Volume 3: Ghost Stories from Texas (Joe Kwon's True Ghost Stories from Around the World) (33 page)

The Lying Ouija Board

San Antonio, Texas

When my oldest daughter was fifteen and we were stationed on a base in Sembach Germany, I had the weirdest dream. I dreamt of us moving back to the U.S. into a dark, creepy looking house. As the dream progressed I saw different things. I saw myself trying to clean the house and crying because no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it clean. Then I saw a strange plaid jacket hanging on the coat tree in the foyer that had those old fashioned mirror tiles on the wall that reflected whoever came to the front door. The next part was the worst, with someone breaking in. I could hear them rummaging around in the other rooms and I was hiding in my bathroom. Suddenly they were trying to cut through the wall with a chainsaw. These people wanted to kill us. I knew it in my heart, but didn't know why. I realized the jacket I had seen earlier was my husband's and that it being there on the coat tree meant he was gone on military duty somewhere. He always left it there when he was gone.

So in the dream I finally knew that I was alone in the house, the kids were at a bunking party at the youth center on base. As the intruders were sawing through the wall I managed to get out a sliding window and jumped onto a rooftop made up of tar and gravel. I jumped onto the pecan tree next to the roof and fell from its branches to the ground. Then I started running from the yard, and as I got to the corner of the front yard I saw the intruders coming after me. They ran under the low hanging limbs of a weeping willow tree.

From all that happened in this dream, I knew it was a premonition dream. I've had premonition dreams my whole life, and I'm 55 years old.

I told my teenage daughter about it and we both agreed that we would recognize the house in my dream and make sure we didn't move into it. But we had to return to the States early due to my son having a mental illness called schizophrenia, that required him to be in a children's psychiatric hospital.

We stayed on base in guest housing for over a month and then moved into a really nice house, nothing like the dream house (or should I say nightmare?). We had applied to buy the house but it failed the VA inspection so we couldn't get a loan. We were really in dire need of a new place to live since the owner gave us 30 days to move and we had to let prospective buyers in all the time. I was working nights and it was getting irritating to have to wake up, get dressed, and show the house, or answer the phone and talk to the realtor and arrange appointments. Try 30 days of strangers in and out at odd hours and you'd be in a rush to get out, too.
A friend of mine had a friend who worked in rentals at Century 21 and she took us to see a lot of places. However, the nice ones were too expensive or too far from the base. We finally got a decent place and by this time that dream was the furthest thing from my mind.

Regardless, this house started to make itself known. First I saw the coat on the coat tree exactly like the dream, and my husband was off in Turkey. So I took down the coat tree and boxed it up with yard sale stuff. Next I noticed how dark the dining room and den were with dark brown paneling, so I got some wallpaper to hang to lighten it up.

Then our cook stove was full of grease from previous renters cooking on the griddle in the center and just letting the grease run into the rest of the stove as the drip pan was missing. So I tried and tried to get it clean, even dismantling it and soaking the parts in the bathtub. The main problem wasn't so much the grease, but every time I turned it on bugs came running out. I guess they lived in it because of the grease buildup. I cried and cried and finally got my oldest daughter's boyfriend to take the whole stove outside into the back yard. When he came in he mentioned there were a lot of pecans on the tree in the back yard. I hadn't known there was one back there.

So many clues we missed. Then my daughter and her friends started messing around with an Ouija board. She came into my bedroom one night and crouched down by the side of my bed and with tears in her eyes said she had some bad news for me. When I asked her what it was she said that my youngest brother Billy came through on the Ouija board and said he had died of a drug overdose.

Billy had been missing a few years, but he was over 21 and could go where he wanted and wasn't legally obligated to inform anyone. Well I got angry and told her to stay away from that board because it would lie like that to get a toehold in her life. I told her I would prove it to her by praying to the Good Lord about it to find out the truth. That next night Billy called from Florida where he had spent the last year in jail and wanted to know if he could come stay with us. He had a ride with a trucker that would bring him all the way to San Antonio.

I proved that Ouija wrong, but I still did not recognize the danger we would soon all face.

Almost every thing I saw in that dream was true about that house. Even one night when someone climbed in through the window of the room my brother slept in. The guy said he was looking for my teenaged daughter Becky. Which that used to be her room until we found out she was sneaking out. So we changed her to a room with burglar bars. The only room that did, actually. Evidently she had been sneaking people in as well.

The last straw for that house came when the first time we all left the house together to go out to eat. At the time we had 8 people in the house.

Someone tried to bust into the back door. It had a hasp and padlock on it and it was just our luck to come home and see someone running from the corner of the yard past the low hung branches of the weeping willow tree.
Note: we also found out that the previous owner had died in a car accident just down the road. It happened a few days after he finished building the den with fireplace and wet
bar onto the back of the house and the roof was made of tar and gravel.

We used to hear a sound like someone walking around on that roof and sounds like somebody doing carpentry work. That was before the next door lady told me about the owner dying.

