color by covering it completely with brown packing paper and taping it with masking tape. I left it covered until it could be returned to the store.
In desperation for a refrigerator and armed with a tape measure, I searched every store that sells refrigerators. Finally, in the last store on my list, I found a slightly different version of the original black one. The floor model was the only one in stock and, because it would be two months before another could be shipped, they offered to sell me the floor model.
A manager, two employees and I checked it over very carefully and found no damage, so I bought it. They decided to protect it with shrink wrap until delivery could be arranged. When the delivery people brought it to my house and removed the shrink wrap, the finish was covered with impressions from the shrink wrap.
The manager said that had never happened before. They let me use the damaged one while waiting for a new one to be shipped.
Of course, I can't be sure whether those refrigerators had faulty paint or if the damage had been done by the ghosts. After four months of dealing with the problem, I decided to take out some "insurance" just in case the ghosts were to blame.
As soon as the delivery people left with the last and final refrigerator, I said to the ghosts out loud: "You can't touch this one. Leave it alone. I cannot keep changing refrigerators over and over again!"
About 10 months have passed, and the last and final refrigerator still looks perfect.
I haven't had any significant visits from the ghosts since. Of course, I haven't made any changes to the house since then. However, I have four projects that I'm about to start, so I guess they'll be back.
