Ghost Stories of My Childhood - Real and True - Halloween Special

Guys - this episode is going to blow your minds.  It's true- I experienced what people would call "ghost stories" my whole childhood.  I know that some of you out there will be like "ghost - schmost" - or nope....not real.
Listen up!  I don't know if I was experiencing a psychotic episode for years, our demons were trying to get at me, or there were ghost on another plane - I'm just telling you what I experienced!
Write me and let me know if YOU would like to be featured on the podcast to share some horror stories of your own ;-)
Happy Halloweenie!
nestingwiththeearleybirds@gmail.com

Music Credits:
Haunted Corpse - Dirges for the Undead - Gothic Funeral
Loyalty Freak Music - A Really Dark Alley

Transcript

Shannon Earley: 0:01

Hey friends, this is Shannon Earley hostess of the Nesting With The Earle Birds Podcast. This is Episod 14. And I hope you enjoy scar stories for it is Halloween, an we shall share them with you Oh, ah, thanks for listening. S e ya in Welcome to Episode 14, the October Halloween special of nesting with the early birds. I will be your Dungeon Master Shannon, as I share with you tales, true stories from my childhood. Thank you for coming back and remember to share this episode with those that may need a fried. Ah, actually, to be fair to you probably don't want kids listening to this unless you're the kind of mom and dad that's like, You know what? I really love terrifying my children. I love it when they're scared. And I love not being able to sleep well. Those are some of my most favorite sayings. So guys, what I'm about to tell you is true. Yeah, I'm definitely a Christian. And yes, I definitely believe that these things did happen to me. Now the reasoning for why they happened was it hallucinations brought on by anxiety induced state. Were they spirits from another dimension, something like demonic entities, demonic beings. Who knows? All I can tell you is that I believe these things happen to me. And I know that there are gajillions of you out there that also believe that these things have happened or are happening to you as we speak. They no longer occur in my life. Thank you, Lord. But they are something that did happen. So I think the best way to do this is to start from the beginning. So everything that I'm about to tell you guys today, like I said, happened to me, this isn't something that I'm sharing that happened to somebody else that I know, it's something that I've shared with my husband, a lot of my close friends, they all know that this is something that I really feel like I went through. And it started when I was actually just eight years old, maybe even seven and a half I should say. We had finally moved to our brand new house. My mom and dad were remarried. And we had moved from Connecticut to Virginia. And then we were in a rental for about a year. And then we moved to our final home in Richmond, Virginia. And actually the area that we moved in is steeped with history. Anybody that's a history buff at all knows the place where it's at is Virginia, we've got like a lot of really cool things that happened. And the area that I lived in actually, as a kid growing up, my friends and I in their backyards we would find arrowheads, like for real Native American arrowheads, and just really cool things you can do with your metal detector. You can find cool old, like screws and nails or pieces of antique guns, like just really neat things of signs that life used to be there. And so when we moved into this house as a kid, I didn't know that this is what it was like, where we were going to be living. Ever since I was a little girl, my parents would tell me and all my family would tell me about how much of an A magic native child I was how I was so creative, and I was such a good storyteller and that I was very dramatic. And so when I was seven and a half year old girl, we moved into this new house. And it was time for me to pick out my new bedroom. It was so exciting. I was still the only child and my mom was about to give birth to my first brother. Well as I went from room to room, I first picked one room at the top of the stairs and then I thought to myself, you know what? I don't really like this room. I think I'm gonna go find a different one. I go into the second child's bedroom. And I started unloading there I thought for sure that was the one that I wanted. And the more I started to unpack my boxes as a little kid, I just kept getting this really eerie. Just

