Last month my husband and I and our two sons travelled from the UK to visit my family in Dayton, Ohio. While there, I had an eerie experience, one I’m still not sure what to make of. Here goes:
My father’s sister, Shirley, was also visiting in Dayton while we were there. She lives in New York, but has made regular trips to Dayton over the years to look after her in-laws, Jack and Clara. Jack died in 1986, and Clara died last year, in her 90’s. Both died at home. Now Shirley makes the trip to Dayton to take care of the household stuff and get the house ready to sell. I hadn’t been to Jack and Clara’s in over 20 years, so my husband and I, along with our three-year-old, decided to pay her a visit.
Shirley took us on a tour of Jack and Clara’s rather large house. We went upstairs and Shirley was showing my husband and I some of the things that Clara had collected over the years. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my son walking around this large room we were in, chattering to himself. Then he stopped, and with a funny look on his face said, “Mummy, that man is talking to me.” We stopped what we were doing and the hairs stood up on my neck because I could see it was very real to him. (Incidentally, while my son has an active imagination at play, he has never made up an imaginary person.)
I said, very matter of fact, “What man?” He replied, “The big man over there by the bed. He’s got brown hair.” My aunt whispered to me that this was Jack’s old bed. I said, “What did the man say to you?” My son answered, “He said, ‘nooo talking’.” Now this was something we’ve never said to him ourselves—normally it’s just ‘hush’ or ‘please be quiet’. Also, he seemed to be actually imitating the way someone was speaking to him.
I said that I thought we should all go downstairs. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I felt very nervous with my son being involved. (I’d recently seen ‘The Sixth Sense.’ ) We went into one of the downstairs bedrooms and there were some photographs on the wall. My aunt whispered to my husband which one was Jack and he pointed to it and asked my son if he knew who it was. He said, very excited, “That’s the big man, Daddy, that’s the big man.” I pointed to another picture of Jack taken when he was a young man, and asked him if he knew who it was. He looked at it for a few seconds and then said he didn’t know.
We called my uncle, Jack’s son, and told him what had happened. He said that ‘no talking’ was something his father would definitely have said.
Before we left the house, we gave our son the opportunity to go back up and see if the man was still there. To be honest, I didn’t really want him to, but my husband and aunt were curious. My son went up with my aunt and didn’t say much, just looked under the bed. But when my husband joined them, he told him that the man was playing hide and seek with him and was under the bed. At this point, I feel that his imagination was definitely starting to take over.
Over the next day or two, we asked him a couple of times about the man and his story was the same. We didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, so we’ve not mentioned it to him since.
Today, though, he made a remark that brought it all back. The washer repairman, a man in his 60's, came by today. When he first came to the door, he wasn’t wearing glasses. My son and I let him in and he later had to go back out to his truck to check something. My son let him in the second time. This time the man was wearing glasses (as Jack had) and my son seemed kind of startled when the repairman first came in. He said, “Oh, I thought you were the big man with brown hair.” I took a good look at him and, sure enough, with the glasses he bore a more than passing resemblance to Jack. So, it’s something that my son still remembers.
I’ve never really believed in the paranormal. I feel that the vast majority of paranormal experiences can be explained, e.g., hallucinations, both visual and auditory, can be duplicated in a lab by stimulating different parts of the brain, etc. But this was my three-year-old son, a little boy who did not even know of Jack’s existence, much less what he looked like. He definitely saw something that day and I haven’t been able to get my head around what it could actually have been.
Any ideas?
P.S. This experience happened on 1 November, All Souls’ Day. My son’s birthday is Halloween.