Our Readers Write
Scott recently posted an invitation to our readers to send us their stories, and I should add, do not wait for an invitation, send us your stories!
One of our respondents has offered up some terrifying events from her life.
Having lived through these events has taken a toll and she wishes to remain anonymous so for purposes of engaging readers, and because there are more stories from this contributor, I will refer to her as Joan.
Joan’s Story:
Hi there,
My husband loves old trunks-It was his B-day so I went searching the internet. I found one I could afford..it was very neat- looked like a treasure chest. I brought it home and started treating the wood. As I treated the wood odd things began to happen that I brushed off. The power kept going out. The doorbell rang…but no one was there…I stopped treating the wood. The trunk gave me an odd feeling so instead of bringing it to our bedroom, I left it in our kitchen.
The kitchen is located on the main floor. My son’s room was downstairs(basement). My husband and I lived on the second floor. For future reference there is a TV on each floor.
Anywho, for approx 1 week I could not sleep and was woken up by sounds of objects moving in the kitchen. I woke my husband up several times because I was terrified. I could clearly hear the cupboards opening and closing. I went downstairs with my husband to look (second floor, kitchen)- but found nothing.
After a week it got much worse. My husband and I awoke to the sound of BLARING white noise on the TV sets. All three levels of our house had the TV’s on and turned up to the highest level possible. This was at 3am. I jumped out of bed and raced throughout the house turning them off. My husband wrote it off and said it was just an electrical issue.
The next night at 3am our alarm system went off. It took my husband approx five minutes to shut it off. If the alarm is ever activated, lets say we came in the house but punched in the wrong code..the alarm company would call us within five minutes…The company would then call our friends house and notify them there was an issue as well (that is how we set up our system). SO, we sat at the kitchen table and waited for a call….We were very shaken..my husband checked all of the doors..everything was locked up tight. After 30 minutes we called the alarm company..figuring we could go back to bed after we told them to please not notify our friends…They said they had NOT received an emergency alarm alert.
We hung up….scared….
We moved the trunk to the garage and moved far away…leaving it behind. We could still go and retrieve the trunk..but we will not.The house is up for sale.
It is presumed by many that objects can be a focus for spiritual energy, so I wondered if the previous owner was pawning off an object that had caused them problems as well.
I never contacted the people I bought the trunk from after-wards. The woman I purchased the trunk from did not actually keep it in her house- It was in the upstairs portion of a old storage building located across the street from her house. She actually led me up the stairs with a flashlight because there was no electricity in the building. She told me she was a knitter and kept her yarn in old trunks for storage. She said she decided to sell the trunk because #1 She could not stack another trunk on top of it so it as inconvenient to own #2 She felt she had enough trunks she could let it go and let someone else enjoy it.
Curious that the trunk was kept outside the previous owner’s house, and in a location that had no electricity.
I know from having a neighbor with an alarm system that if you do not pay your bill, the security company does not follow through. That does not mean the alarm will not go off, it will. It will do so if the wind rattles windows. It will do so when the weather gets very cold. It will do so when the weather gets very hot. It will do so just because the neighbor is not home and it is 3 in the morning.
As far as as our alarm company- They were set up on automatic payments (so were the pest control guys) so I KNOW we paid them. I was always annoyed that my husband put those companies on automatic payment. On top of that we had I’d say at least Bi-weekly screw ups where I’d mistype the code and cause the alarm company to call us- We were use to receiving calls from them and contacting them (My husband kept the info in his wallet)-
Now my wife (then fiancee) and I had the opportunity to house sit for a friend of her family in Hawai’i, and I noticed an unfamiliar sound one night while watching TV. For some reason the television remote turned on the household computer that was across the room at a 90 degree angle to the direction I needed to point the TV remote. As we surround ourselves with more and more electronics signals are literally going to get crossed. I wondered about the TV’s all being turned on at the same time.
All televisions were the old boxy ones- two of the TVs were mounted in the upper corners of the rooms. Only one TV had a remote- the one in our room. The one in the kitchen was resting on a small end table type thing- The one downstairs with my son disturbed me the most- My son could not reach it- Yet there it was- turned all the way up with blazing white noise. After I shut it off (its located in a entertainment type room in the basement) I ran to our sons room and discovered him sleeping- I was shocked to see him sleeping but glad he did not wake up…
So there is just one haunting story from a reader who has been forthright with her information and not afraid to answer questions about events that she admits make her sound crazy. The trunk may or may not have a history of its own, but that is not the only way spirits are said to manifest. People can also be the key as you will find out in the next installment from Joan.
Keep telling us your stories
To satisfy my own curiosity I looked up George Burroughs & Sons of Milwaukee just to get an idea of their history.
George Burroughs was born in England and moved to the US at the age of 15 who live with an Uncle who had been a pioneer grocer in Chicago. Burroughs apprenticed to a miller and after a few years took up trunk making. In 1867 with the tidy sum (even today) of $2000 in his pocket Burroughs moved to Milwaukee and opened his own shop. He rose to a high degree in the Masonic Lodge, and was friend with Cecil Rhodes who established the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. Quite notably Burroughs marched in the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln, and was among those to place a handful of dirt into the grave.
Burroughs remained in the trunk business for fifty years, during which time he boasts never having laid a worker off, and many of them worked for him during the fifty years he lived. Burroughs died in 1921.
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