Unknown: 5:00

weird, weird feeling this just unsettled feeling of absolute quietness that was in this room. And even though the bedroom, the house is a four bedroom house, this room was just strangely quiet and cut off from the rest of the house. The only thing separating it was an attic door. And this room though, for some reason, you couldn't really hear what was going on downstairs, you could hardly hear what was going on throughout the house. And I just thought, you know, this really isn't for me, either. And my parents friends, were there helping us move in and they said, Oh, Shannon, look at this other bedroom, there's a brand new floor there. Why don't you move into this room, it's the only room in the whole house of hardwood floors, where this floor is a brand new installation, this one would be great. And then I was like, Yeah, let's do that. So I found my final spot in the bedroom with the new floors. It wasn't long, until I started to experience really strange things as a kid that was hard to put my finger on. And also when you're already known as an imaginative child, a creative kid, when you tell your folks that you think you might see things, it doesn't necessarily mean that they think that you actually might be seeing things. I don't know for sure the first situation that occurred, but I can tell you that once I was in that bedroom, I almost constantly had a fear of my closet. And it was just a closet where there's a door that shuts it wasn't the kind with the sliding door, French doors, anything like that. And it also is the tiniest closet in my parents entire house, it would almost be I guess how people would consider a coat closet when you first come into a hallway, something like that. Very small. And I just didn't like it. And so as a kid, I would flip out every night that the door needed to be shut tight on the closet. And you know, the door would pop open in the middle of the night, or when I would walk into my bedroom, the door would open up things like that, I would think it was shut turn around. And when I would turn back around, it would be cracked open again. And all of this, of course, was put down that the house was settling that it was an older house. Nothing to be weird about. And so I just kind of tried to put in the back of my mind every time it creeped me out. I was like it's just an old house. This is normal, it's fine. But then other things started to happen. I would start to hear scratching in the middle of the night. And it wasn't like there was trees touching our window sills, anything like that. I would hear scratching. And my parents would say well, your father's shower is connected to your bedroom. It's probably the water dripping. I would hear footsteps coming to my bedroom. And I would think for sure it was my mom or dad coming. And then there would be nobody there. And again, it was one of those things well, you probably hear those footsteps from downstairs. It's a it's a new house, you're getting used to all these different sounds. I don't know what it was, that would wake me up screaming but I would wake up in the middle of night screaming for my mom to come and get me screaming for my dad. And you know that beer as a kid, which I'm pretty sure most kids go through this anyways. But there's this paralyzing fear where you cannot leave your bed like you can't even stick your toes out from under the covers or like a monster is going to eat you or something. Well, I had that fear quite a bit. And so I was always way too scared to jump out of bed and run to my parents house. I mean, my parents bedroom. And so this went on for quite some time. And it was always Shannon, you're just you know, making things up. You're too creative, whatever it was. But as I got older, it continued. It got it continued to the point where I would tell my friends about it. And as a matter of fact, one sleep over I had a friend over and she said she is the doorknob turning. And it was as a matter of fact, the doorknob was indeed turning but there was nobody in the hallway or there would be things or they would be scratching that would go from one side of the wall almost like someone had maybe like the tip of a stick. And they just dragged it gently along the wall from one end to the other. I would hear those sounds. And my friend and I even told my mom we saw the doorknob turning them they're like oh Girls, you guys are so dramatic. That didn't happen. I mean, what would you think right as a parent that sounds bananas. Well, there was a time in my life before I was a Christian, which was, I guess, half of my life at this point. I wasn't a Christian, but I guess I was still searching for some kind of connection to a higher being a higher power. And I actually got into Wicca for a time. Wicca is basically a pagan, worshipping of basically Mother Earth and all the things around you and whatever, I'm not going to go into super detail about it. But suffice it to say, at this time, I was 15. And my mom wasn't a Christian yet, and she did what all moms try to do, and she tried to have a better relationship with Me by showing me she supported me or encouraged me in whatever it is I wanted to do. So she would go and buy things for me at this store. This Wiccan store where they would sell little potion ingredients, books about spells, they would sell pendulums, Weegee boards, books about contacting other realms, that kind of thing. And so pretty soon I started to amass quite a collection, I would do things like ask the VG board questions, there was something called pendulum where you could scrye which is basically you let it dangle over a certain area until it lands in a certain position, I basically practiced witchcraft, like, let's be real. And that definitely 100% opened up the floodgates. Things definitely 100% increased exponentially. So Matter of fact, the increased so much, that even my parents could soon not deny that there was something going on. At this point, now, I guess I was around 15 and a half, 16 years old. And my third, I'm sorry, my second brother, the third child in our family was born. I was so ecstatic. I love being a big sister. And I love children. So all of that is really great. I was so thankful for him. Well, he was moved into the first ever bedroom that I had first moved into if you guys remember I had said the first one at the top of the stairs I just wasn't really into. Well, then very soon after that, I think when he was maybe nine months old, seven months old, something like that my mom became pregnant again, with my baby sister. And so at first, they both shared that bedroom above the stairwell. But then pretty soon, they moved, my parents moved the boys both into the quiet room in the back of the house. Now this is when things went pretty crazy. When my brother was about two years old, and just getting his words out just really trying to be able to communicate with everybody. He was laying in my mom's bed, and he started to point the closet. And he said get out. And my mom said who get out Honey, you want mommy to get out. And he said know her and pointed right at my parents closet. My mom obviously was like what the heck, like that is really weird. Around this time also, my dad had a gun remodeling my parents bathroom. I had told you how the bathroom connected to my room just from a wall. It wasn't like I could get into it or anything like that. But they had just started to redo that bathroom. We had two dogs at the time, lab retriever mix, and we also had a German Shepherd. They would sleep with us every single night go right up those stairs couldn't wait. When my dad started to remodel the dogs begin whimpering at the bottom of the stairs. They would refuse to come upstairs No matter if the plaguing the the pleading and the begging that we would do. We could not get the dogs to come upstairs, which was also pretty weird. We would start smelling weird smells I say we because occasionally my mom and dad would experience the same things. Smelling different things like just all of a sudden this big wall of baby powder or perfume, something like that where it's like this. I mean my room doesn't normally smell like baby powder and there's not in the house but now all of a sudden I smell it. I had told my parents That I had noticed a pattern in the strange goings on and that

