As a scientist, I find it difficult to believe in such things as ghosts and poltergeists and such, despite the fact that I now make a living off them. My wife, on the other hand, is an avid believer in such. To date, I have had no truly empirical evidence that such a phenomenon actually exists. However, as a scientist, I must still remain open to the possibility of the existence of things we don’t yet understand or cannot, at this juncture in time, scientifically confirm, refute, or quantify. All this brings me to the story of my own personal experience with the unexplainable.
Many years ago, before my wife and I were married, I took a job in Northern New Jersey. Not wanting to live in Jersey, I bought a house in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. My future wife and I loved it. She, having a job in the Philadelphia area, would come up and spend the weekends with me. To my knowledge, nothing bad ever happened in that house – no history of violence or death. Yet, apparently, we had an interloper. My wife, fiancée at the time, believed the poltergeist that plagued us was female and jealous of her. The following describes some of the strange and unexplained things we experienced in the five years I lived there.
The house had electric baseboard heating. Needless to say, that got expensive during the cold mountain winters. I liked things warm. My wife liked things budgeted. I tried to comply as best I could. But every now and then I’d get that look as she turned the thermostat down. I was okay with this. Anyway, one Friday night, my band was playing at a local pub. Just before we left the house my wife turned the thermostat down. Not more than three seconds after that, a chocolate bar she had just set on the kitchen table to be enjoyed when we got home went flying off the table and across the room. To this day my wife believes the “ghost woman” was angry with her for turning my heat down. When we got home from the gig, at about 2:30 A.M., the heat was set all the way up to 80 degrees.
There were also several instances where I came home from work and found all my wife’s drawers open and her clothes thrown about the room. Now, don’t for a minute think that some pervert had broken in and rummaged through her things. At the time I had a 111lb, well trained (as anyone who had ever met Major will agree) German shepherd. No one could have gotten in and out of that house in one piece. Impossible! On top of that, one of these incidents occurred while we were both in the house. We were downstairs when we heard a large Crash! When we got upstairs, my wife’s entire drawer had been pulled out and thrown on the floor, her clothes all over the place.
And I’ve saved the weirdest – at least to me – for last. It was a weekend when my wife had other obligations and couldn’t make it up. Naturally, I was a little bummed. I sat on the bed trying to figure out how I was going to spend two empty days. A few seconds later I felt the mattress depress beside me, as if someone had sat down there. It was the oddest sensation. I did not see any depression in the mattress, nor at any time throughout the five years, I lived there see any apparitions. I can only report the strange phenomenon I …we … experienced.
To this day I have no explanation for any of the things that happened. Jealous female ghost? Poltergeist? Shared hallucinations (I don’t think so)? All I can say is that, explainable or not, I lived through them, so I have to acknowledge their occurrences.
I’ll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions about what happened in the house in the Poconos.
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