A Haunted Lifes Travels Read online

A Haunted Lifes Travels

  By Robert Winter

  ####

  Dedication

  I wish to dedicate my first book to my family, my children and grandchildren.

  We have experienced so many things together over the years and I love you for every moment we shared. My children inspired me to write them down and Katelyn especially encouraged me to get it done. My hope is for my grandchildren to read these stories to their children and say "Your Great Grandpa wrote these before you were born. Now who wants to hear a ghost story?"

  ####

  Prologue

  This should start with: I was there, I heard it, I saw it, and I felt it. I have decided to write about my personal experiences with the paranormal now after reading the stories of others. I have watched the television shows about ghosts and haunted places. The stories they share and the opinions they give in some cases are intriguing yet others make you want to change the channel. I believe that what I have been through is different than what I have seen and read. I like a good ghost story as much as anyone but I have experienced my share of the unexplainable by the obvious. Sometimes a believer is a skeptic who has had an overwhelming experience. Beginning with my childhood memories I want to share the homes, spirits, objects and places throughout my life that only certain family members are aware of before I am unable to recall them.

  ####

  Chapter 1 The Toy Car

  I remember being as young as five years old and a favorite toy car that had a special place in my heart and our home. I lived in a large house on S. Fountain Street in my home town. This was an original part of the city only a few blocks from down town. Large homes and trees that stood even taller from as far back as the early 1900's. The house was split into four apartments. My family lived in the apartment on the right side downstairs. My father, my mother, my younger sister and I lived in this particular apartment only a short time. We lived in another apartment of that house a time before this. I had a twin bed in what was once a large walk-in closet off of what was now our living room. There were no doors to my sleeping area but it felt like my own little room to me. I had a few toys that I don’t remember in detail but one I won’t soon forget. This toy always seem to be around when I couldn’t find any others to play with but it was in the same place every time I hunted for it. The toy was a small scale replica of an old car. Not the Match Box car size I still have but larger than I could hold in one hand back then. The car was all black and always shiny.

  It reminds me now of the Cadillac’s that followed a hearse in a funeral precession. Every time I would play with it and left it for some reason I would find it on the floor under my bed upon my return. Sure I thought it was odd even as young as I was but it made that one toy that much more desirable. Every night before I went to bed I would leave my favorite car out from under my bed on purpose. I knew that my parents would be asleep soon after turning out the lights and there would be no other explanation for how that car could be placed in the same spot each time. The toy car was always facing to the left as I looked straight at it from the foot of the bed.

  On the day we packed up to move, as we seem to do a lot of in my younger years, I remember specifically putting that car in a small box of other things I valued. My parents loaded the family car with our things as my sister and I played in the living room. When I climbed into our car to leave I noticed that my favorite toy car wasn’t where I had put it last. My first thought was that one of my parents had taken it out and put it back into the house for some odd reason. But why would they only leave that particular toy behind I wondered?

  I went back to the house to see if it had returned to its usual place as it had so many times before under my soon to be old bed. I stopped at the front door as my father was closing it and I was shocked for the first time that I can remember. My old black toy car was in the middle of the living room floor just a few feet from me. The car was pointing to the left as it had always done under my bed. I didn’t try to get to it and my father closed the front door to my earliest childhood home for the last time.

  I wonder now if that car was saying goodbye or tempting me to stay and play one more time as the door would be locked behind me for good. I have a collection of metal replica vehicles today but none quite like the one I left behind when I was five.

  ####