|

When They Don’t Believe You!

By Teresa Holloway
Messenger Reporter
HOUSTON COUNTY – “I’m here because the cops thought I was crazy. My own ‘brothers in blue’ stuck me here. I’m not crazy. This is a real life ghost story. I barely escaped with my life!” Anita began. (“Anita” is a pseudonym to protect her identity.)
“I argued with the doctors for a long time until they finally let me tell someone else my story, but it wasn’t easy. You know what that one doctor told me?
“He said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re mentally tough or not, Anita. There is something deeply disturbing about repetitive dreams, especially when they are frightening or eerie. And reliving them over and over isn’t healthy.’” Anita recounted.
“Frightening? Eerie? He doesn’t know the half of it. I was terrified! This was not a dream, that’s for sure. I thought it was too, at first, but I have proof now it’s not. I’ll show you, too, after we talk. Just wait.
“It started when my Granny died. We’re originally from New Orleans, but Granny moved back here a long time ago. I saw her almost every weekend. I’d come stay here with her on all my vacation days, too,” Anita explained.
“I buried her about four weeks ago now, I think. I had a really hard time, truth be told. I stayed at her house. She left it to me in her will. She’s got … she had 43 acres down on the river.
“So I quit my New Orleans job and moved over here. No bills meant I could finally retire. I was a police sergeant for the last 21 years. Cops don’t get paid enough to retire, really, especially in Louisisana, unless they own everything, that is. New Orleans is a rough place to be a cop – especially a female cop,” Anita grinned.
Her eyes took on a distant look.
“I stayed at the house, like I said. I remember I cried for a solid week. Finally I got a little better and started moving things around, cleaning and organizing. Most of Granny’s stuff was decent but not stuff I wanted, so I was going to take it to the Goodwill,” she said.
“The place was a wreck. Granny was just too old to do much. I’d help out when I came down, but I only had about half a day and one night to stay there because of driving time.
“I was about beat half to death trying to get everything lined out. Bad wiring, bad plumbing, bad floorboards and porch boards, you name it. The yard out back touched on the Trinity River but it was so overgrown it tooka whole day to clear half an acre,” she continued.
“It’s been a while since I did so much physical labor, so I put most of the strange stuff down to overwork.
“After I moved in there, I started having these weird dreams. They were eerie but not terrifying like chainsaw massacre type of dreams. I never could remember the whole dream, just vague snatches of it. Mental snapshots of old, dusty beds and broken rocking chairs, old dolls … it was like I was in an old run-down house or something. The eerie part was I could always feel someone watching me,” Anita shivered. “You develop that instinct, after a while.”
Squirming backwards on the narrow hospital bed, she adjusted the sheets and blankets tighter around herself as if her own story frightened her.
“The place was like home to me though. I’d spent a lot of my adult life there with Granny, so I wasn’t scared. So what if there was an Indian graveyard 20 feet from the river bank? The dead can’t hurt you, right?
“I loved the old trees that leaned across the river, it stayed dark under there. Owls were always around, even hooting in the daylight. The water is deep in that spot. Some of the trees had fallen off the bluff into the water.
“Those were kind of scary, the branches looked like hands sticking up out of the river, like the trees wanted to claw their way back into the sunlight, I remember thinking,” she said.
“Then I started waking up with dirty feet. Now the house was clean, mind you. I’d been there for about two weeks at that point. I couldn’t figure out how so much dirt was getting all over my feet. It had me worried.
“I stressed over that for a couple days, figured I must be sleepwalking or something. I mean seriously, I’d been a cop for 21 years, quit that job, moved across two states, buried my Granny … it was really stressful. Working myself into an exhausted sleep seemed to be the best way to get past all that, so that’s what I did.
“There was a lot of work to do, too. Like I said, the house was a shambles. In the daylight, it was like an animal attacking me. Everywhere I looked, it snarled,” she laughed. “None of the electricity worked right, plumbing leaked everywhere, boards and walls were warped, windows were crooked. It was really bad.
Anita closed her eyes and leaned against the hospital bed. “Just talking about this makes me tense,” she said, rolling her shoulders.
“Well, the day I ended up in here was the end of it. For most of the time I’d been at that house since Granny died, I felt like someone was watching me, or had that ‘something bad is about to happen’ feeling. I had tons of anxiety.
“I’d be looking in the mirror and see something move behind me, shadows or blurry, quick movements. Of course, there wasn’t anything there. I was just stressed and exhausted,” she said.