generally at 12: 15:04

03am, three minutes after midnight, is when something would happen every single night, every single night. One night, my mom wakes up to what she thinks is a door slamming. And she sees a figure walking down the hall. It is a woman, and she has on an old fashioned tricorn nurse hat. Her head is bowed. She has a clerk on her shoulders. And as she's walking, her arms are crossed over her chest. And she walks from my end of the house, down the hallway and into the bathroom. My mom yells out, Shannon, no answer. So my mom gets up goes to the bathroom, there's nobody there. She then runs to my bedroom, and I'm fast asleep. This clearly scared the crap out of her. Little did she know. But she had finally seen one of the characters that I had often described. This woman could be seen looking out of the bathroom window. If it was after midnight, oftentimes, you would see her looking through the window, almost like a faint reflection in the glass. I knew what to look for. So I knew what she looked like. And my mom mentioned it to me, and I got really excited. I was like, oh, my goodness, you finally saw it. And she's like, No, I don't want to see this you crazy. few nights go by, I don't know, maybe a few weeks, I don't know. And she hears me coming upstairs. And she goes Shannon, and she realizes it's not me. It's the woman. And spy mom yells out and goes, Hey, the woman looks at her, puts her finger on her lips and the motion to quiet her like H and then continues down the hallway with her arms crossed. Well, clearly that is some scary stuff. My brother Jimmy, who was originally the first baby born in this. No. Why can I explain my brothers? It goes me then Tony, then Jimmy, then Sophie, told you were Italian can you tell? Except they gave me the name she and and we'll just talk about that another time. But I've always hated that. It's like mine clearly doesn't fit any. So at this time, Jimmy had actually started waking with night terrors is what they thought he would wake up abruptly, no warning, screaming in bloody terror. I'm talking these screams were just this, the sound of them was just glass shattering just these insane screams. And it would be seemingly out of nowhere. And it was always in that really quiet room I had told you guys about one day I was bringing laundry into my brother's room. And I put it on their bed. They had a bunk bed. And I heard this was in the middle of the day, by the way. And I turn around for the first time I saw a new character. I saw a man standing there. And he had a top hat almost like Abraham Lincoln is the best way I can describe it. And his eyes were red. And he had a beard. And he smiled. This smile was definitely not a welcoming or warming smile at all. So I dropped the laundry basket run downstairs screaming and I told my mom, I've never seen anything in the daytime like this. I don't know what is going on. So this is at this point, we decide, Shannon needs to go talk to a Catholic priest. I go and I speak to the Father. And he actually explains to me that it's not that uncommon to see these things. And that he believes that there's a continual spiritual warfare, a continual spiritual battle. And occasionally, we're able to have glimpses of this, which confused me because I'm thinking, well, what's the battle like what are they battling over didn't make any sense. In my head. I'm thinking it's a battle between angels and demons like head on. Well, I'm now a Christian and I understand that what he said was mostly true. The differences guys that there's a battle over our soul. Our very soul is something that causes a fight. Between Some may say dark and light, good and evil. Or demons, angels, whatever. The difference though is that I do know that the Holy Spirit as a Christian, like he's always gonna win. He's always always gonna win. I wish I knew that when I was younger that there wasn't this sense of fear, like, I had something I needed to do to like, help win this battle along. But there is a battle going on guys, it's completely true, not just that the Bible talks about possessions, as in spiritual possessions, not just that, you want to have something to blow your mind. There's literally a book in the Bible world, the chapter is called the witch of Endor. Check that spooky stuff out. Anyways. So I see this guy in the day, the father tells me that there's a spiritual battle, but at this point, it's not like I have any way to finit like and what's going on, like what is going on? He asks me if there's any way I could have opened up any windows to these kinds of things or any doors for these kinds of things to flooded and I'm like no, not knowing at the time that we g boards like literally is a door. segue welcome everybody come on in and terrorize us. It's great. But also there's people that are just more susceptible to that kind of thing, which you got to pray against it, guys. Pray against it. Don't you wish it was the end of the story the way I'm like, digressing. It's not I think that