Okay, don’t expect some overblown “Amityville Horror” hoax here. Most people can share some sort of story about unexplained phenomena or real-life horrors they’ve experienced. My nuclear family just happens to have had its fair share of them. Here’s a breakdown.

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It all started when we moved into a huge Long Island colonial in New York in 1971. That would have made me two, my brother Roger would have been four, Mike nine, and my oldest brother John just entering puberty at the age of fourteen. Anyone halfway versed in ghost and spirit lore knows that youth seems to attract these energies, and I firmly believe that. This is my family’s story, but I can tell you, my brother Mike, his wife, and their two young daughters have stories of their own to tell about their lives in a different Long Island colonial.

Someone hanged himself in one of the bedroom closets in our house.

There. I said it. Now that’s a way to start a ghost story. Just like in a horror movie, my mother learned this information from one of our neighbors. She soon after learned about the odd symbol etched into the wood over our basement doorway. When she had a priest come to bless the house, he asked her if she’d had that mark put there, and when she denied it and asked what it was, he told her it meant that the house had been exorcised at some point. Second horror movie cliché…Check.

But really, ours wasn’t some horrifying haunting. It turned out we had a very pleasant straight couple, a man and a woman, living with us. My mother knew this because two scents often followed her through the rooms. There was a sweet perfume and a pipe tobacco. She learned to live with them quickly. She would smell their presence, and when sitting watching television by herself at night, she would see shadows flickering on the wall. She would simply say something out loud such as, “I don’t mind you being here. But please, just don’t make an appearance or I’LL probably drop dead.”

Mom may not have been spooked, and my father may not have believed, but the four boys in the house were a little freaked. John, the oldest, was most aware of the problems, like lampshades shaking spastically and items flying off shelves now and then, some breakable. In one incident, while gathered on a bed with my mother watching television one night, me, Roger, and Mike all heard a large piece of furniture rattling in the next bedroom. We expressed our fears, and Mom simply said, “That’s the dog bumping into the furniture as he scratches himself.” We weren’t buying it. Rowdy, our dog at the time, was lying at the foot of the bed.

Dare I even mention the basketball that took it upon itself to bounce up and down in our driveway one evening when my mother glimpsed out the kitchen window?

My feisty grandmother babysat her grandchildren once and only once. Moments after hanging a bunch of clothing from the rafters in our attic to dry, she was called downstairs by “those rotten kids,” as she endearingly referred to us. Later, she returned to the attic to retrieve the drying laundry…only to find it all folded and stacked in a pile on the floor. She made it very clear to Mom that her babysitting days were done.

The ghosts were very protective of my mother. One evening my father came home in the wee hours. Let’s say he was ‘out with a friend.’ Well, no matter how hard he tried to turn his keys in both the front door and the back door of our home, he could not get the locks to budge. The ruckus woke my mother, who came downstairs and easily unlocked the door for him. When my father was finished blowing his stack, Mom simply responded with, “THEY are not happy with you…,” before returning to bed.

I only wish I was old enough to remember these early encounters from the first few years, told in detail to me by my mother at a later date when problems started again in our home (we’ll get to that). As for our first couple of specters, things got hectic enough for my mother to have a sit down with them. Actually, she stood in the middle of our living room one evening and spoke to the thin air. Her message was simple. “Look. I don’t mind you being here. I’ve told you that before. But, if you’re going to continue to frighten my children, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

And that was it. They were gone. It wasn’t her intention, but somehow, my mother had scared away our ghosts.

1976 brought our whole town something to fear. The Son of Sam, aka: the .44 Caliber Killer, began his reign of terror in Queens and Manhattan. Our town was two blocks away from the Queens border. My mother was extremely concerned for my brother John, a Zeppelin and Kiss fan who had grown his own hair long, as had his girlfriend at the time. Son of Sam seemed to be targeting young men and women with long hair. I was only seven-years old when the fear of the scary movies I watched on TV was unleashed into the real world. My mother insisted my brother and his girlfriend leave the house at night with their hair tucked under a hat. Several times during that first summer, we would have guests over for a barbecue, and my mother would not let anyone with long hair step out into our front yard. One night in particular, my Godmother was visiting, and we were all sitting in the yard. She and my mother were talking about the killings and spooked each other so badly they dragged us all into the house. If we thought the killings were close to home at that moment, the worst was yet to come. That autumn of 1976, our family babysitter (who took over after my grandmother’s one-time stint) was shot by the Son of Sam only four blocks away from our home. Fortunately, she lived. I get chills down my spine just recounting it here.

