by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground Magazine

Last night I dreamed that I was afraid of ghosts. Not just a little afraid, but genuinely freaked out by them. There was weird activity where I was living and it scared the bejesus out of me.

I haven’t been afraid of ghosts in years. The dream was almost as if I’d flashed back to the girl I was more than 20 years ago when I had my first experience with unexplained events in my WWII apartment. Back then I was scared. Terrified, really. I think I’ve glossed it over in the intervening years exactly how frightened I was. But the dream brought it all roaring back to me.

For a 21 year old, that apartment was a really scary place to live. I think part of it was because a lot of it was stuff that happened when I was sound asleep and it would wake me up. To this day, I still feel nervous about sleeping in places that are reportedly haunted because I hate being startled awake. My guess is that it all goes back to my time in that apartment.

I think another thing I found frightening was that I wasn’t so sure that the events weren’t actually caused by someone alive who was messing with me. Some of the stuff happened when I was out of the apartment – like coming home and finding the six foot inflatable Godzilla from the living room sitting in the middle of the bedroom, or coming home and finding the door that I’d carefully locked when I left the apartment unlatched and standing ajar. Those types of events left me wondering if the same groundskeeper who would sit outside of my bedroom window and smoke (true story) didn’t somehow have access to a key to my apartment. And yet the apartment management assured me that he didn’t, and those types of things continued to happen after the groundskeeper was fired (for stalking me) and the locks on my apartment were changed.

Finally, I think that the reason I was so frightened all of those (*koff*23*koff*) years ago was because I lacked the context that I have now for paranormal activity. They say that knowledge is power, and in my case, I definitely believe this is true. For the past several years, I’ve chased ghosts and hauntings. I used to make a point to go to any place that I’d heard was haunted. I’ve done almost since I moved out of that apartment – gone looking for ghosts when I heard they were somewhere. I don’t know if it was an attempt to calm my fears or whether I was trying to discover something and prove something to myself. I do know that part of it was just an attempt to prove to myself that I wasn’t some hysterical, crazy 21 year old girl who was freaked out by living alone.

The past year has been good to me. I’ve reshaped what I think and believe about ghosts. I believe they exist and I believe that, for the most part, they aren’t the scary creatures I made them out to be. As a matter of fact, I’d forgotten that old fear until it came back to me in my dream last night.

I can’t say that I’ll never be scared again. Heck – if I ever came across the ghost of someone who terrifies me (like Celine Dion), I might run screaming from the room. But my experiences have made me braver, and I am grateful for that.

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