Ghosts???

In honor of the season, I decided to tell my ghost stories. They're not all that spectacular, but this is what I've seen.

While hunting
One time I was deer hunting with my dad and brothers. I was standing along a riverbank by a great big pine tree and my brothers were hunting up and down river from me while my dad made a drive, which entailed him walking slowly and quietly through the woods to see if he "kicked up" anything to us.

Dad had been gone for about an hour and a half and I was expecting him at any time now. I was looking towards the direction he would be coming from because sometimes deer are really quiet and you don't hear them coming.
I suddenly saw a white misty clearly defined figure with a head, shoulders and shape, just like a man, about 30 feet from me, like it was looking at me, though it had no discernable features. No arms or legs. Just a head, shoulders and man shape. I said, "Okay.." like I usually do when I see something strange. It was white, shimmery, but more solid than transparent. But I could see the branches of the trees behind it.It was there for over a minute, maybe two, not changing or moving. I was wondering if it were a refraction of light of some sort, or breath of some sort or optical illusion of some sort when the figure suddenly stepped (with now clearly discernable legs) behind (or into) a real skinny tree, about one-third the width of the figure. I think the fact that it dissappeared behind or into a tree freaked me out much more than seeing it in the first place.
I was apprehensive, but I did not feel any sort of threat coming from it. But I wasn't about to turn my back on it either. It wasn't scary. But it was perplexing.
A few minutes later, I heard my dad coming slowly through the woods but not directly towards it. My brothers and I walked over to meet my dad when he made it to the river bank. I told them about what I had seen. My dad and my youngest brother were far more skeptical people than my other brother. But dad and my youngest brother took me at face value. My other brother, who's seen strange stuff himself, shook his head and said, "Well, I've heard EVERY hunting story NOW!" and kept shaking his head at me all day. Go figure!

Haunted treament facility
I worked in a treatment facility for troubled teens. It was an old Indian school where members of the Ho Chunk nation were forced to go and live away from their families and learn English and were beaten for speaking their own language. Elders who attend this school told me these stories about their own youth.
When I worked there it had been a home for troubled teens for many years. There was a main building and several more recently built units and houses that had been remodeled into units. I heard ghost stories right after I first started. Stories about cold drafts and things moving and what not. I didn't have any of those problems. I'd already worked in a haunted restaurant (see previous post) and I felt NOTHING, so I wasn't worried.

One night I was pulling a night shift. I had to check the girls every 15 minutes, but other than that there was nothing for me to do until it was time to get them up and make breakfast for them. I was sitting on the couch in front of big windows watching tv and waiting for my next check when in the big glass windows I saw a little girl with blond hair walk out of the bathroom, DIRECTLY behind me and walk into the kitchen. I JUMPED up and looked behind me -- NOTHING!! I looked back into the reflection on the windows just to see her in the center of the kitchen as far as the reflection would show. I walked out there, nothing. I checked all the doors. Locked. She had appeared completely solid. All the girls in that unit were 12 to 18 and sound asleep. Every one was in their beds. They were all in rooms down the hallway to the right of the living room. No one could have gotten past me. This little girl had been about seven. Weird as hell. I KNEW I had seen a ghost.

I didn't tell anyone at work about it. I did tell an elderly Ho Chunk woman I knew. She told me it sounded just like the daughter of the people who ran the Indian school. BUT, she was alive and well and an old lady now. And although the unit I was in had been that family's house, they didn't have indoor plumbing back in those days. Where I had seen her used to be the kitchen area and where the kitchen was now, used to be the outside. So maybe it WASN'T a ghost, but some sort of energy imprint or something.

I saw one other person that wasn't there while I worked there. I was in a different unit, one of the more modern ones. It was nearly 9 a.m. and my shift was about to be over. The kids had already been escorted off to school by another aide. I was just finishing up my paperwork, when I saw, clearly and solidly, a young boy duck into a bedroom belonging to a boy that looked just like him. I thought it was the boy I knew. I called his name and went in to ask him what he was doing there. All students had to be escorted whenever they went anywhere. I was calling to him when I walked in to find the room empty. He wasn't in the closet, under the bed, anywhere. I did wonder if it was another ghost. I called over to the school and talked to the aide that had escorted the kids to school. He said, no, that boy was sitting right there, he could see him right now. Why? I said, oh nothing, must have been my imagination. He said, "Oh. yeah. I've had one of those too."

