Let's get to the nitty-gritty. This is my favorite subject as I find myself at once fascinated with ghosts & yet frightened of the very prospect of being a haunting victim. It chills me to the very marrow of my bones. Nevertheless, I & some of my relatives & friends have had encounters with ghosts. Let me share those experiences.

As for all you skeptics & those who can explain any phenomena that's is in fact unexplainable, bear with me as if it's some fanciful place I'm taking you to - or you can just leave, respectively. Anyways, here goes.

The House On Summit Hill Road
When I was a little boy, my older sister, Hien (pronounced HEE-in) & I were occasionally babysat by Lee, a friend of my foster mother, Phyllis. She lived in this old, dilapidated house on Summit Hill Road in Harrison, Maine. Sounds haunted already, doesn't it? It was owned by Buffy Saint-Marie, a famous folk singer in the 60's & 70's. Lee essentially lived in & took care of this house.

There was a breezeway that attached to the barn. On the outside, the shingles were peeling away & graying & cracking, creating that perfect 'haunted' appeal. It really should've be in a movie. There were three 30-foot towering shrubs to the right of the house, wind carved & leaning away, as if they had spent eons trying to flee the relentless winds but instead reluctantly took on the duties of being the night-guardsmen. They scared me almost as much as the house did. To the left of the house were sprawling blackberry & raspberry bushes, overgrown, wild & thorny - easily pricking you if you had reason to graze through them, which I did - I loved berries, especially in cereal.

So Phyllis would take us here, now & then, until my sister finally refused to go back due to an unnerving experience she had. That's another story - I'll throw it up at the end of this story.

My sister & I slept in the same bedroom upstairs, to the right of the stairwell, the very first room. I was approximately 7 & she was 12 at the time. When we woke up the next morning, we began opening up the mutitudes of cupboards in the room just for curiosity's sake. My sister opened a medium-sized cupboard door and saw a diamond ring laying there. She picked it up, I stared at it. We were excited just to have found something but were wondering what to do with it. So we ran downstairs to show it to Lee. She looked at it & asked us where we had found it. She looked rather surprised, to say the least. We told her we found it in one of the cupboards in our upstairs bedroom. She didn't really give us a response after that but waited until Phyllis came to pick us up to tell her what we had found.

Lee began telling us about this newlywed couple that had stayed in that same room 25 years ago for their honeymoon. In the morning, the newlywed bride looked down at her ring finger to find no wedding ring there. She was aghast - it had been on her finger when she was asleep. The husband attested to that fact as well. So they both furiously upended the room, searching frantically through every nook & cranny but to no avail. They finally gave up, leaving the house without ever knowing what happened to that ring.

So Lo & Behold, some kids come back to that same room 25 years later to nonchalantly open up a cupboard door & find that exact diamond ring sitting there as if it had been resting there all along. Lee was surprised, to say the least. So was Phyllis. The ring was hardly dirty, this I remember - it shined.

More things happened in that house but that's another story & I'm tired.

Here's my sister's story:

She was sleeping in that same bedroom in that haunted house & felt somebody - something - get into bed with her. It touched her with what she felt to be a hand & that's when she pretty much freaked out. She refused to ever go into that house again, if she could help it, at least into that bedroom.