Witness: Jen Smith
Location: Lincoln, Rhode Island
Date of Encounter: July 1, 1980
My first experience with something, I was just about 6 years-old. My bedroom had gotten moved to a different side of our very small house. I woke up to my grandmother (or someone who looked like my grandmother) talking to me through the window screen while standing on the bulkhead that was below my window. I don’t what she said. She had passed away when I was 5. I always thought that was maybe a dream except when our family — my mom, my older and younger brothers, and myself moved from that house to the house my mom grew up in (my grandfather left his house to her and my uncle) — literally a block over. Nothing spectacular happened at first, a few pushed-open doors, and some sounds, but nothing really until I finally had a lot of room to myself.
My mom had the upstairs renovated from what had been the bedrooms in her childhood and turned it into a lost attic and now bedrooms and upstairs bathroom for us. Unfortunately, or fortunately for me, my mom’s asthma was really bad up there for unknown reasons and therefore my youngest brother wanted no part of upstairs if he had to be away from my mom (don’t worry, he turned out normal or whatever not uber creepo is)… and then, poof, like magic my older brother went away to college! I had a whole floor to myself. Sweet sweet glow in the dark stars! And my horrible paintings and really cool posters! But the thing is the room I chose to sleep in overlooked the front of the house with its 12 feet of grass before you are in the road. Streetlamps lit my room up like living on the sun. And even though I was super-afraid to sleep in the dark as a kid, I couldn’t do it now–I was 13–I was cool. Anyhow, I covered my windows with black trash bags because nothing screams class like black trash bags on your windows. But they worked! No light. At least no light until the three balls of light started moving around my room at first like car lights gliding against the walls, but no lights were let in from the outside. The balls soon just moved in different ways. I was so super-scared of them I’d say, “Hey, thanks for coming by, but you are really scaring me, so could you please leave?” and they’d go. I thought maybe my eyes were being weird, and I talked to my mom about how I was seeing lights in the dark, and maybe I needed to see an eye doctor. We went, but nothing was wrong with my eyes. And it kept happening. I just knew it was spirits eventually, and I wasn’t so freaked out when they appeared. The balls were always together. Never separate.
I’ve had other encounters since, but nothing was more of an “Oh, yes” moment when my mom said, “I want to thank you so much for talking about three balls of light at night because now I see them and with all your talk of ghosts!? Then she asked me, “Did you know that your great uncle, great grandmother, and great grandfather all died in this house? And back then we still held the Irish Wakes. Thanks for sharing!” Her bedroom faces the very dark back of the house and she is uber religious. She believes in no ghosts, or dinosaur, or caveman. Anyhow, I love to know that when we die our energy doesn’t just dissolve into nothing.