“That’s what I thought, anyway. Then, the last day I was there, that all changed. I realized it wasn’t my mind, it wasn’t stress or overwork.
“That place is haunted. My Granny is still there. Maybe those dead natives, too, I don’t even know. But get this – there is a cave under the bluff on the west side of the house.
“That dream I kept having wasn’t a dream. Granny was calling me from the grave and she wanted me with her. Not dead, just not alive, either.
“I found that out on that last night. It started out like the same dream I’d been having, walking around through empty rooms full of dust, looking at old broken things. Then for some reason, that last night, I woke up.
“When I did, I was in a cavern under that bluff. I remembered, then, going in there through a huge old tree that had rotted out in the middle. It made a tunnel-like opening into the cave.
“The tree probably fell over a hundred years ago, maybe tightly wedged between other trees. Time and Mother Nature covered it all up and a little spring washed the middle out, so it made a natural cavern.
“Someone had gone in and braced it up, then for some reason, put in an underground house almost exactly like my Granny’s house. Why would someone do that?” she puzzled.
“Anyway, I ‘woke up’ from this sleepwalking spell inside that cavern house. I was terrified. I could look up through the boards and bracings and see into my house above ground.
“Don’t you see? Someone had been watching me the whole time! I was not imagining things. I tried to tell these doctors to go look for themselves, but no one believed me.
“It gets worse,” Anita paused. “Here’s where you’re going to think I’m crazy, too.”
“Granny was there. I mean, I know that isn’t possible. I buried her. I buried her myself. It was almost a relief, you know? Going back and forth from Trinity to New Orleans all the time was so expensive. I was tired, worn out.
“So I know she was dead. But she was in that underground house. I saw her. I talked to her. She forgave me for being angry at her for needing me so much, I guess. She sure didn’t seem angry. She said she wanted to teach me things. Coming from a dead person, even one I really loved, that was terrifying.”
Anita gingerly stood up, stretched and limped to the window. “This watery, thin winter sunshine always reminds me of that last week I was at mine and Granny’s house,” she smiled.
“But back to the story. When Granny came out of that bedroom underground and started talking to me I panicked. I scrambled back through that slimy, rotten log as fast as I could. I slid into the river when I came out on the other side. That’s how I hurt my hip and leg.
“When I woke up in the hospital, I told the nurse what had happened. I probably should have kept my mouth shut, I guess, but I was half-drowned and hypothermic, broken up bones … not on my A game, for sure.
“Sure enough, the cops went out to my house. They found Granny, but they told me she wasn’t alive. They said her lungs were full of river water. No way was she alive, they kept telling me. She wasn’t in an underground house, either, they said. ‘There is no underground house,’ the police chief insisted. ‘She was in the bedroom, lungs full of water.’ That’s what he kept saying.
“That’s not true. I know it’s a lie. Granny got out of that cave, too. She was coming after me, I think. She didn’t know I’d fallen in the river. She must have gone to the house looking for me. That’s all I can figure.
“She wanted my soul. We didn’t need our bodies, she said. We could live together forever there. That’s what she told me,” Anita trembled again.
“They sent psychiatrist into ICU to talk to me after that. I didn’t change my story at that point, but I was telling the truth, so I thought it would be okay.
“I figured someone would find out the truth. I mean, I know Granny’s still alive. I talked to her! She was just tricking them, probably. She maybe even wanted to get me in trouble, maybe she really didn’t forgive me. Who knows? But she fooled them good, because now, they won’t let me go,” she looked back out the window. “I know what I saw. I know what I did and what happened.
“I can prove it. You take this little map and go out there. Please, just go check it out. When you get back with the truth, they will have to let me go, okay?”
Three days of searching through thick brush turned up the old house, but a hollow log or a cavern couldn’t be located. The side of the hill did, indeed, show signs of activity. At some recent juncture, several trees had fallen into the river, collapsing the side of the bluff as they fell. Only a major excavation could reveal a buried cave at that point.
A request for a follow up interview was ruefully denied by her doctor. After hearing the report on what the investigation had revealed, the doctor admitted to feeling Anita’s story had a ring of truth.
“But,” he said, “Anita has slipped into a coma. We think it was a suicide attempt. Her lungs were full of water.”
[email protected]

Similar Posts

One Comment

Comments are closed.