Army Post in Texas

We live on an Army Post in Texas - Fort Hood. And I never really believed in the paranormal ... until we moved into post housing! What follows is my true account, but I don't expect you to believe it... I never would have!

We moved into "post housing" around August of 1996, at Ft. Hood, TX. The house is nice, but nothing special, a two-story duplex. Downstairs is all tile floors, but the upstairs is the original wood the house was built with back in 1957. Everything that has happened in the house concerns the upstairs, nothing has ever come downstairs. That sounds strange to say, but it's definitely how it feels!

I talked to someone once, a person who is knowledgeable about the paranormal, who stated that this may be due to the tile floors downstairs... the wooden, natural floors upstairs would be more receptive to paranormal activity than the man-made asphalt tile of the lower portion of the house. Before living here, I would have thought a statement like that was pretty nuts really... but it "feels" right. The upstairs is definitely active in some way that the downstairs has never been. Let me tell you some of what we have experienced here, and then I'll move on into the specifics of when I started to keep a journal of all this weirdness!

The first thing was a night when we had another couple over to play cards. We were sitting at the dining room/kitchen table, playing Spades as usual. I had faintly heard crying from time to time, but dismissed it as what I refer to as my "Mommy hearing". It's an instinctive thing, I think - ever since our first child was born, I have at times heard a baby crying when there was none... like an instinctive cue to check on the baby. I don't really hear it probably, just a subconscious reminder to check on my kids! Hey, don't laugh, lots of Moms experience this, it's really an instinctive thing I think. Anyway, I had been hearing it on and off, but ignoring it! We had two children at the time, and they were both older, ages 3 1/2 and 2 so if they were crying, believe me I'd hear them a bit louder! Then eventually the other woman here noticed it as well and commented that we must be picking up someone else's baby in our monitor - we had a baby monitor sitting on top of the bookshelves. I was a bit startled! I had thought it was just my imagination, but now someone else heard it as well! The guys also said they heard it... and they all agreed that it was another baby in the neighborhood. Comments were made about other people's garage door openers opening your garage door, picking up other conversations on a cordless phone on occasion, etc. and we were all joking about it. My husband said, "Honey, just turn the monitor off. We'll hear the kids if they wake up." I had just gone white, and was staring at the monitor when he said that. I was looking at the little red indicator light on the monitor. You know, the one that lights up when the monitor is turned on to let you know that it's working. The one that was not lit up. But the monitor still seemed to be broadcasting the sound of that baby crying, not too loudly, but still plainly coming from the monitor. When I mentioned that it wasn't on... the light isn't lit up... my husband simply said, "The light's just broken, no big deal." And we all agreed that that must be it. I went over to the bookshelves to turn it off, but it was not turned on. As I followed the cord to the wall, I noticed that the AC adapter cord was not plugged into the wall. Everyone commented that it was batteries. I was the only one that knew there were no batteries in the unit - so I removed the back and showed them that there were no batteries in it. It grew very quiet as we all contemplated what this could possibly mean... I had never come this close to the unexplainable before in my life. How could this be possible?

I went upstairs to check on the girls, and to check the other - transmitting - end of the baby monitor upstairs. We were all determined to explain this rationally... even though the transmitting end would have no effect on the impossibility of the receiving end operating while turned off and with no power source! Still we were determined to figure this out. When I got upstairs, the kids were sound asleep, and the button on the monitor was in the "OFF" position, but for some reason I needed to physically verify that by touching the switch... as if my eyes couldn't be trusted - I had to make every effort to verify that it was indeed turned off. Just before I touched the monitor, my hand passed into a "cold spot" in the air. It was like a patch of almost arctic air in that it instantly made my whole body break out in goose bumps! I ran downstairs instantly, terrified as I've never been in my life... and realized that in my panic, I had left my children upstairs in their room with - and I couldn't finish that sentence, even in my mind! Everyone reassured me that the kids were fine... it was freaky, but harmless!

We laughed about it a lot!

The monitor only did that one other time that I can recall, and it was much shorter in duration.