I just get scared. So there, I'm just kind of talking. Alright, so I see the guy in the middle of the day. I told you that my baby brothers waking up screaming in the middle of the night, we start realizing that this nurse like entity thing, tends to come from my late my baby sister's room, which was the first room that I was going to move into tends to do a walk that goes somewhere like the boys and eyes end of the hallway down the hall into the bathroom. So it goes baby sister's room, down the hall. boys room, my room bathroom, as we start realizing that this chick is not something to really be feared, fearful of. But it's still really scary. Because like, Girl, you don't belong in my Get out of here. So at this time, now, I'm getting closer to 17. No, I guess I'm more like 18. I'm in my final year of high school. And I'm telling my parents Listen, guys, I'm telling you every night at 1203 something happens and they're like, Yeah, whatever. Okay, one night, we're all playing cards. And all of a sudden, we hear my baby brother's screaming. My mom and I look at the clock. And what do you know, it's 1203. She runs upstairs, we go and try to console him. He's just terrified. And she kind of looks at me like this is really odd, you know. And we have Emily, if she gets some back to sleep or whatever. The next night, we decide we have a game plan are really giddy. We have his baby monitor. And we are going to wait downstairs and you're going to listen, we are going to listen like little spice to see what happens. That merry night at 1203. There's all of a sudden like a disturbance. And then there's this low, grumbling male voice. We can't understand what the voice is saying. But it sounds something like something like that. And then my brother screams. My mom and I we are peeling through the hallway running to get to my brother. And we're talking to him. And he explains to us in his little baby speak, that there is a man that every night, shakes my brother's bed until he wakes up and tries to jump into his mouth. What the EFF that is some skirt stroeve. So my mom decides From then on, she's gonna have Jimmy's sleep in her bed for a while. And things don't exactly end we tried some different things. And finally, at one point, my mom and dad, for some reason are still not believing. I think it's just who believes it who thinks this is for sure what's happening. But one night we're in the kitchen. I don't know if I'm with a friend. I don't remember the exact how it who was in the room, but I know it was definitely my mom and dad. And we have these decorative plates that had been on the kitchen wall since I moved in. So at this point, it was like nine years or something like that. They've always been on the wall. And my mom's just talking and she's like Shannon, this is ridiculous. There's no ghosts in this house. One of the plates falls But I'm like, That's weird. And she just looks at me rolls her eyes or whatever picks up the plate, puts it back on the wall. And she goes, besides, don't you think if there were even a ghost in this house, the next plate falls. She looks at me picks it up, hangs it back on the wall. She said, Oh, whatever, Shannon stop. But this is nothing. This is not a ghost at all. If there was anything in this house to be afraid of, don't you think your father and I would know by now, every plate falls off the wall. That was scary. And so it got to the point where even as I got older, and I would be visiting, I just knew like if it was 1203, I would be sitting in my car until at least 1215. I'm not going in. Even if it was 1158. Nope, I will sit in my car. Thank you very much. So my mom actually at this point decides This is kind of strange, but she doesn't share it with her friends. Because like, it's embarrassing. It's weird. Nobody thinks this kind of thing is really going on. She decides to I guess she's like visiting with one of her friends who is a Christian like a very strong Christian. And the lady goes, you know, Cheryl, it's gonna sound crazy. But I have this. I'm gonna say something. I don't want you to think it's really weird. But have you ever considered having your house blessed? My mom's like, no, what do you mean? And the lady says, Well, this is so crazy. But I had a lady come to our house recently. And she fasts and prays. And then she comes in and she cleanses everything in Jesus's name. And she actually came to our house and she would say things like, you know, I sent that over here. There's like a darkness Lola. And then they would find things like, I don't know, horror books, just whatever it is. My mom's like, yeah, I mean, I guess you know, very skeptical. As you can tell by this point. My mom is not gonna believe it just because you tell her No, sir. So my mom calls the lady and she's like, yeah, that sounds weird. But I was just wondering if you'd be just willing to come over and bless our house, and my mom decides I'm not going to tell her any information. I don't want her to know. Because I think that it could