I talked out loud to his spirit one time and told him as long as I lived there I would fix things. After that the odd sounds went away. I think he was the reason that whoever tried to break the back door open was not able to, because the screws were almost out of the door jamb and it seemed like one good yank would have pulled that door right open.

I just say thank you to whoever was watching over us until we could get a new house.

Angry Motel Ghost

Temple, Texas

My father-in-law passed away just days after Thanksgiving in 1992. When he was diagnosed with cancer, the doctors said he had less than a year. It came as no surprise, as both my husband's parents were heavy smokers. He smoked big old cigars, and she smoked at least two packs of cigarettes a day.

We live in Texas, but most of our relatives live in Arkansas, so I told my mother-in-law that if she needed her son, to call and I would make sure he got leave from his Air Force job to go help her. Plus I wanted him to spend those last days with his father. I knew what it was like to lose someone and not be able to say goodbye. My uncle that raised me died when we were stationed in Germany and it was hard on me. I didn't want my husband to go through that.

My mother-in-law called and told me her husband had fallen from the hospital bed they set up in their den. She wasn't able to get him back in the bed and she couldn't get ahold of anybody, so he had to lay there for hours. I called my husband at work and told him he needed to go help his parents, now. He got the next flight out.

I drove down for the funeral, spent a few days with family, and then he and I drove back home to Texas.

After the funeral my mother-in-law loaded our station wagon with things she wanted my husband to have that belonged to his Dad. They were also clearing out her house so she could move closer to her daughter. We had one of those big old Brady Bunch station wagons, the kind with wood grain on the sides. Or as my husband called it, an "Uncle Buck-mobile" after the John Candy movie.

We made good time going back home until we got just past Waco. Then the station wagon started acting up. The engine started backfiring and fire would shoot out from the tailpipe . It was like the motor had hiccups. Well, about an hour into this the engine backfired one last time and shut down. We had been driving through freezing rain for the last two hours, and when the motor quit it didn't take long for the heat to dissipate.

By chance, some guys in a wrecker came by and worked on the engine. They charged us a hundred dollars, the last of our cash. We got going again and not more than 10 miles down the road and BANG!! The engine backfired again. Fire billowed out the tailpipe, and we pulled off the road once again. My husband got out, raised the hood, fiddled with something, and then hollered for me to turn the key on. This time a little flame shot up and scared the wits out of me. Finally it started again. But 10 minutes later, Kablooey! Another half an hour's wait.

We continued to just drive in these ten-minute increments. We finally saw a LaQuinta motel and slowly limped the wagon into the parking lot. My husband rented us a room and I was relieved to be out of the freezing cold. By now the roads were getting near impassible. Ice was everywhere.

The room had two twin beds, but I didn't care, I just climbed under the covers and conked out. I was sawing some serious zzz's, when suddenly I couldn't breathe. I thought I was having a panic attack, which I get from time to time. Considering the circumstances I wouldn't have been surprised to have one now. I tried to get up to get a glass of water from the bathroom. I was thinking that maybe the heater was on too high, as causing me to choke.

Just as I started to sit up, I felt myself slammed back onto the mattress. Again I tried to rise and couldn't move. Only now I could feel something holding my wrists above my head.

I was struggling just to get a breath of air because whatever was happening, it was putting pressure on my chest. It felt like something was pressed over my nose and mouth. This was no panic attack! Something was on me. Then I felt whatever it was trying to actually enter my body.

That was the most awful feeling I have ever had in my life. It was like this force wanted to take over my body and push me out. And there wasn't enough room for two people in one body. I've had a spinal myleogram and when they inject die into your spine it starts feeling like a pressure like when your ears pop in changing elevation, but ten times worse. This felt a hundred times stronger. I kept pushing against whatever was holding me down and finally I gritted my teeth, and pushed up with all my might and coughed out, "Get off of me!"

My husband was snoring away in the other bed and I hoarsely called his name. I was still short of breath, so I scrambled off the bed I was on and climbed in on the other side of his bed. My husband woke up and held me until I calmed down. Then he got up to get me a glass of water from the bathroom and when he turned on the light I could see a swirling black mass above the bed I had been in. I yelled at my husband to look and he saw the same thing. My heart is pounding right now as I am recalling that night.

The mass got thicker and darker and started moving towards my husband. I was terrified. I didn't know what this thing was, but I could feel emotions in the air.

Thick sadness, grief, anger, revenge, all those emotions were settling onto me and I suddenly realized that someone had been strangled to death on that bed. I could feel that the presence was male and more than any other emotion, anger was the strongest. This presence was extremely angry. It wanted whoever else came into it's aura to know it was mad.

I shouted to my husband to come back to the bed and leave the lights on. The presence seemed to be confined to that second bed. Right now I was ready to go back to the station wagon, freezing cold or not. I wanted so much to be home. My husband pulled aside the heavy curtains on the window and thankfully it was now daylight.

We went to the lobby and ate breakfast and we managed to get a tow truck to take our vehicle and us home,

I have no idea what happened in that motel room but I do know this, I will never stay there again.