Another thing that happens is footsteps on the stairs. I'll be sitting in the living room, watching TV or reading, when I hear someone coming down the stairs. Judging by the sound, it sounds to be a child - the steps are uncertain somehow, and fairly light - definitely not the steps of an adult. The first time I heard it was when my kids were upstairs asleep at nap time. I thought it was my oldest, Emily, coming down when she was supposed to be taking a nap. At first, I almost just yelled up, "Emily! Get in bed, young lady!" or something to that effect... but instead decided to surprise her and sneak up on her. Then I'd put her back in bed myself, rather than just make her get back in bed herself. I waited, crouching on the lower two stairs (there are ten wooden stairs, then a landing that turns a corner, then two more steps to the bottom), waiting to scare her! The footsteps stopped, so I turned the corner - but the "Boo!" froze in my throat. The stairs were empty. There was no one there. It would have been impossible, in any length of time, for a 3 1/2 year old child to sneak back up the stairs silently, let alone in the 1 1/2 seconds it took me to turn that corner. I just froze there, unbelieving of my own eyes. Then I quietly went up the stairs, only to find both girls sound asleep in their beds. Emily was never on those steps. But someone was, I distinctly heard footsteps, there was no mistaking it - I was right there! The sounds weren't muffled or "unearthly" sounding... it sounded like a kid clomping down the stairs.

When I was pregnant with our youngest child, I was on a lot of bed rest, an inpatient numerous times, etc... a very rough pregnancy. At one point, my sister-in-law came to stay for a little while, just to help out. We hadn't mentioned anything about the house to anyone, we felt kind of silly I guess - I've always been interested in the paranormal, but I don't think I ever took any of it seriously. Eventually, we started talking about this and that, Michael was at work. The kids were asleep upstairs, and we were just passing the time - getting to know each other better and talking about whatever came to mind. She was talking about something of a paranormal nature, something we were watching on television perhaps reminded her of something a friend said happened to them once - that kind of vague, "it happened to someone else" kind of discussion. Interesting, but very safe! For some reason, I started to tell her about the baby monitor story, and the footsteps. She said, "Like that, perhaps?!" as a joke - it sounded as though Emily had woken up and was coming down to see us. Anna was younger, and her footsteps would have been less steady. It was definitely Emily. We were laughing, and I almost felt silly... the whole thing seemed ridiculous until the footsteps rounded the corner. But not the child. We both distinctly heard the footsteps continue past the landing and onto the first of the bottom two steps. Then they stopped. Except that there was no one there. It was the middle of the day, bright and sunny in the living room, and although we had to turn our heads to see the stairs, we both had an unobstructed view of the stairway landing. We both stared at that landing, not believing our eyes, for what seemed like five minutes, but was more likely only around ten seconds. I turned to my sister-in-law and said, "Yea, about like that, but it's the first time he turned the corner." We both laughed, but it was a nervous laughter. I had goose bumps all over my body.

Why "he"?, I'm not sure. I had been thinking of it as a little boy of around three or four years old, judging from the weight it sounded to have on the stairs, and the level of coordination... not perfectly coordinated like an adult would be, but much more coordinated than say a toddler would be. The gender is a mystery, but it "felt right". It felt as if it was a little boy, but I can't explain why.

Later that week, I was kept overnight in the hospital, and my sister-in-law was watching the kids. She later told me that while I was gone, she had put the kids down for their nap. She was sitting on the couch reading, when she heard someone upstairs, walking around the kids room, moving toys around. Concerned that Emily would wake Anna up, she tiptoed up the stairs to bring her down to play where she wouldn't disturb her sleeping sister. When she got upstairs, both girls were fast asleep in their beds. The sounds had stopped when she got about halfway up the stairs, but there is no way one of them could've fallen back asleep by the time she got up there. It wasn't one of the girls that had made the noises. She ran back downstairs, panicked. Stood in the middle of the living room, then said to herself, "Oh, my god! I can't leave the girls up there!", so she went back up the stairs. But it's silly to wake them, so she sat in their room for about thirty minutes, reading, and then felt better about it and went back downstairs. I'm not so sure she was terribly unhappy to be sleeping downstairs on the couch. Things don't seem to happen down there!

My cousin is the one who is knowledgeable about the paranormal, she said that the asphalt tile floors downstairs would be a poor conductor for spiritual energy. The man-made flooring is "dead" and can't absorb psychic energy, but the wood upstairs is "living" in a way, having come from a natural, living source. When I told my cousin about the events here, she immediately asked me , "Have you figured out a way to use it yet?". Let me just say that the very idea gives me the willies and makes me want to change the subject! I've decided that I enjoy hearing about the paranormal, watching film footage on "Sightings" and similar programs, but experiencing it personally is a different story!! I'm a chicken!! This whole thing creeps me out!