be like a fake, weird, psychic thing, and I don't want to tell her what we know. So the lady's like, Alright, you know, I have an appointment with you guys. Whatever day I'm gonna have to fast before I come over. So just so you know, and then I'll come in and the way it's gonna work is I'm going to come in, we're not going to talk. I'm going to go through your house, get a sense of what I feel blessed the house and then I'm going to talk to you about it. Well, my mom doesn't tell me about exactly what's going on. Because she knows I'm like, so excited about this. And also my grandma from the North is visiting my nanny, she's Italian. She's Catholic, and she's the most sassy, feisty, you're not going to tell her what she doesn't already know. Like, are you ridiculous? There's no ghost. That kind of person. All right, guys, before you continue, because you've still got some time left on this episode. Please remember to share this guys. Even people that are like me. I don't like that Shannon's or crow strim. This is weird. I bet you know somebody that likes a ghost story. Come on, guys. Share it. Thank you. So my mom decides that what she's gonna do is have me take my nanny out for the day so that my nanny stays away from the house, which I still wanted to be there. I still to this day, I'm like a little bit hard up about it. Anyway, so we expected the lady to come. Maybe maybe with a friend. My mom said car after car starts pulling up. And women after women get out and there's like 12 women that show up at my mom's house. And my mom's like, I thought it was for one person. The lady said, Well, as I was fasting and praying about it, I just got this feeling that I would want. I would want more women to come with me. So that's like, what? The lady is going through the house. And she's blessing the house. And she when she's all finished. She goes downstairs and she talks to my mom. And she says so. I just wanna let you know that. Is there somebody in your house that is acting like a gateway or a portal? And my mom's like, no. lady said, Is there somebody in your house that seems to see these way more than others? Or maybe has seen them first? Anything like that? And my mom's like, Oh, yeah, well, then yeah, that's my daughter Shannon. The lady said you need to pray against that to stop that Shannon obviously is very sensitive to this and that she's opened something and you need to pray against it. And then the lady said, upstairs and this one bedroom with the really tiny closet. This is gonna sound so weird. But we kept sensing like these, this like darkness like, I kept having this feeling of arms, reaching through the wall through the closet towards towards us. And when I was going throughout the rest of the house, I just had this feeling in one of the rooms in the fire into the hallway, there's a quiet and airiness there. And actually there is this, this feeling of evil coming from, you know, those two bedrooms particularly. And so they real, they explained to my mom that in order to bless the house, if you guys are feeling anything like this is that you don't talk to the demon or whatever you don't say, Hey, girls started demon. What you say is I bless this room and the name of Jesus Christ. You bring up Jesus, you don't talk about whatever entity it is, you bring up Jesus's name because he can heal it. And that's the same thing that happens. If you read about the possession of the dude, there's a dude in the Bible that's possessed. And in order to expel these demons into a flock of pigs or a herd of pigs, whatever, they use Jesus's name. So when that happened, there was like a rushing wind or maybe just like a feeling of a breeze. I don't know, because I wasn't there. Thanks, Mom. To be honest, things stopped. They stopped. And at this time, I was either just becoming a Christian, maybe it was still a couple years, but I understood my role in keeping those things. basically allowing them to stay at our house allowing them to terrorize my siblings, my mom, dad, whatever, my dogs, I realized that I have an important role in it. So that is co story part one. I've got 75,000 more. I really hope you enjoyed listening to Episode 14 of the nesting with the early birds podcast. Thank you for spending this time with us considering it's a Halloween special. Hopefully I didn't offend anybody out there. Listen, I'm just a chick with a microphone and four kids. So I am really appreciative of all of you people that are listening. You guys have no idea. Like I said before, it's super encouraging. So thank you so much. Next Episode Episode 15 is a super special interview with one of the most renowned breast surgeons in the Richmond, greater Richmond, Virginia area. She has actually even started her own breast clinic. You guys this lady you are not gonna want to miss. She's a world traveler. Culturally amazing, beautiful, kind and gentle, super smart lady. Please tune in next time for Episode 15 of nesting with the early birds to hear some really fun talks about boobs.