Ghost and Me

By Kevin Killen

This book is a journey of searching and trying to understand the paranormal. For more than thirty years, I have experienced some form of paranormal activity. This book explores many of those experiences. From the first time I experienced a ghost at the age of five, to high school where I tried my first electronic voice phenomenon. Then, my first EVP capture on tape in my childhood home.

The book goes further into my experiences in several different schools and states, such as my experiences at a school in West Virginia. While not ghostly per se, the experiences had a paranormal feel to them. From there, my years spent in Waynesburg, Pa, where I graduated from college, met and dated a witch, and had several more paranormal experiences, including living in a haunted house during school.

The book goes into my experiences in Virginia, which include a haunted battlefield, a haunted theater, and a few haunted homes. After leaving the state and going back to Pennsylvania, there are more experiences including more evp’s, seeing my first shadow person, and an encounter with “something” that I was protected from by my pet dog and cats.

I return to Virginia to chronicle my experiences in a haunted work place, which included phantom noises, footsteps on the roof, doors closing by themselves, and a visit from the long dead woman who started the organization. During this time, I have several coworkers have many of the same experiences as I I did, sometimes together. I explain why working with addicted personalities can be a major reason for the paranormal activity, and why I have doubted what I have seen over and over.

Finally, some experiences I have had with my current girlfriend and her family in Maryland. I also take the time to explain why people shouldn’t think they are crazy when these experiences happen to them, and why they shouldn’t be afraid to relay them to other people, even though they may fear what they think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ozark Mountain Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005881375

Kevin Killen

Kevin has won five Virginia Press Awards during his time in journalism. Having stepped away from journalism, Kevin now counsels recovering addicts.He hopes this book can help others understand the paranormal, and to give insight into what others are experiencing. Kevin has never gone on a full paranormal investigation, and cant wait to do so.Kevin resides in Alexandria, VA, not far from his childhood home in Falls Church, where he had some of his earliest paranormal experiences. He is still experiencing the paranormal.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Thump, thump, thump went the distinct sounds of footsteps.

I am frozen with fear. Who could be walking upstairs? There are only two people in this house, and we are both sitting on the couch.

The solid wooden floor creaks again, and the foot falls seem to get heavier. I turn to my mother, and ask, Who is that?

In a calm voice, she said, Oh, that’s just my little boy. Little boy? The only little boy I knew of in this house was me, and I sure wasn’t doing this. But who, or what, was? Again, the footsteps started, and my mother, being a strong Irish woman, decided to go look. She ascended the twelve wooden stairs that led into a long corridor, her body gripped with fear. Finding the light, she quickly turned it on. Nothing but silence, but is something there?

This was my first encounter with ghosts, and I was only four at the time. But I recall it like it was yesterday. The footsteps echo in my head as I write. The smell of mildew and freshly cleaned pine wood invade my brain as I think back. I remember the ugly, green wooden furniture I sat on as I waited for my mother to return. I think back to who the little boy is. I was the little boy, there was no other. But no one else was in the house … so who walked on that floor? Had they always been there? These are questions that have never been answered in my forty years of dealing with the unexplained. I finally got the nerve to write down my experiences because ghosts fascinate me.

In every house I have ever lived in, I have dealt with the unexplained. I know thousands out there who say they have had similar experiences. While mine may not be considered bone chilling, they are scary, at least for the people who believe in the afterlife.

This book doesn’t have much in the way of phantom hands touching people, blankets being pulled off, or even a lot of communication with spirits. But what this book does have is plenty of personal experiences that I want to relate to an audience who is thirsting for knowledge.

One thing I do know: ghosts do exist. Let me take you on a journey into what has been my world for the last forty-plus years.

Chapter 2

They say the Irish have an inherent gift to be able to see into the future. Ireland is a magical place, with tales of banshees, little people, and other strange things. The Celtic people are very superstitious. The Irish also have the gift of gab, and unfortunately, the gift of consuming large quantities of liquor. The reason I bring this up is I believe a lot of my experiences happen because of my Irish heritage.

My mother’s family was from Cork, and my father’s from Belfast. Having Irish blood running through my veins is a fact I am extremely proud of. I know that tales from the Motherland abound here in America and, of course, were brought over from the Emerald Isle. When the Irish made their great migration to America, they brought the tales of the wee folk and the dreaded banshee, who is a harbinger of death, with them. Irish folklore experts have claimed that many of the high-ranking Irish families all have banshees. Some of these clans brought them over with them to America. I guess we weren’t one of the high-ranking families, because as far as I know, I have never heard the banshee’s cry, a fact that I should embrace. However, it has been stated that John F. Kennedy’s family has a banshee. If this is true, unfortunately, they have heard her mournful wails on many occasions throughout the years. Of course, no one speaks publicly about that, at least not firsthand. Also, I have never seen a leprechaun, never been enticed by his pot o’ gold. I have never seen the washerwoman of the ford, which is like the banshee. It is said that if you see this woman, you or a relative will die. Sadly, I have also never encountered the black dog who is said to haunt the field and moors of England and the British Isles. I used to read tales of these things as a child, get scared, and not want to go to bed. When I did, it was to fling the covers over my head and hope nothing was out there. Luckily, there wasn’t, or at least, not yet. However, as my life evolved, and I started to encounter the unseen, I believe there was always something there, but they were not quite ready to show themselves to me.

