Your
True Tales
December 2005 – Page
22
Big
Mike's Ghost
by Jennifer Cox
I never thought much about ghosts until I saw one for myself. And I would have shrugged off the “apparition” I saw as just a figment of my imagination if I hadn’t experienced supplementary events to go along with it. All in all, I would say that the weird experiences that happened to me while I lived in with my ex-boyfriend in 1995 made a believer out of me. A believer in exactly "what" I still cannot say.
When my boyfriend Michael was just 15 years old he witnessed his father’s sudden death. Around two o’clock in the morning one night, Michael was awakened to his mother screaming from her bedroom. His dad, Big Mike, apparently was suffering a massive diabetic seizure. Michael tried to give him CPR but to no avail. Big Mike was only 37 years old.
In the years after his death, there were many stories told of how great a guy Big Mike was. The biggest acclaim to his name was his panache for pranks and practical jokes. So much so, that when Michael’s mom called out-of-state family and friends to tell of Big Mike’s death, unbelievably everyone thought it was just another one of his classic pranks to get everyone together.
The events that subsequently took place in the house after his death chimed right in with his teasing personality. When Michael and I first got together, his mom told me how the Christmas tree lights, which were operated by remote control, would suddenly turn on and off by themselves. She would laugh and tell Big Mike to “stop it,” and sure enough, they would stay lit. Michael said one time he felt his dad sit next to him on his waterbed and nudge him to wake up. “Wake up, Michael. Wake up.” After that he slept on his mother’s floor for over a year.
One weird occurrence involved Michael’s friend Tim who was washing his car in the driveway at Michael’s house. As he was rinsing the soap off of one of the hubcaps, he was startled to see a reflection of Big Mike standing behind him looking over his shoulder. Tim never came back to Michael’s house after that. I found these tales to be interesting, but I didn’t think much beyond that. The house wasn’t creepy at all to me and it was reasonable to think that the stories, while true, probably had a normal explanation. Then stuff started happening to me.
I was getting ready for work around 10 in the morning one day, and I always liked to listen to the TV news while putting on makeup in the bathroom. As I was alone in the house getting ready, I noticed that the TV sound went out. I figured it was just a station break, or a lag in the broadcast between commercials. But it just kept going on and on. I went out to check the TV and surprisingly it had been turned off. “Okay,” I thought, “that’s weird,” and I went about my day. Sometime later I was sitting on the couch watching the same TV. The remote control was sitting next to me untouched. All of a sudden, a TV just started changing channels on its own. Again I thought it seemed odd, but I thought perhaps interference from other remote controls could do that. But even if they can, why did it only happen to me when I was alone in the house?
One occurrence happened to Michael and me together. We were sitting on the couch watching TV when we heard a piercing crash. We shot up off the couch thinking for sure that a whole shelf of dishes collapsed. We looked and looked for the cause and found nothing. Then when we looked closely on the entertainment center we found the culprit. It wasn’t a pile of broken dishes like the sound indicated but a delicate 4-inch ceramic figurine of a duck. One of his little ceramic webbed feet apparently shot out from underneath and left this figurine standing, seemingly against gravity, on one foot. It looked so weird and unnatural how it was positioned. Michael and I looked at one another, shrugged and said comically, “Big Mike.”
But the one event that got me thinking that there may be something more to these coincidences was the time I saw “the figure.” I had to get up for school very early, around 6 a.m. I was very used to this schedule so I was generally not too groggy. One morning I woke up and opened the bedroom door to go to the bathroom. Something immediately caught my eye. Down the hall, in the doorway of the room where Big Mike died, I saw a shimmering golden figure. It was about six feet tall with a head, shoulders and a torso that faded into the ground. I remember I wanted to be certain I was seeing what I was seeing so I looked intently at it. Then I got spooked because I was afraid it might start moving toward me. I ducked into the bathroom and shrugged it off while I brushed my teeth. After a few minutes I got up enough nerve to look down the hallway again to see if it was still there. It wasn’t. The doorway was now pitch black. At that moment I realized that whatever “it” was could not be attributed to light coming from anywhere else. It was still dark outside and there were no night-lights in the house. At that moment I admit I got an eerie cold chill from the thought of what I maight have just seen.
I could accept skeptics’ theory that an isolated apparition sighting is just a “waking dream.” I could accept that electrical items might sometimes just short circuit. I could accept an isolated mysterious loud crash as just an anomaly. But what about when all these events happen together? Especially in a house where the house has a history of the typical “spirit-haunting” tragic death? I have read so many stories that mirror mine. And so many have the same types of phenomena. If sightings are just “waking dreams” then why don’t people who have them once have them throughout their lives anywhere and everywhere they go? To this day I have not had another unexplained experience, nor have I seen another “ghost” since leaving Big Mike’s house. If it were just my imagination, one would think I would still see ghosts from time to time. Unless, of course, it wasn't my imagination at all.
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