I’m not sure what kind of genes my parents passed on to my brother and sister and I, but we are all freaks in our own way.
Dougie has seen ghosts on several occasions. His first haunting was at our parent’s house in East York. The previous owner of the house had killed himself in the garage, running his car until he choked to death on the carbon monoxide. I remember washing the windows of the garage with my dad before we moved in.
One evening in the middle of the night, when Dougie was about nine years old, he heard a car running, looked outside his bedroom window and saw the lights of a car running inside the garage and my father’s car parked in the driveway behind it.
Dougie’s second haunting was at my grandmother’s house. He was sleeping on the couch in her living room and when he woke up, he realized something was pressing on his chest and he was unable to move. This went on for at least five minutes and he was terrified. A gust of wind suddenly rolled through the room, caused the front door to open and then slam shut. It wasn’t the first or the last time something similar happened to him at her house.
Another time, Dougie was staying a friend’s place during the summer and woke up in the middle of the night to find the walls had turned to ice and there were turn of the century soldiers walking around in the bedroom. When he relayed this story to his friend’s parents the next night at dinner, they told him their oldest son had experienced this exact same thing a few years earlier.
My sister Connie had a strange dream about her next door neighbour one night about 13 years ago. He was reaching out to her, desperately trying to tell her something. She woke up wondering what that dream was all about but she found out a few hours later, when his wife called, crying, telling her that her husband had died that evening.
As for me, I’m a Slider (no, I can’t slide into other dimensions like on the TV show) which means I am able to affect electricity with my brainwaves. Light bulbs sometimes pop when I walk into a room and street lights commonly go out when I walk underneath them, especially if I’m angry. I’m usually not shutting down lights on purpose, although occasionally, by sheer force of will, I can look up at a street light and *poof* – the light goes boom. It’s like I unleash a sort of lightening rod from my brain that emanates to the socket.
I wondered if fluorescent & halogen bulbs would be immune to my ability, as they are supposed to last a lot longer than incandescent light bulbs, but it seems they are not. Since I’ve moved in to my new house, I am constantly replacing light bulbs.