I worked there a little while after that but had no further experiences and saw nothing else. Other people continued to have strange experiences like feeling they were sat on and getting blasted with cold drafts.

On working in a haunted restaurant

When I was young, I worked in a restaurant that was haunted. The very first night that I worked there, we were just getting things organized to open the next day. The cook, who had worked for the previous owner, and I were putting items away in the kitchen. We put some big glass jars of mayonaise up on a shelf and put huge plastic jugs of crisco oil in front of it. The owner called us out to a booth for a short meeting on our gameplan for the following day. A few minutes into the meeting - SMASH!!!! - coming from the kitchen. The cook looked at me and said dryly, "That would be the mayonaise." We all got up to go look. All the jugs of crisco were lined up on the shelf in a row, just as we had placed them. But there on the floor was one of the jars of mayonaise that had somehow JUMPED out from behind the plastic jugs. I was Dumbfounded. Perplexed. Confused. Confounded. Mystified. on HOW that could POSSIBLY have happened???

I just couldn't understand it. It was improbable, no, impossible, for the crisco to have slid to the side to let the mayo slide by and then move back into position. No ONE else was around. There was no back door.

The cook and I stayed in the kitchen to clean it up. He then told told me that "all sorts of strange things happen around here." He wouldn't come right out and say the place was haunted. I guess he wanted us to figure it out for ourselves.

All sorts of strange things DID happen around there. I would be working alone in the kitchen, chopping lettuce for instance. I would lay my knife down, take two steps to grab a collander and return to find my knife GONE, no where to be found. I'd look all over, only to find it either right where I left it, or someplace I had not been near. It wasn't just knives, it was any object. It didn't happen every night. Sometimes it would happen once or twice a night, or numerous times. There wasn't any pattern that I was aware of.

Waitresses quit on a regular basis. Some claim to have been pinched by something unseen. One quit because she was hanging up a broom and something whispered loudly in her ear. Another quit because of a whistle in her ear and a pinch in the bottom on the same night.

The basement was really creepy. It was a very old building. It was dark with boarded up doorways and all sorts of lathe with wide gaps and cold drafts. There was a paneled office and a white, bright flourescent lighted "paper room" where we kept styrofoam and paper products. The office did not bother me that I remember. But I HATED that paper room with a FEAR so deep that I DREADED having to go there. I felt completely threatened every time I had to go there. The other girls either hated the basement altogether, or the dark scary places. But I hated that paper room. I'd reach in with great trepedation and flick on the light, step back and look to see where in there I had to go, then I would run and get the item, flicking the light off on the way by. If I missed the light switch, I'd have to gather my courage to reach back in there and flick it off. I was not intimidated by the dark creepy spots but there was something scary as hell in that brightly well-lit room that terrified me. No one else seemed to have any problem at all with that room. They were creeped out by the older parts of the basement.

Whenever we were putting stuff away in storage or down in the office talking to the manager, we'd hear the main door open and heavy boot thumps or high heels walk in the front door. We'd hurry upstairs to find no one there. It happened time and time and time again. It finally occured to us that where we were hearing it was impossible, because there were booths there and because the floor was carpeted. No one could have walked across the floor like we thought we'd heard. We surmised there must be a hallway upstairs in the apartments that we were hearing, until someone pointed out that they each had their own entrance. No hallway up there.

The cook and the manager got really mad at everyone talking about ghosts. The cook quit saying he wasn't working with a bunch of superstious women. I became the cook then. The manager told everyone not to talk about the experiences to me because I had to close every night. I'd known about it since that very first night! And every one of the waitresses that quit came and said goodbye to me and told me WHY they were quitting! We had a great boss, she was a really sweet lady, but they just couldn't handle the weird stuff that happened.

I kept thinking there MUST be some explanation. I did believe in ghostly stuff, but I thought all the pinching, whispering and whistling the waitresses were experiencing could have been fear making their minds run wild. I'd seen the mayonaise jar shattered on the floor. I'd reached up and touched the shelf to see if it had been wet. I'd had knives and spatulas and all sorts of utensils moved on me when I was alone, I heard the boot sometimes, high heels sometimes on the floor, but nothing ever whistled, whispered at or pinched ME, so I wasn't that scared, EXCEPT for the paper room, which I COULDN'T explain and no one else was concerned about.