Until I turned fourteen, I shared a bedroom with my brother Roger. This made it disturbing for me, to say the least, when he started to see a man standing at the foot of his bed in 1977. A man with one leg. I never saw the man, but my brother would stare straight ahead in terror, which naturally, terrified me in the next bed. This apparition appeared to him for a series of months and my mother tried to convince him that the man didn’t mean him any harm, but must be his guardian angel. On another night, we were all gathered in Mom’s bed as usual, watching a movie, when Roger suddenly parted from the group. He walked to the bedroom doorway and stood staring into the hallway. Mom approached him and asked him in a whisper if the man was there at that moment. His reply was an immediate and firm, “Yes.” Mom never had time to scare yet another ghost from our home. Within a matter of weeks, Roger ended up in the hospital…in the critical care unit...for over a month. He was near death at one point, and doctors could not figure out what was wrong. Eventually, they discovered the problem. Roger’s appendix had ruptured. Needless to say, he recovered and returned home safe and sound. He never did see the one-legged man again.

For a decade after that, our house was phantom-free. But things heated up again in 1987 about six months after my mother kicked my father out of our house for good.

The fault for the return of the paranormal was sort of mine. That autumn, I had my first big post-high school Halloween party. I thought it would be fun to use a Ouija board. Let me tell you, that was a real catalyst to some serious situations. It was all fun and games the night my group of friends first did it, munching on candy, sitting on my living room floor with our legs crossed and waiting with our fingers pressed against the planchette. The party was hopping, people talking, laughing and dancing, music blasting. The board began speaking to us very slowly, and before long, we were asking it eerie questions. The planchette picked up speed. Sure it was giving us all the creeps, but that was our intention. Then my dog, Floyd, named after the Pink group, came nonchalantly strolling through the room and suddenly, without warning, lunged for the planchette, teeth snapping angrily. That was the biggest scare of the night for us.

My mother was not in the most stable frame of mind with my father gone. I stuffed that Parker Brothers Ouija board under my bed after that Halloween party. My mother dug it out. My mother began to use it, by herself, late at night, after knocking back a few drinks. She came to me after only a few days with her concerns about the horrible things the board was telling her to do…to my father…to herself. I told her she needed to stop using it alone in such a vulnerable state. Whether it is spirits or one’s own psyche moving that planchette (the debate will forever rage on), dabbling in Ouija should not be taken lightly. I insisted she stop using it, and stuffed it back under my bed.

It couldn’t have been two days later when I was lying on my bed and felt this searing fire of pain shoot into my gut. Almost paralyzed, my mind frozen with fear, I was convinced that the heat was burning up through my mattress from the Ouija board under it. I hurriedly climbed out of the bed and rushed to a crucifix that hung on my wall (always a family staple even though we were not churchgoers). I took the crucifix in my hands and I kissed it. Instantly, the burn flushed out of my system. I practically tore up the rug running to my mom in terror. She suggested we remove the Ouija from under the bed and store it under the dining room hutch. Notice she wasn’t yet ready to get rid of the damn thing. Unbeknownst to me, she was still using it when I wasn’t home.

Several days later, I was up early for work (my music obsession had me working at a record store by that time). I was the only one awake in the house. I finished my breakfast—toast and a glass of orange juice—and set the plate and empty glass down in the sink. I quickly showered and dressed. When I came back into the kitchen to take my vitamins, I noticed my empty glass was still sitting in the sink…now filled with water. I stared at it confused, until I heard the squealing sound. It seemed to be coming from the next room. The dining room. I crept around the corner with Floyd in tow. The sound was much louder. The sound was coming from under the hutch. I backed away. Floyd did the same, whining, his head tilting in that cute, confused way dogs’ heads do. I knew that sound. It was the sound of the planchette’s velvet castors running across the Ouija board. Thing is, inside a Ouija board box, there is a compartment for the planchette, and the Ouija board is then placed on top of the planchette, making it impossible for the castors to even make contact with the board. Freaked out, I basically ran from the house and to my musical escape at the record store, pretending I had been imagining things.

