Our Protective Spirits

Witness: Sandy
Location: McFarland, Kansas
Date of Encounter: Winter of 1991

We had numerous incidents. There were always heavy footsteps, sounding like a person in boots upstairs in the attic. Sometimes I heard them coming down the stairs or on the front porch at night. I had babysitters come to the house to watch my children while I worked nights, but I had trouble keeping them. They said the TV kept going off and on. One said she saw a man in the attic through the window. My boys were afraid to sleep in their room alone sometimes, because they saw people in the backyard.

There were two very strange occurrences that happened in the winter of 1991: I was married at the time to a man who was abusive to my children and myself when he drank. One night I smelled something burning in the bedroom, and the bed was smoldering. I woke up my husband, and he pulled the mattress off the bed. There was a burning area right in the bottom middle of the top mattress. He had not been smoking in bed, and it wouldn't have been there anyway. Another night, I took the kids to get ice cream. When I got back, the doors were all dead-bolted and windows locked to where I couldn't get in. I didn't have a deadbolt key. I looked through a crack in a curtain and saw my husband lying unconscious on the floor and the heavy dining room table was turned over. The phone was dangling from the wall. I pried open a window and climbed in. I called for an ambulance and called the police. My husband was taken to the hospital, and the police detective was totally baffled. Later my husband said that he was talking on the phone to his mother when he was hit hard from behind and knocked out. His mother called to check on what had happened, saying they had been talking, she heard noises, and he was no longer there. I felt like maybe we had a ghost that was protective toward us, but angry with my husband for his actions. I usually felt safe in the house, but on occasions I was very frightened.

After my husband and I divorced, I felt the need to move. While checking out the history of the house later, I found that it was originally owned by a doctor who kept his ill patients in his home with him. This was in the early 1900s, around 1907. After he left, there was a terrible train wreck just outside of town where some Mexican immigrants and a couple of local workers were killed in a train collision. Their bodies were badly burned and thrown into a mass grave, which turned out to be in the back acre of our yard. I feel certain that we had multiple spirits, though before this time I never believed in ghosts.