After the cook quit, I wondered if something had happened to HIM that scared him. He was WELL aware of the activities BEFORE we were. And when he was calling us superstitious, he was angry (scared?) and didn't even finish his shift, and no one had said anything TO him that night he quit.

Then we had a hellacious summer storm. Tornadoes in the area. The power in the whole town went out. We were closing up and cleaning up by lantern light. I let all the waitresses go home. It was just me finishing up. My manager called and told me there was a tornado between me and my home and I should just stay THERE and sleep on the cot in the office. That would be the cot in the office DIRECTLY across the basement from the paper room!

I told her, NO, I'll go home. She tried to tallk me into staying there. NO WAY!! was I staying THERE. So I went out to my car. Trees down everywhere. Power lines and mattresses in the streets. It NEVER occured to me to go back inside. Nope! I drove home in high winds and on FUMES because I was going to put gas in after work, but with no power, no gas. I got within a few miles of home and had to turn around and go 10 more miles out of my way because the trees in the road were too big to drive over. But I made it okay.

Now, many things happened at that restaurant. Many waitresses came and went. It's been over 20 years and I've forgotten details and stories by now. But this I haven't forgotten because I can relive it at will.

I was helping the waitresses clean up one night. I grabbed a big plastic tub and started to clear out the salads from the salad bar. We were closed, but there were a few customers finishing up. I had my tub full, grabbed it with both hands and backed up -- into a huge solid SOMETHING -- that felt like a big man. It wasn't like a post, it had give to it, just like I'd backed up into a big lumberjack or something. I stepped forward and turned to apologize to NO ONE and NOTHING, because only NO ONE and NOTHING was there! No person, no post, nothing! It really rattled me. I was completely startled.

I had two skittish anyway waitresses working with me. So I didn't tell them. But with the adrenaline rush I had -- I power-cleaned full throttle and we got outta there FAST.
That event changed the way I viewed the place. I realized that all those waitresses that quit -- had REASON to!

The managers husband started having health problems and we didn't work there much longer after that since she had to sell the place. I wasn't unhappy about having to find another job. It became a food co op after that. I always wondered about the place. But I've never gone back there to ask!

Viruses on our hotdogs!!????

This just completely horrifies me...

In August, the Food and Drug Administration(FDA) ammended the food additive regulations to provide for the "safe" use of a bacteriophage preparation to be sprayed on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products as an antimicrobial agent against Listeria monocytogenes. This action is in response to a petition filed by Intralytix, Inc.

It doesn't have to be listed on the label. This is a combination of a couple different live viruses that supposedly only attack the Listeria bacteria. But if you were eating a food that was coated with live viruses, wouldn't YOU want to know about it???

For more information check out the organic consumers website.

Addresses of the articles are:

http://www.organicconsumers.org/2006/article_1801.cfm

or

http://www.organicconsumers.org/2006/article_2400.cfm

or

http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/cf0559.pdf

Isn't it bad enough that mad f-ing scientists are splicing jellyfish genes into our fruits and vegetables that now they have to start coating our foods with live little nasties like this??

Rocks

One of the really great things about working out at the marsh was that the equipment, tractors, loaders, trucks and cats worked up the hard ground on the landing so that cool rocks were uncovered and I could find them. I am a rock freak from WAY back, my entire 44 years. So I found many cool ones out there. I found agates, jaspers and a whole lot of -'I don't know what they are, but they're cool's.
The marshes were formed when the last glaciers receded. So many of the rocks are already naturally polished by the weight of the ice and the motion of the water. Being so passionate about rocks, I really should know more about petrology. But I find I often get lost in the technical terms.
Many times at lunch break, instead of relaxing, I would be walking around picking up rocks, checking them out and filling my pockets with them. Many of my rocks look quite ordinary, but if it felt like they wanted to go with me, I would take them home. Sometimes I would find a really pretty one, and think I was going to take it, but had such a strong feeling that it didn't really want to go, that I would put it back down.
Now, surely there is some mental disorder with anthropomorhic associations with rocks and stones, but I am blissfully unaware of it. I like rocks because they are pretty, interesting, cool, or because they "feel" good to me.