Experts who have done research on ghosts have always said children are more apt to see a ghost because of their innocence. I wholeheartedly believe this and have a few tales to relate from my childhood.

In 1975, my family consisted of my father, my mother, myself, and my three brothers. We had just relocated from the Philippines to Evanston, Illinois. My father was a journalist who worked all over Asia. I was born in Manila, the Philippine capital, and have been told I spoke nothing but native Tagalog for the first few years of my life. I have no recollection of this. One thing I do recall from that time is that my mother told us that Filipino women would tell their children that a kind of ghost, called a mau mau, would get them if they didn’t behave. I have no idea what this was, but it did scare me, and I bet it was even scarier in Tagalog, which I can’t remember. I am pretty sure my nanny Maxine, who spoke to me in Tagalog, said these things right before bedtime. As I got older and did research, I have found that the Philippines, and all of Asia really, have some terrifying ghost stories. Whether true or not, it would figure with all the bloodshed and death that continent has seen. I made some good friends growing up who are from Southeast Asia, Laos, and Thailand to be specific, and I share some of the things I experienced with them and some of their stories.

Anyway, my family settled into a huge house on Asbury Avenue in Evanston, just outside of Chicago. The house was probably built around 1900 or soon after and stood on a corner. It reminded me of a castle, with large brown bricks covering its frame and a screened-in front porch containing some sort of green bamboo swing with purple cushions my parents had brought over from Asia.

A story my mother had heard about the house is that a previous occupant was a real-life mad scientist. My mother always chuckled when she told me this. But the interior of the house, especially the basement, would give anyone that impression. The basement easily could have supported a laboratory, as large as it was. This is what I called home for nearly three years.

You just knew something was waiting to jump out at you from behind a corner. Luckily, nothing ever did jump out at me. But, being a typical youngster, I took it upon myself to search every nook and cranny of the house.

I loved running in the old house, especially the walk-in closet that connected one of my brothers’ rooms to my parents’ room. I would pretend it was a secret passageway to the gold treasure that I stole from the pirates.

Because of my father’s job, he was often sent away to cover various stories and conventions in other states. One time, he was sent to St. Louis for something, so he took my brothers. It was just me and my mother alone in the house for a few days, and that’s when we heard those footsteps I mentioned earlier.

As we sat down to dinner, and I distinctly heard footsteps overhead, walking along the corridor that passed the bedrooms. The upstairs consisted of three bedrooms and a door that led up to a very scary attic. My mother never did figure out who, or what, created the footsteps. When I was older, she told me she never really felt comfortable alone in the home and dreaded when she was.

She always wondered if someone died in the house or if the previous owner was really a crazy scientist who performed some unwholesome experiments. I don’t really recall any other unusual events while we remained in the home, but I did have some unusual dreams. I remember one dream because it really freaked me out. We had these large wooden steps that led down into what we called the front room. I recall in this dream that all my stuffed animals walked down those stairs and came over to where I was. I recall in the dream, I sat frozen, and didn’t move. It’s amazing how a dream from nearly forty years ago can be so vivid, I can see this image in my mind’s eye clearly as I write this.

One of my brothers did tell a tale that maybe was to scare me, and it involved the scary attic. I say I believe he told me this to scare me because if it were true, this was enough to scare the heartiest of people. Plus, being the youngest of four boys, it seemed like their duty to torment me well into my teen years.

My brother Jake and his friends would often go to the attic of the house, which was big enough for a full-grown man to stand straight up in. A typical attic, it was always stifling hot in the summer, and freezing in the winter. My brother had his train set up there and would spend hour upon hour playing with it. It was one of those old Lionel sets, complete with railroad crossings, and it would switch tracks with the little levers that came with it.

He told me one night that he and some friends were in the attic, and some sort of hand came through a window and started choking my brother. After a brief struggle, the hand disappeared out the window that it came in through. Being as small as I was, for some reason, I got the weird impression that this hand was kind of furry, and I don’t know why I thought that. I’m sure this tale was told to me when it was close to Halloween, so maybe that’s why I thought of it. I asked my brother about this some years later, and he has no recollection of it at all. However, I did, and it scared the hell out of me. Once he told me, the attic was off-limits.

Another odd thing happened in the upstairs hallway. Somehow, a small footprint in some sort of black liquid kept showing up. My mother would scrub the floor, and it would go away, but it would return later. The footprint looked like a child’s, but it was much smaller than mine. That always freaked my parents out. It was always there, and it seemed to dissipate slowly as time went on. By the time we moved, the print was just toes. Small, black toes. But they never went away. I have heard of certain bloodstains that never go away at a murder scene, but this was black, kind of like shoe polish. I have tried to research the house, but unfortunately, I haven’t found anything that could back up any ghostly claims like deaths or murders. I think it was just an old house. My oldest brother and I visited Evanston in 1991, and found the house, which didn’t look nearly as large as I remembered it.

But it was still as imposing and creepy as ever.

I found out many years later that