Within a matter of weeks, my mother’s obsession with the board grew dangerous, to the point where it told her something so bad (which she refused to tell me) that she threw the board in the trash. Twice. The first time, it popped out of the trash and made a nice dent in her foot.

The Ouija monster was finally banished.

Several months later, I was sitting with my mother and my sister-in-law around the kitchen table discussing the ‘Ouija Incident.’ I decided it was time to confess about my auditory experience. Both my mother and sister-in-law stared at me with what seemed to be disbelief. I read their expressions wrong. They responded with two similar confessions of hearing the same exact sound coming from under the hutch. My sister-in-law had her encounter while playing ball with Floyd in the house (Mom always said, don’t play ball in the house). His ball rolled under the hutch. My sister-in-law coaxed him to go after it, which he usually did without hesitation. My sister-in-law did not know the Ouija board was under there. Floyd refused to go near the hutch. And that’s when my sister-in-law heard the squealing sound and basically fled the room. And of course my mother, so possessed by the power of the board, had heard the sound quite frequently, and had determined that she was going a bit loony.

Sadly, a year later, in 1988, Floyd, an adorable black lab/golden retriever mix and an incredible dog, died of Leukemia. It was my first great loss. We’d gotten him when I was ten in 1980, and I had raised him. We grew up together. About a year after that, sometime in 1989, something quite freaky happened to me. I’d been having dreams all year long in which Floyd appeared and I’d always be calling for him, or running after him, but just when I went to reach for him, the dream would end.

On one particular morning, while I was attending a music college, I woke from my sleep to see that the time on my digital clock read 6:51. The alarm was set to go off at 7 AM. I decided I would just rest for a few minutes more. I was lying on my back as I closed my eyes. Suddenly, it felt like there was a huge weight pressing down on my entire body. My eyes flew open, but all I could see in the dark was my ceiling. I couldn’t move my head. I couldn’t move my arms or legs. I was being held in place. And then I felt and heard the scratching. Like quick gentle scrapes by a set of nails, the sensation went all around the pillow into which my head was sunk, and then entirely over the blanket covering my body, from my neck all the way down to my feet. At last, the pressure was literally sucked off my body and I felt control being returned to my limbs. Nineteen-years-old or not, I bolted out of bed and rushed to my mother’s bedroom. The time on my clock read 6:53. It had taken two minutes for all of this to go down.

I don’t know what the feeling was, but I tend to think that somehow, Floyd had visited me. He had always made it a habit to come get me at about the time I would normally get out of bed, usually climbing up onto it and nudging me with his paws and nose.

A couple of years later, I experienced the same exact situation, but it was much less intense, and not nearly as frightening. Eventually, I had that first breakthrough dream in which I reached for Floyd, and felt him so clearly in my arms that it seemed real.

At some point in the early 90s, my cousin dated a self-proclaimed psychic who could detect paranormal vibes. My mother asked her to bring him over for a visit so he could walk around the house and give a reading. Mom gave him no information about the history of the home. His feelings were quite interesting. There was one small corner in my kitchen that bothered him and made him uneasy. He told my mother the safest place in our home was the dining room and to go in there whenever times got rough (although, I’d still refrain if there was a Ouija under the hutch). However, this psychic didn’t like the doorway to the basement, which was also in the dining room. This would be the same doorway that once held a symbol signifying an exorcism. Finally, the psychic proceeded to the stairway to our second floor. He got halfway up the first landing and stopped. He turned to my mother and told her he could not go any further. She begged to know why. He said he did not want to talk about it, but he absolutely refused to go any further up those steps. Steps that led to: a bedroom in which someone had hung himself; a second bedroom in which a one-legged man used to appear to a soon-to-be-sick little boy; a master bedroom in which large pieces of furniture used to shake of their own accord; an attic in which laundry took the liberty of folding itself; a bedroom in which a young man was pinned to his bed by a phantom dog one early morning.

After she got sick with cancer, my mother sold our home of almost thirty years to some local neighbors just before the new millennium. I often wonder if this family, which includes a number of young children, has experienced anything out of the ordinary. And with the passing of my mother in late 2003, I can’t help but wonder if she’s returned to the home she’d made so warm for her four boys, a home that had been her fifth pride and joy.

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