This is a continuation of THIS POST. You’ll want to check it out and then come back here to finish this true life ghost story.
Where were we? Oh yeah, my new nighttime routine with Isabella:
- Put Isabella to bed
- Wake at 3am to the repeated throaty call of “MommyDaddyMommyDaddyMommyDaddyMommyDaddy”
- Walk to the third stair and have Isabella snap her head up a little as soon as your foot touches it. You realize it is very cold at the third stair just as Isabella starts to sing-chant the same three sentences over and over in a deeper voice while you try to get her to bed.
- Go back to bed confused and a little traumatized, wondering how to stop this recurring nightmare scene from happening. What is she dreaming? How do I stop it?
Josh was starting to miss sleeping through the night and we were a little annoyed. (We were both so sleep-deprived, everything was annoying). Repeatedly, we tried to get Isabella to describe her nightmare so we could reassure her and have it stop. The problem was that Isabella thought she had slept peacefully through the night.
Instead, we installed extra nightlights, got a glow-worm that sings, rearranged her room so there were no scary shadows- everything. Nothing helped.
It was getting freaky at night when I would go to check on her. I told Josh that everything is different about her at night- her voice, the way she stands, the words she knows- and that I couldn’t do it all the time anymore. We started to take turns but it freaked Josh out, too, and he isn’t easily spooked.
We still didn’t believe in ghosts. At all. We started to research night terrors vs. nightmares and how to treat them.
One night, I asked Isabella to put on her pajamas and she yelled at me to come up there. “The boy” was bothering her and she didn’t want to get dressed until he was out of there. As she talked, she tracked him with her eyes until he left. Okay, so now I’m wondering if my kid needs behavioural therapy ‘cuz this imaginary friend thing has gone too far.
Then “the big freaky thing” (as I call it) happened that changed everything.
One hot summer day, I was downstairs with the kids to avoid the heat, breastfeeding Hunter. (Oh yeah, somewhere
in this crazy time we had a baby and I was up doing night feedings, too, so I was basically a zombie with frayed nerves by that point). Isabella was on the floor, playing with her toys, which for her means arranging them and rearranging them in different patterns and assigning them different roles. “Pony is the mom and she sits here. Gorilla is the dad and he sits here. Now Pony is a kid so she goes here instead”….you get the idea. She decided that she needed another stuffed animal to be a baby and asked if she could go upstairs. I said it was fine but come right back down.
Now, to understand the next part, you have to understand the layout of this townhouse. It’s what is called a “fourth-floor walk-up”, which just means there is a TON of stairs. Every floor is divided by 6-10 stairs and a landing or room. So if you are going from the basement to the top floor, there are four flights of stairs, two landings, a room and a hallway.
Isabella climbed all the stairs and went to find a stuffie. I finished feeding Hunter and laid him safely in his playpen to nap and was just wondering what was taking Isabella so long. That’s when I heard a door slam and Isabella scream. My first thought was that Isabella had slammed her hand in the door. I have never run up stairs so fast- I bet I was up there in under 5 seconds.
When I opened the door, I was shocked that she wasn’t behind it with her hand pinched. Instead, she was across the room, facing AWAY from me and sitting in crisscross applesauce formation. Now, at 3 years old, it took her FOREVER to get into crisscross applesauce. She would pull one leg in, only to straighten the other leg- it could take her five minutes. On top of that, she had several stuffed animals cradled in her lap. She couldn’t have been the one to slam the door. As I walked in, she turned around with tears streaming down her face and sobbed,
“Mommy! WHY DID YOU DO THAT! It scared me!!”
I asked what I had done and she said that I had slammed the door behind her back and yelled “BOO” at her.
Oh. My. God.
Right?
I reassured her that I hadn’t, that it was probably just kids yelling outside and the wind blowing the door closed. I checked outside for wind. Not a breeze. I checked the windows, but I already knew they were all closed. Earlier, I had closed them to keep the heat out and not even the curtains were open in the whole top floor.
I was beginning to think we had a ghost. Josh still wasn’t convinced.
I think he started to really get it when he saw Isabella follow “the boy” with her eyes as she talked at night and when he would try to get her back to bed as she repeated the same three sentences over again, louder each time. I really wish I had written those sentences down. Now that I know what I do, I bet that poor ghost boy was just trying to tell us his story.
Isabella was now 4 years old and this had been going on…oh, since the beginning of time, it felt like.
Finally, at wits end, I did a genius thing. At Josh’s high-school reunion in Nelson, BC, I overheard a former classmate talking about crystals and thought he would be open to a ghost story. He was! I told him everything and he gave me tips on cleansing my house. Burning sage seemed the easiest option, but I still thought of it as “woo-woo” nonsense
and didn’t know where to get any.
Josh and I went home, I added the knowledgeable friend to Facebook, since he lived in B.C. and we are in Alberta, and all of us pondered options. Unbeknownst to us, as we pondered, the high-school friend was talking to his buddy about options. Meanwhile, I started looking up places that might sell sage in Calgary, feeling a bit weird about it.
Suddenly, the nightmares stopped. It was a Tuesday night when he visited us for the last time, if I can remember correctly. On Friday, I noticed we had slept through the night the last two nights! Shortly afterward, the friend messaged me on FB and casually asked if Isabella had seen “the boy” or had any nightmares recently. I said I was just about to message him that it had stopped but didn’t want to jinx it! He then probed as to exactly when it had stopped and for me to ask Isabella to make sure of the date.
Now, I still feel crazy saying this, but here is what happened.
The friend had gotten together with his buddy and they had held a seance in BC. They had never been to my house and one of them had never been to Calgary. All the knowledge that they had was that I lived in a townhouse complex on the NW side of the city. Taking a map, they honed in on a general area and did seance stuff. Apparently they found a townhouse with a little boy ghost that fit Isabella’s description and asked him to leave. He indicated he was “just playing” with her and was sad to go, but left out of the upstairs bathroom window. I know!!
Our friends didn’t tell us before they did it, because they wanted to make sure it had really worked. Instead, they told us afterward so we could be sure. The weirdest thing is that the friends in B.C. described the upper floor of my townhouse to perfection but had never been there! I didn’t even have pictures of those areas on our social media. I was so amazed..and shocked…and maybe a bit freaked out. But it was worth it- we didn’t have a problem after that!
Three weeks later, we heard Isabella calling for us in the middle of the night. I was immediately on my guard. I looked at the clock and it was 1 am, not 3 am. Her voice didn’t sound throaty or deep, it was its usual chirpy, bird-song self, and she said a very normal, “Mommy are you up?” Both of those promising things! Phew! I went up the stairs into a very normal temperature. Phew, again! It turned out that we forgot to turn on her nightlight. I have never been so relieved.
We haven’t been haunted since.
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