Sister Stories
The following are just a few of the stories among many of true occurances which took place in our former home (the home I grew up in as a girl in the heart of East Los Angeles). But first I'd like to give you a little history of the house.
This house was built in the early 1900's when silent pictures were just beginning to take hold in Hollywood. The area at that time was not as populated, and it was the third home to be built on the block. Our neighbor who had come up with the idea as to how to Part the Red Sea in Hollywood's first silent movie about the Bible, with Moses parting and crossing the Red Sea (by the way, he used red Jello to part the Red Sea - just to give you an idea of his age)......he remembered the house as being used at different times as both a home for elderly jewish women and also, a home for unwed mothers. I'm afraid I never found out in which order they were (which came first).
My first story happened when I was just a wee thing. My older sister and my cousin were very young kids at that time and they were playing and got around to fighting with each other. As punishment my mother made them sit in one of the rooms of the house (the room we now call the "pink room") By the way, people have often commented that this room gives them strange vibes, if not the "willies." Anyway, as the two girls sat there crying, upset because they were being punished, the closet door knob turned and the door opened a crack. An arm reached out from behind the door. It was a large beefy arm with thick dark hair all over it. The hand was gnarled with long discolored nails. Both girls forgot about being miserable and started to scream at the top of their lungs. When they screamed the arm retreated as my mother burst in through the bedroom door terrified by their screams. When they told her what they had seen, my mother tried to calm down the two very hysterical girls by saying it had been her arm they had seen. But she had only said that to try and calm down the girls. My sister is now a responsible adult, married, level headed, with two children of her own. But to this very day she'll swear as to what she saw that day in the "pink room."
This house seems to be spiritually inhabited by more than one individual. We've been told that during the depression poor homeless people would pay the caretakers a small amount of money to sleep under the house at night (it is an old fashioned stilt style foundation home so it has a very spacious crawl space. Some spots under the house you could almost stand up straight). I sometimes wonder if one or two of these people could be some of our present day spirits. Which leads me to my second story.
Our house was always like Grand Central Station. There were nine of us living together, my grandparents, mom, dad, and five of us kids. My grandmother's sister and her common-law husband lived in the small house behind us on the same lot. There were always visitors, relatives, peddlers and an endless stream of friends and new faces passing through our house, which is probably why when my grandmother was preparing dinner in the kitchen one night when a strange man walked through the kitchen, at first she only glanced at him and looked back down. The man was wearing a floppy old hat and an old "well worn" raggedy jacket. As my grandmother looked back down it finally registered in her brain that a stranger had just walked through her kitchen and she was curious. She looked over her shoulder to get a better look at him, but in the instant it took to look over her shoulder, he was gone....without a trace.
Here's my last story for today:
Although our house was a good size, it was still very tight for a large family of nine people. Three of us kids shared a room, myself and two other of my siblings. We were a very close family and every so often a cousin would spend the night with us. This is exactly what started our eerie evening. A younger cousin decided to spend the night. She was the same age as my younger sister. We three girls shared the "pink room" (by the way, we later put a lock on the closet to keep it closed). The eldest of us was a teenager and because it would have been a tight squeeze to fit one more body (my cousin) in our room and because she was a teenager and didn't want little kids in her room (we all go through that stage don't we?), it was decided the two girls would sleep on the living room floor. They were about seven or eight years old and they were afraid to sleep alone in the dark living room with the rest of the family behind closed bedroom doors. So, I being the second to the eldest I volunteered to sleep with them. We stretched out blankets and pillows on the living room carpet, and being kids, we quietly whispered and giggled half the night away. Finally, we grew tired and we lay quietly as the rest of the household slept. We heard something - soft sobbing. But it was the saddest mourning sobbing.....It was a woman's voice and she sounded like her heart would break. The crying came from outside our grandparent's bedroom, then along with the sobbing we heard footsteps, traveling slowly from my grandparent's room, moving across the dining room and towards us! But then we realized it was actually heading for my parent's room (which was right next to where we lay in the living room), The room was so dark, we could barely make out the dim outline of the dining room furniture and my grandparen't door....but we couldn't see anyone.
We unbelievingly whispered to each other "Do you hear that?" Then as the sounds approached us we lay paralized, as flat to the floor as could could get - trying to hide under the blankets (we were really scared!) When the sounds (crying and footsteps) reached my parent's bedroom door we heard the doorknob turn....then silence, it was over.
Knowing how the house looked before we added a bedroom to accommodate our "large" family (the wall where the crying started out at one time was a large wall-to-wall window, from waist level up to the ceiling). In retrospect, it made me thknk this woman was looking out of the windows that were physically there when she was alive, then as she sobbed she made her way slowly back to whatever type of room my parent's room was in her days.....a bedroom perhaps? I wonder sometimes why she was so sad and what was it she was looking at from behing those windows?
There weren't occurances every day, but there were many throughout the years, such as identical nightmares among some of the children, sightings, the dissapearance and reappearance of personal possesions, strange markings, etc. I could go on and on (if I haven't already), but that's all for now. Mayby if anyone is interested, I'll tell some more at a later time. I've got tons of them!