On Tuesday morning, I had my first interview of the semester with Tracey, Joe’s future sister-in-law and a fellow believer of the paranormal. While I was driving, I tried to pay attention to the houses and developments I kept passing, expecting them to be older and rundown, you know, the typical picture you get when you think haunted house, but when I turned into Tracey’s development, I was completely surprised. The houses were beautiful and looked relatively new; not at all what I was expecting!
I gather my bag from the floor on the passenger’s side and walk up to the front door. I decide to knock instead of ringing the doorbell because this is Tracey’s daughter’s nap time. I look around the neighborhood, and spy the garbage truck making its way down the street and a Ritter carpet truck backing in to the house on the culdesac. As I turn back to the door, I spy a wisp of white moving past one of the side windows before the door opens. A young woman in her late twenties, early thirties stands in the doorway. I ask if she is Tracey, we shake hands, and she invites me in.
As I step into the house, I can’t help but be impressed. It’s beautiful inside; all of walls and carpets are done in neutral colors, and the house has a very inviting feel to it. As Tracey leads me through the dining room to the kitchen, which looks to be newly renovated with upgraded appliances and granite countertops, I am again surprised by how comfortable I feel. Tracey takes my coat introduces me to her two cats, Willow, a very friendly girl, and Tracks, a boy Joe found wandering around the train tracks behind the development. I am in kitty heaven, but that’s a story for another time.
As we walk through the house, Tracey tells me that the house used to belong to her fiancé’s parents, who then offered it to Joe’s brother and his family, and then when they moved, the house was passed on to Tracey and her fiance. After offering me bottle of water, we move into the family room and settle into the couched facing each other. Willow follows me onto my couch and makes herself cozy next to me while I stroke her fur.
I open the conversation by asking Tracey to tell me about some of the paranormal experiences she’s had in the house. She tells me about the heavy footsteps in the hallway and multiple rooms upstairs in the family room.
“The activity was much worse for my future sister-in-law. Her little girl, Jacklyn, used to sleepwalk in this house. She hasn’t done it before or since, but I remember hearing about when her parents couldn’t find her when they woke up. After searching the whole house, they finally found her asleep in the bathtub in the upstairs bathroom down the hall.”
She asks me if I’ve come across anything like that in my research, and I haven’t seen or read anything like that. She continues by explaining that that family was very religious, and when she moved in, she was told not to bring in any psychics, mediums, or Ouija boards because it would only make the activity worse.
“She told me to say ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, stop,’ and that would make the activity stop. And it works for a while, but it always comes back. Some of it sends chills down my back.”
“A lot of stuff happened with Jacklyn. When her family lived here, her mother would hear children running around upstairs and laughing, but Natalie was an only child.” The final straw for Jacklyn’s parents was when they found out she had a imaginary friend named Dede. “Her parents assumed it was a girl, but when they were going through some old family albums, they came across a picture of Jack, a distant cousin who was eleven when he died. When she saw his picture, Jacklyn pointed to him and said ‘Dede!’ They left shortly after that.” I asked if she was afraid for her daughter since so much activity happened with Natalie, but Tracey said she was used to it now, so she wasn’t ever really scared.
I ask if she can talk about how bad it was for her when she first moved in. Tracey shivers a little and explains that that was when a lot of things would happen. “It sends a chill down my spine just thinking about it. I always felt like someone was trying to get my attention.” One incident in particular, she was giving her daughter a bath and remembers feeling this presence behind her. “It felt like a man was standing over me. It made me feel very uncomfortable.”
I asked is she ever did any digging about the house to see if maybe somebody died there, but Tracey admits she’s never even thought to go look. She was especially curious about who the land the development is built in used to belong to, and I offered to try to find out for her. I haven’t been able to look into it yet, but I intend to once the semester ends.
I ask if she can remember when she first experienced anything paranormal, and since she’s been having these experiences all of her life, it’s difficult to remember her first. She does remember a lot of activity associated with her parents’ house. “It looks like a Civil War museam. There is a cannon in the house, not a big one, but it’s definitely a cannon!” Her father, a Cival War reenacter, has had so many experiences out on the battlefields, and says that he has some great stories he’d be happy to share with me. I file that information for later on as she remembers a particular incident with the metronome that her sister would use when practicing the piano. “The stick would unhook itself, and there was this one time when my sister saw the metronome fly off of the piano and crash into the opposite wall. I’ve never seen it happen, but it really freaked my sister out.”
She goes on to explain who she thinks might be responsible for that. “A little girl who lived in my parents’ house died in a fire. I think it might be her because she’s said to have played the piano.”
