A true story
One family's experience in the state's oldest community.
Our family moved to a small eastern Washington community in 1989 where I took a job with the City. One of my responsibilities was the overall management of the cemetery. It dated back to 1854 and had roughly 6,300 burials. Early in 1990 I hired a sextant to make an effort to correlate all of the cemetery records through an on site review and then we would compare the records at City Hall to see where it would come out. During the preceding years, I and the office staff had data based all of the city's cemetery records.By the spring of 1993, I had a very strong knowledge of this cemetery and its various sections.
At the time, we were living a few blocks away in one of the community's older homes. My wife and children professed a great amount of anxiety and fear over what they perceived as an incessant amount of strange occurrences in this house, none of which they were able to explain. I frankly was very skeptical, although we had lived in homes before that had a lot of paranormal activity. I decided to check out this one. A number of the City staff had lived in town all of their lives. Upon inquiry to one of my clerks, I was informed that at one time there had been a third floor on this house that had burned during the war. There had been a fatality. Consensus seemed to indicate that the casualty was a young man. This entity was very mischievous. Apparently, he enjoyed turning on water faucets, opening washing machine doors, turning on or off lights, slamming doors etc. I was skeptical of these claims.
One Saturday night I got up to visit the bathroom. The only light that was on in the house was in the hallway. When I exited the bathroom, I was quite surprised to see that the only lights that were not on were in the bedrooms. The front room, dining, kitchen, and laundry room lights were all turned on. I decided that the family was right, we need to move.
The very next morning, I was on a walk through the cemetery when I noticed a young woman in a faded dress standing in front of a headstone in one of the older parts of the cemetery. The dress looked like an early 20th century wedding dress. I turned and walked over to where she was standing. She appeared to be in her twenties. She was slim, long brown hair and of medium height. She was looking down at the headstone with a very sad look on her face. I quickly surveyed the cemetery. There were not any vehicles or other people in the cemetery. From where I stood, I could see all of the grounds. She vanished as I approached. I noticed a man's name on the headstone. I wondered what could be happening since she probably wasn't buried here. The name on the front was that of a man, Slocumb. But, since the stone was four sided I decided to check the back of it. It was the only Jewish headstone in the cemetery. It was unique in shape and I had remembered it from previous trips to the cemetery.
The name Emma Moore was on the rear of the stone. She died at age 26 in the early part of that century. A daughter, maybe. A check of the City's burial records confirmed that they were both buried in this grave. Sad.... Never more Emma Moore.
We soon found another house and moved ASAP. The children were becoming paranoid and my wife was unhappy with the current arrangements. Peace at last, I thought. Wrong. It wasn't long before the children began complaining about noises in the basement and footfalls on the stairs coming up from the basement. One afternoon, several months later, I was home preparing lunch when I heard footfalls coming up the stairs. They were located directly behind the kitchen and these footfalls were quite loud. I sprang to my feet and ran to the door at the top of the stairs. This will end right now, I thought. As I opened the door, A wispy figure of a middle aged woman scooted by me and into the kitchen where she soon vanished. That afternoon I checked with the long time residents again about the prior occupants of that house. The building inspector informed me that a woman fitting the description had lived there about twenty years earlier. She died in a plane crash a few miles west of town. The call went out again, we're moving. We subsequently found a fairly new home that had no complications.
I then received a phone call from a local car mechanic that had moved into our prior residence. He stated that he had heard about our experiences in this house and that he and his family had recently moved into this house and was having some strange experiences. What kind I asked? He stated that he had placed their three month old child into a play pen in a side bedroom. When he entered the room some twenty minutes later to check on the baby, he found it crawling around on the floor outside of the pen. How could that happen I asked ? I don't know he responded. What should I do he asked ? MOVE I said. Move Now....Submitted by Don Avery
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