One day my daughter Emily was playing with me quietly on the living room floor, her sisters were asleep, when she said, " Mommy, I don't like that little boy." I casually said, "What little boy, honey?" but I had chills. Emmy said, "The one that comes in my room sometimes." I wanted to find out more, but since she's only just turned four, I had to be very careful that I wasn't leading in any way with my questions. I wanted to know what was happening, without influencing her in any way. She said, "Well, he shouldn't be in my room without his Mommy. He's little, like me. He should stay with his Mommy and Daddy or he could get hurt." I said, "Yea, he shouldn't be by himself. Is that why you don't want him in your room?", hoping that was it, that nothing else happened to frighten her... could this thing hurt her in any way? "His Mommy doesn't even know he's here. It's dangers to go wifout your Mommy!" I agreed, and told her that maybe she should tell him that next time she saw him. I asked what he does in her room and she said, "He just looks at me... he's not for real." "What do you mean, sweetie? I asked. She screwed her face up in concentration, then said, "Well, I can see him but he's not there for real. He's not pretend though." I asked her something else, maybe to remind him that he shouldn't be there without his Mom or something... I don't remember, but she had moved on and was insisting that I play Barbies some more. She was no longer interested in talking about the little boy. I've never heard a better description of a ghost, have you? He's just watching, he's not there for real, but he's not pretend either - she's not just imagining it, he's there but she knew that something wasn't quite right about it.

I asked her about the little boy again some time later, but she said she doesn't see him anymore. "I told him I don't want him in my room. It's my room. And he's not wif his Mommy, he could get hurt. I don't want him in there." I said, did he say anything to you? Is he going to stay away now? She said, "No, he can't talk. He just looks sad at me. But he's not there now." She hasn't spoken of him except for those two instances.

My husband was sleeping upstairs once, when he heard footsteps start at the bottom of the stairs. He had actually just been lying in bed, not quite ready to get up, but not sleeping either. He thought the footsteps belonged to me, coming to drag him out of bed! He lay there, waiting to scare me, with a pillow on top of his head, as he often sleeps. The footsteps continued into the room and around to the far side of the bed. Still he lay there; ready to scare me when I least expected it. He then felt weight on the bed, as if I had climbed onto the bed and was crawling over to him to wake him up. He said that he distinctly felt someone kneeling above him, of course he assumed it was me! I was coming up to get him out of bed, but instead he was going to scare me half to death! This was going to be hysterical! Just then he threw the pillow away from his face and yelled ready to crack up when I screamed in fright. The problem was that he was alone in the room. Completely and utterly alone, although he could still feel the weight on the bed, and actually see the indentation on the bed where there should have been hands and knees to match. He yelled again, got up and sprinted downstairs, where he grabbed a towel, looked at me but didn't say a word, then went back upstairs and stayed in the shower for some length of time. I went up to see what was going on, but he wouldn't say. Later he said he was just too freaked out to talk about it at the time, and just needed to calm down a bit before he talked to me about it. The occasional footsteps on the stairs have continued uninterrupted.

Once a "Ring Around The Rosie" singing baby doll started singing on its own in the kids' room... and I couldn't make it stop. Although it was probably just a mechanical malfunction of some sort, it scared the hell out of me and I threw the doll out the back door! To go into the kids' room to see who is up and playing at midnight only to be confronted by a singing doll laying undisturbed in the middle of the floor is a bit much for me!! We could still hear it after I threw it outside, so Michael retrieved it and took the mechanical insides out of it. He could be right, it could've just broken... it could have nothing whatever to do with this house... but when have you seen a toy break so that it turns itself on and cannot be turned off? It can happen, but it freaked me out! I half expected it to keep singing after he took it apart!

That's about all the incidents I can remember... as if it's not enough, right?! Anyway, I decided to start keeping a journal of the strange goings-on at this house. To see how often things really happen here, and because I know that, for instance, more happens when Michael is in the field for the Army or now at his 2nd job - but that I often forget to even tell anyone about it. Later on, it just doesn't seem as real, as important, or as believable. You tend to blow it off and forget about it! Now I'm curious to see how much really goes on in this house... So here's where the journal entries start, and I'll try to log each incidence soon after they occur, or even during if I think about it! Let's just hope I don't freak myself out too much paying more attention to all of this! This journal should be interesting, if nothing else, and it'll be cool to have long after we've moved out!

I'd love to research the house to see who has lived here, any tragedies that happened here, etc... but since it's military housing, that information isn't as readily available as it would be if it was a private residence. Too bad... I'd like to find out who the little boy is.