As Willow stretches next to me, I rub her belly and ask if either of the cats have ever reacted to anything, but Tracey says with a chuckle that they’re too wrapped up in themselves to pay attention to anything else. “Do you want to see the rest of the house?” I agree, gently dislodge Willow, and follow Tracey upstairs. When we reach the landing, I notice almost all of the doors are closed. “You’re probably wondering why the doors are closed.” I laugh and say I was just thinking that. “I don’t like the closets open. I don’t know why, but it makes me uncomfortable to have them open, especially this one.”
I asked what she does when she needs to vacuum, she laughed and said she procrastinates, but does eventually face the closet to free the vacuum.
Next, she goes into the room right next to the closet. “This is the office. This and out in the hallway are where it sounds like the footsteps are coming from. I would never use this room if the computer wasn’t in here.” I look around the room, and shiver. I don’t like the feeling in this room.
I notice another closet in the corner; Tracey sees where I’m looking and goes over to it. “I don’t like this closet open either, but even when it’s closed I feel uncomfortable.”
“If you sit at the desk, your back is to the closet,” I say, pulling out the chair. “Does that bother you?”
“I don’t like it at all, but I spend as little time in here as possible as it is. I can’t not do my job, you know?”
Next we move down the hall to the bathroom. “This is where they found Jacklyn asleep in the tub.”
I step into the room, but don’t feel anything threatening or unsettling in here. After a couple of minutes, we move back out into the hallway. “This is my least favorite room in the house. I tried to sleep in here a couple of times when I was pregnant, and I always felt like someone was in here with me, watching me.” As we step up to the door, I immediately don’t like the room.
Tracey asks if I want to go in.
“No, no I’m fine out here. What’s with the blue carpet?”
“We don’t know. It was like this when Jimmy’s parents bought it, but it throws you off, doesn’t it?”
“And this is the only room in the house with the blue carpet?”
“Yeah. We were thinking if we ever had a boy, we could put him in here, but after trying to sleep in here, I could never do that to my kid. I especially don’t like the closet in here. Whenever I look at it, all the hair on the back of my neck stands up.”
We can’t go into the master bedroom because Jimmy is sleeping, but Tracey assures me that I’m not missing anything. “Nothing ever happens in there.” Just as we finish looking around upstairs, Tracey’s daughter wakes up from her nap. After a brief introduction, Tracey takes the baby downstairs and leaves me to look around upstairs. I spend the most time in the “blue room” and the office, but can only spend a couple of minutes in each. They each make me feel extremely uncomfortable, and a chill runs down my spine if I look at the closets in both of the rooms. I take my pictures and notes and head back downstairs.
After taking a look around the first floor, I then join Tracey and her daughter for some quality time with Elmo and the cats.
Reflection:
- The interview exceeded my expectations. In my pre-interview post, I was really worried about being able to keep the conversation flowing, but it turns out I needn’t worry. Tracey was so full of information that I was struggling to keep up. I’m really grateful for her letting me come into her home and giving me free reign of the house. The interview would’ve been completely different if we hadn’t conducted it there. But because of Tracey’s willingness to share her experiences, I was able to actually experience the discomfort and uneasiness she feels in certain parts of the house.
- Speaking with Tracey allowed me to learn about paranormal activity from someone lives with these experiences on a daily basis. Rather than watching a paranormal investigation show from the comfort of my couch, being in this haunted location was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I was hesitant to bring my recently purchased EMF detector or even my digital recorder for fear of provoking the spirits there, so I kept it simple and only brought my camera. Tracey and her family have had so many experiences that they have almost come to expect them, and they are rarely disappointed.
- The interview with Tracey gave me the unique opportunity to learn about the experiences she’s had with the paranormal, but also to observe how she lives with these experiences on a daily basis. “The interview itself has created, as well as tapped into, the vast world of individual experience that now constitutes the substance of everyday life” (Postmodern Interviewing, p. 27), and while most may think of these ghostly happenings as rare occurrences, Tracey’s stories are a testament to the opposite. And because of that, I never thought of Tracey as a “vessel of answers” (Postmodern Interviewing, p. 70), but always as a person who would have to live with this ghostly inhabitants after the interview was over (which was why I didn’t want to bring any equipment that could potentially upset him/her).
- The only thing that I was hoping to happen and didn’t was that I would get to hear exactly what Tracey hears on a regular basis. Since the activity seems to happen almost always at night, Tracey has invited me back this coming Tuesday night in the hopes that I will get to hear and experience what she has in the past. Wish me luck!
Julianna Lopez's Research Blog 