detached ghost sightings.

That could be a portal, and they could be passing through.
(I'm joking. I borrowed this from an online magazine
called uncube magazine.)

I have a half-day off, Internet, and it feels fabulous. I've met with almost all of my kids' parents, and they are fabulous. Fabulous kids = fabulous parents and vice versa. You do know the saying "apples don't fall far from trees" is true, yes? It is. I don't know who put this class together or why I was given them, but I would like to find that person and hug them. Maybe buy them dinner. Something. They are going to carry me through the rest of this year. 

So I was thinking about what I wrote about last time. Apparently, it worried some people? I mean, my mom texted and emailed me to let me know she was thinking about me and loved me. And I got sent a ton of messages about how loved and awesome I am. So I feel like I need to clarify what I wrote:

1. I am not depressed. Have I been depressed recently? Yes. Because of burn out. There have been some really dark, bad days. But when I wrote THAT blog, I was actually pretty fine. 

2. What I feel is detached. I don't think this is a bad thing. I mean, Buddha said it's the goal to Enlightenment - don't cling to anyone or anything, that's the key to a perfect state of being. None of this is permanent; none of this is real. People aren't possessions; love is fluid. Let go. Detach.

I guess some people hear that word and go: oh, Amy doesn't want to participate in life anymore. No, no. I'm pretty cool participating in life and socializing and all that. When I say "detached," what I mean is: you do you, I'll do me. I don't have the energy right now to worry about why someone said this or didn't say that, or why someone did this or didn't do that. I don't care WHAT you do, quite frankly. You want to read this blog and blow me kisses? Have at it. You want me to clean your kitchen and take your trash out and operate on your time schedule and blow you kisses and follow your rules? Hell freaking NO. 

As long as you aren't hurting me or my kid, as long as you aren't being a complete and total douchebag, as long as you aren't trying to load me down with expectations and demands that meet YOUR needs, do it. Rock on, motherrocker. Meanwhile, I'll be over here wallowing or dancing or reading or writing or whatever...don't worry about me. I'm doing exactly the things I need to do to meet MY needs; I don't need or want anything from anybody else. I've learned if I can't get it or find it or give it to myself, then it's probably not something I really need to be pursuing in the first place. 

So I'll be just fine. You do you, I'll do me. That's what "detached" means. To me, at least.

3. That's it. That's all I was saying in that last post.

In THIS post, what I want to say is:

I got to hang out in a real haunted house the other night. I tweeted about it, and meant to include Jason Hawes in the tweet so he could come find me and keep me safe but I totally forgot about Jason in all my excitement. My friend R - she lives in a house with haints, you guys! The house is beautiful. (R, your gigantic house is gorgeous and also I'm so glad I don't have to clean it!) But it's also right next to Dawson Forest, which is well-known for being a dark and creepy woods. Several years ago, a serial killer (or at the very least a terrifying psycho drifter who went off the deep end) named Gary Michael Hilton bludgeoned a hiker named Meredith Emerson to death and then decapitated her, dumping her body in Dawson Forest. Three other murdered people have been dumped there over the last 12 or so years. People regularly commit suicides in Dawson Forest. Also in the vicinity of R and family lives a family of crazy people who keep fake heads on spikes in their yard and shoot at them. This is totally like Deliverance meets The Exorcist meets The Blair Witch Project. It's the BESTEST.

Years ago, I had a friend who lived in some apartments near a graveyard. The apartment complex was fairly new, but sometimes she'd wake up to see shadow figures standing in her bathroom. Finally, a boyfriend let her know: those are the people from the graveyard. They're passing through, and your bathroom is a portal. 

Holy crap, Internet! I hope none of you live in a portal! I can't imagine anything more freaky and terrifying than constantly waking up to dead strangers standing around, looking very confused in your bathroom. At 3 AM. Watching you pee.

So I think R's house is a portal of some sort. A creepy Dawson Forest portal. It has a little girl in it; she's often seen standing outside the laundry room. R's son's bedroom door opens and closes all by itself, sometimes right in front of you. R was asleep one night with one of her feet hanging off the side of the bed and something tugged on her big toe three times. Once, she heard a southern woman say to her very loud and clear: "Hello!" And their basement just has a general, overall creep factor to it that made it absolutely impossible for me to be there alone on my visit. R says she's perfectly fine being down there by herself, but I sense she's a ghost whisperer of some sort. 

The children played down there the other night just fine because there's a movie theater with a stage and a karaoke machine that they didn't use to sing into but to make very loud sounds and tell Yo Mama jokes. I, however, had to use the bathroom upstairs at one point and to get to THAT, I was forced to walk down a hallway and go by a pitch black bedroom with door wide open. Any thing could have leapt out of the black maw and chewed my face off! I almost screamed my head off, running to make it to the bathroom to turn the light on as fast as I could. I don't want any creepy, cold, bony fingers of death touching me and stuff. 

When I was growing up in Kentucky, I think our house was haunted. The first house we lived in was. That was the Streamland Drive house, and I swear the downstairs basement had SOMEthing in it. There was a laundry room down there, an office/den, and a big, finished multi-use room we used as a TV and playroom. I was fine in the TV/playroom, fine in the laundry room...never ever wanted to go into the office/den. It just felt creepy.

Once, when I was asleep, I remember waking up because I felt like I was levitating above my bed. When I opened my eyes, I could see two ladies dressed in early 1900s garb standing at the foot of it, just watching me, one dressed in purple. To this day, I don't know if they were ghosts or angels because when I was in college I visited a psychic who told me I have two guardian angels, and one is an older lady who always dresses in purple. (The other is young man who wears yellow, and he's ridiculously protective of me; he's not going to let anything really bad happen to me...and so far he's done a fairly decent job, I must commend him.)

So. Still want to go on a ghost hunt. But now it's been confirmed for me: I CANNOT EVER BE ALONE. Seriously. I'd totally be the one the poltergeist would eat first.