Archived: The Ghost Life by Tiffany Wohlgemuth

I still remember the burnt candles in the crawl space beneath our home. Fear shook me, and I loved it. On that day, my interest in the paranormal was ignited. The year was 2000, and we lived in a beautiful five-bedroom, hardwood floor, hundred-year old home. My family and I were ecstatic until things started to go amiss. My brothers’ flashlight Bubba Bear would flicker in the dead hours of the morning and started to say things I haven’t heard it say before. “Is anybody awake?” it jeered. The television would freeze and play weird channels or sometimes just static.  An infestation of creepy crawlers emerged, despite us keeping our home spotless. My siblings and I reluctantly discovered the crawl space. I remember lifting the hatch and peering inside a hollow hole in the ground. There were burnt candles on the dingy counter top. On the wall, the outlines of knives that once resided there haunt me to this day. This room had a negative energy to it.

After moving in, my family and I were so terrified we fled that home. In the years to follow, I had countless paranormal experiences. Many of them involving a Ouija Board and EVP recorder. In a small-town cemetery, my comrades and I patiently waited in the dark for any sign of afterlife. We caught an EVP recording that softly spoke, “mommy?” in a little boy’s voice. From that moment, we knew we had made contact with something otherworldly. This was simply a game to my friends, however, in my opinion it made me think deeply and question what the afterlife contained. What happens after death? Do we float off into the sky or do we reside beside the living for eternity?

I believe the ghosts of my past, present and future haunt me. Many ghosts of the past remind me of regret, growth, and change. The ghost in the present haunts me with a desire of the future and past, keeping me from living in the moment. A ghost of the future is tantalizing and ferocious giving me ambition, desire, and fear of mortality. I’ve regretted things from my past, forgotten to seize the moment, and longed for the future. I believe in seizing the moments that make a person feel alive. That haunted house of my childhood was a broken home, and my parents fought a lot. I was alone every day as a teenager and dealt with the absence of my parents and their neglect with a fondness for the paranormal. Some ghosts will haunt you forever, this I believe.