Читать книгу Communications From the Other Side - Anthony Quinata - Страница 13

After Iceland, my father was stationed at a naval base in Indiana. It was there that my youngest brother Steve was born.

We lived in a small town, and I went to a small school several miles away. I developed a reputation for being a weirdo interested in psychics, ghosts, and witches. Virtually every day I went to school, I was harassed about it. So much so that one of my eighth grade teachers brought a “test” to class which was designed to determine if someone had ESP. Guess who was the only one assigned to take the test.

According to my teacher, if I answered seven of the ten questions correctly, then it was “possible” that I might actually have extra sensory perception. I don’t remember what the questions were, but I do remember surprising everyone, including myself, by answering the first six questions correctly.

I also knew the answer to the seventh question. I could see the answer clearly in my mind’s eye. Now I faced a dilemma. Do I answer the question or don’t I? I was already feared and hated by much of the school, and most of those people thought of me as a nut case. Like so many kids that age, I wanted more than anything else to just fit in.

I decided that answering the question would only make things worse for me than they already were, so I claimed ignorance. My teacher and classmates all laughed at me. She didn’t bother asking the remaining questions. I did get what I wanted though. The harassment I was subjected to started to ease up slowly.

After that, my classmates began welcoming me with open arms. My intense interest in things paranormal gradually began to be replaced by playing baseball and basketball and by joining the track team.

An incident happened later that did keep my interest in ghosts alive though. One day I heard on the news that a female student at Indiana University in Bloomington was murdered the night before. Later that day, Julie, one of my neighbors, asked me if I had heard about what had happened.

I told her I had and she said, “Did you know that she used to live where you live now? She grew up in that house.” I didn’t know that, and now that I did, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It just seemed creepy to me.

I told my parents about it and that somehow gave them the idea that going shopping in Bloomington later that day was a good idea! I didn’t want to go, so I was alone in the house, reading a book, when I suddenly thought about the girl who was killed the night before. I thought about how she had lived, played, eaten, and slept in the very house I was in. Suddenly, the glass of a small kerosene lamp that hung on the wall between my room and Meridith’s room exploded sending glass all over the hallway floor.

I sat there trying to decide whether I should clean up the glass or run screaming out the door. There was another kerosene lamp hanging on the wall between two other bedroom doors that didn’t explode, which made me wonder if she had slept in either Meridith’s bedroom or mine.

I came to the conclusion that since I was sitting there, it must have been mine. That made me want to pack my clothes and move out, and I probably would have done so if it weren’t for the big wet spot on the front of my pants.

When nothing else happened for about an hour afterwards, I decided it was safe to change my pants and sweep the glass up off the floor, saying a prayer for the young university student as I did so.