Trying to Communicate

by Kevin Epperson
(Centerville, Ohio)

This story is actually several stories in one. It starts out with my best friend from grade school. When I first met him, he had told me stories about how his mom had seen figures and heard voices in the back bedroom of their house. He said that supposedly an older woman had died in the back bedroom of this house before they moved in. The next house that they moved into had several odd things happen in it.

One night my friend was sleeping in the basement, and he woke to what he thought was a black bird or something flapping its wings against the ceiling. He glanced at the clock when he didn’t see it anymore and it was 3am. The next morning his mom told him that his aunt had died that morning at 3am.

The next story I actually experienced myself. My friend and I were in his basement one night, and everyone was gone except for us. We were watching television when all of a sudden we heard a loud thud on the wood floor above us and it sounded like a bowling ball had fallen on the floor and rolled all the way down the hall, stopped, and then rolled back. We thought his brother had come home and was just messing with us, but we ran upstairs to find that nobody was home. We checked the closet where their bowling balls were, and none had been moved.

So about twenty years later, I went to South Bass Island on Lake Erie in Ohio. I went there with several friends to play in an annual volleyball tournament. We had rented a cabin at a state park there(not sure which park). As we were first driving to the cabin, we started up this hill on the road that led to the cabin. As we started going up the hill, I started feeling a burning sensation on the back of my neck as if the sun was shining down on the back of my neck. The sun was not out on this day. As we got closer to the top of the hill my neck felt hotter and hotter. When we got to the top of the hill there was a stop sign. We stopped at the sign and across the road was an old cemetery. I really didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in hindsight the burning neck sensation across from the cemetery may have some meaning. We turned down several roads, and finally got to our cabin. We got all settled into our cabin, and we all gathered in the main living area of the cabin. We started talking and somehow got on the subject of ghosts and ghost stories. I started telling the story about my friend’s houses and encounters that we had that I wrote about earlier in this story. I started telling the story about the sound of a rolling bowling ball and suddenly the television that was sitting in the cabin came on all by itself. We all looked at each other. One of my friends reached over and turned it off and said “that was weird”. I continued my story and the television came on again. There was no picture on the television. It just had a white static picture. This time my friend unplugged the TV and he said “if it comes back on this time, we are leaving”. It didn’t come back on and I finished my story. Nothing else happened that night, but I got up the next morning to discover that the cemetery that I had seen when we were driving to the cabin was backed right up to our cabin. Nothing else happened the two days that we were there. When we went to leave we cleaned the cabin up and packed all of our stuff into the car. My friend threw me the key to the cabin to lock it because you had to use a key from the outside to lock the door. I stuck the key into the lock and turned it to lock it. When I tried to pull the key back out, it wouldn’t come out. I turned the key every way I could and it wouldn’t come out. I yelled to my friend to tell him I couldn’t get the key to come out. He came up to the door grabbed the key and it came right out. I stood there puzzled. I grabbed the key back from him and stuck it back in the lock. I tried to pull it out again and it wouldn’t come out. Once again, I tried everything I could to try to pull the key out, and it wouldn’t come out. My friend grabbed the key and pulled it right out again. I am not sure what or who it was that was trying to communicate with me, but I believe it was something paranormal.