Gifford, your signature should say : "I STILL BELIEVE in ghosts!" If you believe in ghosts you've seen too many movies... Cue someone posting "Oh, man, you don't believe because you never have seen one in real life, man..." in 3...2...1...
As a young boy we lived in a home which had been built on an old homesite which had burned down. The lady of the fomer home had died in the fire. Her name was Dorothy. We had lots of strange experiences and sightings. All of us would hear things in the night. Lights would go on and off. My mother would feel people tap her on the back. Ice cubes popped out of glasses. We had a substitute housekeeper who came through the kitchen into the dining room and saw a strange woman sitting there smiling-- then she disappeared right before her eyes. We came home to find this housekeeper sitting on the curb afraid to go back in the house.
Ok, the Latin from the picture. Or maybe, a better discription of the picture first. It's not great- I wouldn't know how to classify it, but there aren't any details. The floating 'lady' looks like a christmas tree with a green dress on, with a white blob for a head and another blob for an arm. Beneith her is a brown swirl of color. Above the 'lady' are the Latin words, "Rex Homines" scratched into the painting. Below, in the swirl of brown, are the words "Corpus Spirtus", also scratched in. Maybe someone can translate?
There's an old slave house on the far side of the Potomac river. The property itself has a dark, and most troubled past. What's left of the old wooden floor has rotted away. There are shadows everywhere that creak as the wood dries out. Little shoes from the children are strewn around, with their untied shoelaces dangling at their side, and small iron kettles, and iron pots thrown about in very much the same way as the shoes. Nothing has been touched in all this time. Not one thing. Yes. The picture is perfectly still. It is in the same condition as it was nearly two hundred years ago this October night. But it's ok to poke your head in there at midnight and look around. Nothing is going to frighten you. Nor care that you are there. Because it's not the old and dark and rotten slavehouse where all of this started, it was in the meat house, right over there, where the slaves were asked to smoke large hunks of meat that hung on long metal slabs. Water inside the meat is a problem. You see, it spoils everything. Dried meat lasts longer. And so the heat and smoke are meant to drive off the water. And so there the slabs of meat would sit, even on rainy days, and smoke for many days. The flesh would hang everywhere. And then one day the people living on the small farmhouse, who owned the slaves, looked in on their precious meat. They found, amongst the lathering slabs of rosy loin, a boy hanging from a hook. His flesh had been smoked in the rising steam. He was dry to the bone. Good for eating. But such a horrible sight that the farmhouse up on the hill was closed for the remaining week. Nobody worked. No children played. Not one soul moved. Everybody was is a deep state of sadness. Of pure and utter horror. But when all calmed down into a sickly state, blood was disocovered on the hands of a large black slave who lived in this old slavehouse. He had killed the boy, hung him up in the smokehouse, and did so for no other reason than to do it. So the family living the farmhouse up on the hill locked him up in the old slave house, all alone, isolated, and awake, and punished him for his crimes. A thick lock now clamped him inside his thoughts. And did so for twenty two days. He was given no food and no water, but they told him, before closing that door shut, and crimping him into a shiriveling darkness, that on the twenty third day, they would rattle his shoulder and take him to a place where he would be hung. That was his punishment. To sit and rot. Then hang. Blood curdling screams hurdled out from the slave each night, asking to see his son and daughter, and wife. But no one heard them. nor cared. They were already dead, hanging outside, in a tree, with their shoes thrown off and their little feet haging in the air, waiting for their father to come out and see them. Their shadows were forever lost to the changing leaves. And for almost twenty two days the slave was locked in darkness, and in total silence, until at last, one night, he awoke near midnight when somone gently touched his shoulder. The door left open and the room left empty. There was no one person in there but the slave. The shadow gone, he was alone now. The slave opened the slavehouse door to find his family hung. The tree bent over. He grieved for a moment, and no more, and then when anger set in, and revenge reared it's ugly head inside him, he head up to the farmhouse with the idea of taking all their lives. But it was there, in the farm house, up on the little hill, that as he went from room to room, that he found, everyone else was already murdered. Their blood pouring down from the ceiling, dripping along an old stone floor, and down a drain. All of them were dead, hanging in their respective bedrooms like slabs of meat. And now it seemed, the only one left alive on this plantation, was the slave who had been locked away for twenty two days and a couple of hours to be exact. To this day there are no swinging doors, no horrific sounds, and no cries for help in the old slavehouse. You see, its' prefectly silent. A Sanctuary of sorts. And if you haven't quite figure it out by now, I might as well spell it out for you, there's really no reason be frighted when I ask you if you want to be locked in an old, dark, rotten slavehouse, and left with nothing to eat or drink for days. You really shouldn't be frightened at all. So what do ya say? Can I lock in there?
I remember when I young, I thought I had ghosts in my house. Doors in the hallway would be open then close shut. It ended up just being when the central air conditioner in the house would turn, it would create a sort of vacuum seal pulling the doors to a close.
I locked the doors every night (routine) and shut all closets,turn off all lights . Well my pantry door would always be open every morning when I would wake up. I assumed something really wierd was happening, because I would shut it on purpose to see if it would be open in the morning. I actually changed the knob one time. It was freaking me out. It turned out that my 11 year old would wake up in the middle of the night and eat a snack. My wife still laughs about that.
Havent had Latin in a few years but heres my translations: Rex Homines- I know rex is king think homines is man, so "king man"? Corpus Spirtus- I am guess corpus is body, and spirtus is spirit- so "body spirit" or maybe "spirit body"? Someone might wanna help me out, not exactly sure
We used to live in a house with a cemetery bordering the back yard. One evening, we're watching tv in the living room and there's a loud crash in the kitchen. The kitchen had an open floor area of about 10 x 15 feet with cabinets on two sides. Apparently the crash had been a glass bowl. It was sitting upright on the opposite side of the room, in pristine condition. And all the cabinets were closed. Including the one it fell out of. A couple of other weird things in that house. We had birds flying around in the house on multiple occasions when they would have no way in the house. One night we went to go to bed and there's a sparrow sitting on the nightstand on my wife's side, just staring at us. Another time I was watching tv late while everyone was in bed. The remote a good three feet from me. All of a sudden, the menus came on, and it started scrolling through the menus and selecting a few options. I grabbed the remote and cancelled out of the menu and after thirty seconds, the tv turned off. I said "stop!" out loud and it didn't happen anymore. Another time, our wood panel attic access was pushed up into the attic randomly and set aside as if someone had gone up there. I also used to have weirdly vivid dreams there. I still don't know if I believe. These are all coincidental. I've moved to a new house that someone told me was haunted. We've only had one weird thing happen, but that's somewhat explainable too.
