I Believe You Believe What You Believed You Saw....

Several weeks ago I was all alone in my house one night (the kids were sleeping over at their dad's) and dreamed I was being caged in with spirits at my childhood home in Vietnam, except I thought it was my marital home which had been converted to a rental property for a few years now... until I realized with tremendous relief upon waking that the house I saw in my dream didn't have the configuration of my former home.

If you thought the above sentence was terribly convoluted and made absolutely no sense, you might just be about as confused as I was when I shook myself free from my nightmare and realized it was just a dream, although the imprint it left on my senses was so vivid and frightful, it scared me into a stupor deeper than the original dream itself.  "Oh my God, I can't ever move back into that house because it's haunted!" was what first came to my mind.  Then it dawned on me very slowly, as I mentally retraced the incidents in my dream... "Wait a minute, my house on Pieper Lane didn't have a balcony that ran the entire length of the upper floor; it didn't have a walk-in shower smack in the middle of the upstairs quarters; and the floor plan included double stairways leading up from both the kitchen and the hallway, which my childhood home in Vietnam didn't."  At that point I went limp with relief even though I was still half frozen in my bed by fear.

And if you thought I was being melodramatic and a nutcase, imagine yourself as a child living in a country with a war being ravaged years on end where people were dying every day, inside hospital grounds near a morgue (my father was the province's medical chief-of-staff), with a grandmother who told ghost tales as bedtime stories (and she was really good at it, too!), and you would understand how I got to be the way I am.

I could never tell you why, as fearful as I was of ghosts, my favorite shared pastime with my siblings as children was taking turns pretending that we were, or being pursued by, evil spirits.  We became almost possessed with this thrilling game as we chased one another nightly down the balcony of our childhood home until we dropped from exhaustion and our hearts nearly stopped with fright.  Most of the times, whoever happened to be the "pretend ghost" lurking in the dark ready to pounce on their victims would be scared stiff that a real ghost might just be out there waiting to get them.  It certainly was a strange way for kids to amuse themselves.

I don't know if I can wholeheartedly say I believe ghosts exist, and don't even want to contemplate the possibilities, but I did tell my ex (just in case), when he was still my husband, if one of us happened to go first, the one left behind didn't need a visit or a sign.  If you died before me, please don't come back in any shape or form, even if you had good intentions and desperately wanted to communicate with me for whatever reason.  I'm better off not knowing you're there.  You might scare me out of my mind if I realize we were sharing the same space!

My sister Midol saw a ghost at her apartment once and it took her a long time to recover from the incident.  She's still a little miffed about her boyfriend's comment upon hearing her story, which went something like this:  "I didn't say I don't believe you.  I believe you believe what you believed you saw was a ghost."  What the heck!  She knew what she saw.  And I happened to agree with Midol that what she saw was most likely a ghost, even though I didn't see it myself and hoped to God it never paid me a visit.

What happened was my sister has lived in her Seattle apartment by herself for over 10 years without witnessing any paranormal activities until that evening when she realized with some bother that she needed to get her laundry done and it was already getting late. As Midol recounted to me, she was lifting her laundry basket ready to step into another room in order to leave the apartment when her heart suddenly jolted in her chest and she felt a powerful physical force pass through in front of her.  It made Midol stop in her track and pull back instinctively, although at that split second she had only felt its presence and not registered anything visually.  Then her eyes naturally riveted toward the opening that led out to her small kitchen and she saw a woman standing there.  A stranger in her apartment!  When and how did she get in?  Midol looked again and the woman was gone.  It was as though she had never appeared in the first place.

Midol was stunned and frightened.  She looked everywhere for physical evidence of the woman she saw, but could find nothing.  She couldn't explain away the apparition because she was wide awake and fully conscious when this happened.

It wasn't the first time a member of my family had seen a ghost.  My sister Terra and my mom both saw the same ghost on a trip to Florida to attend my other sister Peni's wedding.  The night before the ceromony was supposed to be held, they arrived at the home of Peni's future in-laws and were shown to the guest room.  That night, Terra awoke around 3 AM and saw a Caucasian man in the room with his back towards her.  Her first thought was that he was an intruder, because everyone in the house at the time happened to be Vietnamese, but she looked again and the man had disappeared.  Terra was so scared, she desperately wanted to poke at my mom to see if she was awake, but didn't dare stir.  In the morning, during breakfast with their hosts, my mom told everyone she saw a man in her room last night, one that fit Terra's description exactly.  Peni's in-laws admitted that their house had been haunted ever since the former owner's brother died in an accident while remodeling it after a wooden beam fell on top of him.  They said they and an elderly aunt in the family would sight his spirit most often as they walked the grounds of their estate in the evening.

Several days after my nightmare, I thought I'd finally encountered a ghost!  It was 10 in the morning and I was alone in the family room working on my computer.  I'd heard indeterminate shuffles from upstairs which I attributed to the aftershocks of a passing train (my house was in close proximity of the train station).  Then my master bedroom door started squeaking loudly and I became more than a bit alarmed, but tried to reason that it could've been the wind from the windows that someone forgot to close.  I continued entering data on my computer with half a mind, thinking if I heard anything more definitive, it would be best just to bolt out the front door quickly.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to inch toward the hallway yet when the unmistakable sound of footsteps treading down my staircase became ominously apparent.  I briefly considered escaping through the back door, but realized with panic I hadn't called the builder to request repair on my French doors that had been stuck for a while because of excessive humidity from the recent rainstorms.

So I braced myself for what seemed certain in coming – either an intruder to whom I'd beg to spare my life, or a ghost!  I wasn't sure which would be the more scary possibility.

Just then my daughter Andrea breezed into the room.  "Hi Mom!" she said.  The sight of her was never more welcomed!  "Can you take me to school?  I don't have IVC classes today so we should leave for Beckman in a few minutes?"  I had totally forgotten that the quarter has ended for Andrea's college courses, so I still had a kid home at 10 AM.  Thank God for short-term memory loss!

Andrea in her Halloween costume