Friday, March 20, 1988

The house has been really quiet the past month or so, I had almost forgotten that we had any activity here at all - until Wednesday night! Michael was out delivering pizzas, and I was home with the girls, when the house began to get unusually "loud". When I told Michael, he said, "They're doing some work next door, remember?" At 8:00 at night? Also, the noises were definitely coming from upstairs, not next door. It would get really quiet, the girls and I were watching TV cuddled up on the couch, then you would hear what sounded like a box being dropped down the stairs... bouncing around and stopping on the landing. Except that the only people in the house were on the couch and that when I went to look, there was nothing there. A couple of times, I heard breaking glass, muffled as if it were in our bedroom, but definitely too loud to be from next door. I was almost afraid to put the girls to bed... they stayed up until about 10:30 that night. But then by about 10:30pm, it was quiet up there, and I went to take a look around. All the lights were on upstairs, but I honestly don't know if I could've left them on earlier when I was cleaning and forgot to turn them off... it's not all that likely, but I can't say for certain that the lights were off earlier either, y'know? It was strange to go up and see all the lights on, and for some reason I was sure that it was done for the night. I turned off the lights except for the kids room and bathroom, and took them upstairs to bed. It felt very peaceful and calm, I had thought I'd be nervous and scared to go upstairs, but it was strangely calm, quiet, and I felt at peace, like nothing would hurt us there. Not like I had felt earlier at all.

I had forgotten about that part until I wrote it just now - probably the strangest part of it all - that I knew it was over for the night! And when I came back downstairs, the kids went to sleep without a peep... they're not used to being up past 8pm at the latest, so they were tired... but I didn't worry about it again. Normally I'd be a little nervous after so much activity earlier and them being alone upstairs. By the time Michael came home I had all but forgotten about it until I said something to him about it this morning. He said something about it being so quiet around her lately and I cracked up... "QUIET?! I don't think so!!!" He said, what happened? And I realized that I had forgotten to mention it, by the time he came home I wasn't even worried about it anymore! I'm going to start keeping a kind of "diary" of the house I think, just to jot down things when it happens, so I can see how often things happen here that I can't explain... now I'm thinking it might happen more often than I thought, y'know? It really amazes me that I almost forgot about this one - it was so loud for about 3 hours... it sounded like the Three Stooges Moving Company was crashing around up there some times!

The last time I wrote about the house was around three months ago. Since then the sounds have continued, and I will only relate the significant new occurrences - the sounds are pretty frequent and even I get bored with them!

One evening, Michael was at work and I was taking the girls up to bed. We have three, so it's somewhat of a parade! The older two were behind me, and I was carrying the baby. Just before the stairs begin, on the left hand wall as you go up, there hangs a picture of my father-in-law. It was taken during his tours in Viet Nam, and although it is a posed portrait there is a haunted quality in his eyes that is a little disturbing... it is a close up taken by a studio and it just really reminds you of what was going on over there at the time. As we approached the stairs, this portrait flew from left to right and struck the opposite wall, a distance of maybe three feet. It struck with suck force as to shatter the glass and bounce the photo in its frame back so that it hit the wall that it started on. The picture was not bumped. It did not fall off the wall. I watched as it struck the wall, my mouth hanging open. That was the first time that I actually even felt a threatening quality to the events occurring in this house. I had been afraid before, the sounds, etc.. can freak you out. But this time I felt actively threatened, it had a very violent quality to it. Somehow I sensed a very different entity than I ever had felt in the house before. Very strong, male, and threatening. I was as afraid as I had ever been in my life.

I quickly ushered the girls upstairs and put the safety gate up on the stairs so that I could clean up the glass... I seriously think that if Michael had witnessed it himself we would have stayed in a hotel that night! It was that creepy! It's not that I'm that stoic or anything, I just seem to deal with this pretty well. This house is very active - I think I'm getting used to it or something... but I was shaking for hours after this one.

A day or two after that, Emily started talking about the little boy in her room again. She said "Karick is really sad, Mommy." I asked who Karick was, and said "I don't know who that is... do you mean Erick?" Think that she had pronounced the name incorrectly and was talking about a neighborhood kid. She said, "NO- his name is KARICK, Mommy! The little black boy in my room!" This confused me, because Emily has never referred to anyone as black in her life. She is 4 1/2 and the little boy next door is "color brown" if she ever even mentions that his skin is a different color. I had no idea what she was talking about. But then she said, "Mommy, his clothes are all color black. Nuffin else, only black every day." OK, now I get it - she thinks it's weird that he never wears colorful clothes like she does. We talked about him for a bit, she only added that he still watches her play sometimes, but he is nice.

