The Sallie House Haunting: A True Story (29 page)

One day he called me at work shortly after 11:00 a.m. He had been trying to sleep when he saw something odd near the foot of the bed. This was the second time he had seen it. Weeks earlier, he had experienced a similar situation that had started out as non-threatening but ended traumatically.

Eventually, I became aware of the terror that Tony was experiencing and the toll it took on him. He became distant and very distracted as he struggled to understand, accept, and deal with the situation. Although I did not pick up on this for quite a while, I soon realized that he was not himself for days afterward, which was excruciating to watch. At one point, we had agreed that I would be more open to believing him and understanding what he was going through if he let me know when these experiences were happening.

I also thought being close to the activity might actually deflect some of it, since it seemed very little of the events were witnessed by more than one person. In fact, when any of us attempted to get involved in the activity, it often stopped dead in its tracks. So the second time Tony saw the telltale signs of a spirit apparition forming near the end of the bed and heard the familiar female voice whispering, he called me at work.

Whispering to me as if it were a big secret, he described how the many voices seemed louder than before. As we continued talking, he described what the dust-like particles floating and forming in front of the window and near the foot of the bed looked like. After three or four minutes of telling what he was seeing and hearing, the activity seemed to come to a halt. We hung up and I finished work. When I arrived home shortly after 5:00 p.m., Tony reported that no more activity had occurred after our conversation.

Tony always got the brunt of the extreme activity and we thought it interesting that the activity stopped when we spoke on the phone. It gave us hope that we could thwart the malicious spirit by standing against it together.

Later that evening as he got ready to for work, he seemed very tired. When I asked him about it, he said that he had not gotten any sleep that morning. He was afraid that something might happen while he slept. He was even afraid to close his eyes while he washed his hair. He felt like an easy target, a sitting duck with an ambush waiting to happen. This fear was always on his mind so he was often distressed before going to sleep.

Hand prints

Tony’s fears about things happening while he slept was not unfounded. Several months before the
Sightings
group began investigating our experiences, Tony was attacked in a different way. Originally, he had thought it was a dream. The only odd thing about this dream was that he never saw a face and just assumed it was me.

At one point, however, he told me that incidents were happening more frequently and while he was awake. As I listened to his description of the events, I was shocked. He told me about the pressure he would feel on his upper thighs and the feeling of cold hands moving up his legs.

A few nights after he told me about this, I felt him violently shaking me out of a sound sleep to tell me it was happening again. As he lay next to me, he could feel pressure on his lower body. He could not see anything there, but he also could not move his legs. Realizing that something seemed to be on top of him, I sat up and forcefully yelled at whoever or whatever it was to get off of him. I know I yelled loudly several times and later wondered what the neighbors thought. Within a minute or so, Tony reported that the pressure was finally gone.

Upon inspection of his legs and thighs, we found red marks shaped like handprints on his upper and inner thighs. The red marks then morphed into bruises. I wondered how this happened and doubted that something paranormal had been responsible for such an act. I could tell from the location of the handprints that Tony could not have made them himself. They pointed upward in such a way that it would have been impossible for him to fake. We came to realize that he was being attacked while he slept. In the morning, the bruising was completely gone.

I wondered how many times this had occurred, leaving no telltale signs of physical harm or damage to validate his experiences. It was horrifying to think that someone was messing with him and he that hadn’t realized it. I wondered how long it would have continued if he had not been honest with me.

After I realized the nature of some of his experiences, I finally began to understand that Tony was going through more than I had been willing to admit, and perhaps more than he had actually let on. I knew I needed to be more supportive and not only listen to him more, but actually hear him. A united front against whatever was affecting him seemed to be our only defense. Of course, it was easier to decide that than to actually accomplish it.

Possession

As Tony and I bonded as a force against whatever was in the house, it stepped up its efforts and began working from within Tony. Sometimes I didn’t recognize it for what it was. For instance, I generally attributed his changing moods to a lack of sleep. I didn’t consider that there could be evil spirits in our own home, and I was not aware of all the signs I needed to look for.

I didn’t recognize the first sign as it was happening. Several weeks later, I realized that specific event mimicked a possession. At the time, I dismissed it completely and didn’t think about it until after we had moved out of the house. Now I wonder if some influence had been clouding my thoughts.

This event took place in the living room on a weekend afternoon. We had spent a leisurely morning playing with Taylor. He was now upstairs taking a nap while we relaxed on the couch. I was sitting at the far end of the couch while Tony stretched out lengthwise, his feet within a few feet of my hand. I don’t remember what we were watching, though the television was on.

Tony had fallen asleep as he often did on the weekends after his tormented attempts to sleep during the week. It was probably easier to fall asleep when someone else was in the house.

Without warning, Tony sat up. He then stared me straight in the face and, in a strange voice, said, “He’s mine!” Confused by this behavior, I looked at him dumbfounded and waited for him to say something more. He remained motionless for several moments, but said nothing. Then, he simply lay back down and remained quiet for quite some time.

I tried to figure out exactly what was so weird about what had just happened. Certainly the manner in which he sat up and the sound of his voice struck me as odd. While his voice did sound like him, it was cold and disconnected, even mechanical.

Since I thought he was just talking in his sleep, I wondered what he might have been dreaming about. Who was he talking about? Perhaps he had been dreaming about someone wanting to take Taylor, and his reply was, “he’s mine!” This explanation suited me just fine. Perhaps because I didn’t want to think about other implications, perhaps I wasn’t being allowed to think about them.