We all took a nap that afternoon, I laid down and fed the baby. What followed was very likely a dream, but it felt right, as if it were a message of some kind. But I acknowledge that it was likely a dream.

I fell asleep, and saw a little boy, all dressed in black. He was very sad looking, and was wearing a "shorts suit" that used to be popular in the fifties and sixties... a very dapper little man! In the dream I said "Karick?", and he nodded slowly. We just sort of stared at each other for a minute, and then he spoke, but as if I heard it in my head - his lips never moved. He said, "I mean them no harm. I will keep your girls safe, even the little one. I will protect them. I'm a big boy. I can keep them safe." "Safe from what?" I asked. "Him." was the reply. "I will not let him hurt the girls, they are my friends, I like them very much. I watch them play sometimes." And then I woke up, and ran in and checked on the girls. As I thought back about the picture that flew off of the wall, I felt that I had discovered who "HE" was already. The more I think about it, I'm convinced that our scared little Karick was an abused child who possibly died in this house - and I think that I've met his Dad. I don't like him much. I feel that Karick will indeed try to protect the girls if there is ever a need to do so... Emily said once that he makes her feel safe when she is scared. It's definitely the weirdest thing I've ever experienced, though, and I wish that it was a regular house, not post housing so that I could research and find out who is still in my house! But the military does not reveal that information, so I guess we'll just have to figure this out as we go along!

Mid-November, Emily has started to talk about the little boy in her room again, and I think it's scaring her more than the last time... but it's been a while so she's a little older - perhaps she just realizes a little more of what is going on. Enough to not understand what is happening, or who this little boy is, and why he looks so different than she does. And what happens when we can't understand something? We become afraid of it! I don't actually believe the boy is behaving differently or intimidating her in some way, trying to hurt her... just that she is reacting to it differently. She still describes it the same way, "He just looks at me." or ,"Why does he not talk, Mommy? Where is his Mommy?"

One night, the kids were really fussy and did not go to sleep until the wee hours of the morning, "I saw a bug!", etc... and finally Emily told me about being afraid of "the boy". I talked to her, and reassured her, and she seemed to be okay and tried to go back to sleep. Anna did not. She was crying, and saying, "I scared, Mommy! I want you sleep in MY bed!". After much cuddling and talking softly, I got her to quiet down and relax a bit... I was leaning over her, my head turned away from her, towards a dresser in their room, eyes closed. I opened my eyes, and there he was. A little boy, the same boy that I saw once in a dream, sitting on their dresser. Dressed exactly the same as in my dream. He was swinging his legs, in a fidgety little boy kind of way, but the odd thing was that his legs passed through the dresser. When they would normally impact the dresser, they simply went "into" the dresser without resistance. He was not exactly "solid", as if a person, he was more opaque, misty perhaps. I could see the wall behind him, although not clearly. He smiled sadly at me, but did not speak. I became depressed, mentally as well as physically somehow. I was furious, scared, upset.... I said aloud, "Look, kiddo, you are upsetting my girls. You are scaring them. I would appreciate it if you would leave them alone, they are little girls, they don't understand that you don't mean to scare them. Please leave my house, and do not come back. You are not welcome here." I felt like an idiot talking to someone who was not entirely there, and even seeing this apparition with my own eyes, part of me still did not want to believe. I turned my head and held Anna tighter, almost in tears. When I turned to look at the boy again, he was gone. I could see nothing out of the ordinary.

The depression that was brought on by the encounter lasted for a few hours, I found myself erupting into tears, sobbing at times, for no reason. It gradually subsided, and when my husband came home from work - around 3am - the depression was only a residue of what it had been, and having him home made me feel a lot safer and I could finally relax. We talked about what had been happening, the most disturbing for me has been the picture flying off of the wall... that felt physically threatening and although seeing the boy was shocking and scared me, I did not feel threatened really. For Michael, it was when something climbed on the bed with him... his exact words were, "I mean that was real. I felt it, I saw it." We still have a hard time accepting the things that have been going on here! We have seen, heard, even felt these things, but why is it so hard to believe? Because we don't want to sound like idiots? Crackpots? Lunatics? Certainly there are things that happen that we cannot explain. But intellectually, we have such a difficult time validating them!

So what happens now?

I have an older cousin, Joanne, who knows a lot about the spirit realm, and about communicating with them. She is the one who asked "Have you figured out how to use it yet?" I'd love for her to come visit me some day before we leave this house, just to see what she can tell me about it, or what she senses. This is a true account, not fictionalized, but you only have my word on that...