Weeks later, I thought how strange this was and how strange he sounded. The way he moved and spoke just didn’t seem like him at all. What if it wasn’t Tony who spoke to me? Was the word “him” actually referring to Tony and not the baby? What if something in him was challenging me and claiming Tony for itself? Was it the same woman Tony had seen so many times? Had she been trying to gain his affection? Had she been the one attacking him in the bedroom when he slept?

I remember asking Tony his opinion. He simply said, “I don’t know what to think.” We never discussed it again, which makes me wonder why I didn’t pursue it further. Maybe I didn’t have enough information and had put it on the back burner until something else triggered thoughts that made me reconsider it? Had I been influenced to ignore what my gut was telling me? All I know is that it wasn’t like me not to explore this theory further. It didn’t come back to me until years later.

Dead Cat

I now believe the event was the beginning of the turbulent feelings Tony had toward me. As he later described it, he’d been having very angry and harmful feelings toward me on a daily basis. He described having hateful thoughts when he saw me. He remembers how hard he fought the desire to hurt me. To this day he wonders what stopped him from actually doing so.

One day, he called me at work and told me he had trouble sleeping that morning. After some general conversation, he mentioned how uneasy he felt and he suggested it might be time for us to move because he felt that someone was going to get badly hurt. “And I think it’s going to be you,” he said. He described that I was the focus of anger and rage coming from the spirits in the house. We hung up the phone and I was distracted for the rest of the day, trying to make sense of his words.

It just did not make sense. I had not been the one physically attacked and I was not having trouble sleeping. I didn’t hear the voices or fear the dark. Tony seemed to be the focus of the spirits in our home, not me. Once again, I did not heed the warning and I chalked it up to his growing paranoia and lack of sleep.

His feelings of aggression continued to grow. He became argumentative, short on patience, and his temper flared often. Unaware of its depth or origin, I blamed this on a lack of sleep, and the anger on our arguments each time
Sightings
came back to the house. I’m not even sure how aware Tony was of what was going on, since he found himself confounded by his actions and thoughts.

One of these instances had to do with what I assume was a neighborhood cat. There had been two significant and horrifying experiences in the house concerning cats and these experiences were very different. One was the unfortunate incident with the cat in the dryer described in chapter 10. The second I didn’t find out about until we moved from the house.

Tony had gotten home just before I awoke. We both went about the morning as usual—I got ready and left for work while Tony tried to unwind before going to sleep. Years later, he described this day and he sat on the couch downstairs with terrible thoughts about me.

He remembers getting a bowl of cereal shortly after I left. As he turned to put the milk away, he saw a cat drinking out of the bowl. He did not recognize the cat and had no idea how it had gotten into the house. Seeing the cat drinking from his bowl completely infuriated him. He took a few steps closer, angrily pulled the French knife from the countertop holder next to the stove, and stabbed the cat.

He remembers being very proud of the act. Knowing how much of a cat lover I was, he was excited about leaving it there for me to see when I returned home. Without a care in the world, he then went into the living room and sat on the couch, his feelings turning more hateful and wretched. “I’ll just stab her, too,” he thought.

His thoughts continued to reinforce his mood: “I can’t stand the way she looks at me. It’s her fault we’re here. I can’t stand her nagging. I can’t stand looking at her.” Eventually, he made detailed plans to kill me upon my return. “If she walks by me, I’m just gonna slit her throat.” He remained in this state all morning with the dead cat in the kitchen.

At some point in the early afternoon, he went up stairs to dress for the day and eventually left the house to pick up Taylor, who was staying with Tony’s parents. He returned a few hours later feeling more like himself. He cleaned up the dead cat so I wouldn’t see it and thought, “Oh, God. What was I thinking?”

Over the railing

Two days after he killed the cat and planned my demise, there was another attempt to do bodily harm to me. Tony reports the following:

“I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, just going about my day. I had just gotten out of bed and was going to head downstairs. As I approached the doorway, I was suddenly struck from behind with great force. It felt like someone had run up behind me and shoved me as hard as they could. My feet left the floor, I was airborne, and flung towards the upstairs railing, which was about three feet in front of me. My upper thighs hit the railing and my knees, legs, and feet inadvertently knocked out three of the rungs below it. It scared the crap out of me and to this day, I don’t know what stopped me from going over the top of the railing and going headfirst down the stairs.

“Startled and nervous, I made my way down the stairs, holding the railing as I did so. When I reached the living room, I sat on the couch, afraid to move, for the rest of the day. I flinched at every sound I heard.

“I called Debra at work, hoping the comfort of a familiar voice would relieve the feeling of being alone. Although I didn’t tell her my most recent experience, I did tell her that I had a feeling that I just couldn’t shake, a feeling that someone was going to get hurt, and that I thought it was going to be her. Then I told her that we really needed to get out of the house. Her reply was that we would talk about it when she got home, and I feared that my words, once again, fell on deaf ears.

“I remained in the living room until she arrived home later that day. I told her about the threatening event I had experienced that morning. I realized that this time she had taken my concern seriously. Perhaps there was something in my voice when I called her, or perhaps it was something I said. Whatever it was, it motivated her.”

I remember Tony’s phone call and that I was distracted by it. I knew that something was very wrong. Tony had never been so adamant about moving. I knew there was more to this than just a call out of the blue to suggest a move. I couldn’t wait to talk to him and find out what had led to the desire to move.

When he told me about the morning’s experience, I was immediately concerned. If there was that much force or energy acting against us, what else would Tony or anyone else suffer? I wondered why he was pushed with such force, and what stopped him from falling over the railing. I couldn’t help but think it must have been some sort of angelic protection or intervention that saved him from a tragic accident. If this was truly the case, I didn’t think we should take it for granted.