Date Submitted:  March 14, 1999

Submitted By:  Martha Jean

Type of Submission:   Personal Submission, Haunted Experiences
 

First, I want to tell you that I've never been published and if that will help convince you that I wouldn't know how to use the pen to convince you of these tales. And, something else: These began when I was a mere child and these are the memories I use to recount the events to you.

Daddy was a worker with the U.S. Defense Department assigned to Moron/San Pablo Air Force Base in Spain. We had taken a camping trip to Marbella and it was late into the night, way past midnight and only two or three hours before daylight. I needed to use the bathroom and so I woke my sister and a classmate who was spending the night in the tent (her family was staying there too). We went up to the women's community showers and toilets, finished, and headed back to the tent. About 50 feet in front of us, walking in the same direction, was a woman in a long nightgown or robe. She had very long hair past her shoulders. She kept on walking and I though her tent was closer to the water than the huge tent my sisters and I were sharing. Suddenly she walked into the water and didn't stop. Then, she was gone. This put to waste our time in the women's bathroom, because I peed there on the spot. All three of us saw this and yet today my sister Nancy denies this. Of course it was years after the next morning before I mentioned it again.

The next morning when we were all at breakfast in the camp's dining room I mentioned it to my parents and it was only after a few words, that they hushed me. But the campowner did overhear me (my voice is a bit loud and does carry); he proceeded to tell of a ghost legend that paralleled what I saw plus a story behind it that I don't fully remember. Either she was a bride or her husband had left her. The encounter was in the early 1960's., the summer of either '61 or '62.

Another encounter I had with what I later learned is called the paranormal took place when I was only 13 years old and again we were camping in the town of Almunecar (Camping Rincon de la China). We used to go to the Hotel Sexi's pool very often. A lot of cemetaries in Europe remain untouched and unearthed even after more than a thousand years and no more burials are done there. Behind the hotel wall, there was such a cemetary (I say was because I haven't been back there since the summer of 1968, five years after the event I'm about to relay to you.). Again the same sister and I were together. I liked to explore and she's a lot of fun. We were in the cemetary and I hadn't looked at any markers to know the names or dates of those buried there, but I started to cry because I sensed a lot of crying happening by those "living' there I couldn't see. Actually I could hear it and see figures fighting and people falling and dying. I ran from there. Nancy said she didn't have the same experience and she seemed a nonbeliever.

In 1968 when we were there again, Nancy ran with the bulls and had her body painted to be an extra in a Spanish beach movie being made there The piece was later edited out. In between these two episodes we did take a tour of a few countries there in Europe. This would have been in the summer of 1966, One night while we were in France, we looking for a campsite that Mom and Dad had read about in one of those tourbooks. We drove through a tiny town where all the shutters were closed on all the windows and noperson or animal was in sight. We thought nothing of this since it was very late. There were arrows made out of tree bark on poles directing us to the campsite we had read of in the book. I was very excited at this because it seemed the campsite was probably a 'cool' one -- a lot of fun. When we arrived there, we saw lots of tents in lots that were roped and each lot had a tiny, so very tiny one pice pedestal table in the farthest corner. We saw a lot of tents closed up, no tables or chairs, no cars; we speculated that this was because the campers were weekenders. Mom and Dad found an empty lot and backed up into it and then went looking for the managers office. I'm very certain they were away for at least one-half hour and when they came back they couldn't wait to get out. They had checked the place out, liked it and finally found what should have been the office but couldn't get an answer at the door. Mom and Dad rushed out of there so fast and didn't want to hear anything out of any of us. And they weren't talking to each other either. Unusual, because even though they seemed to always be arguing, that never stopped them to want to talk to each other. I started to tell them of what we'd seen and so did my sisters. Mom was upset, more so than she'd been in Marbella on the subjet. We did see a head go by the front of the car. I thought at first it was too dark to see the body beneath but the head left without coming back. Also when we left heading back out the exact same route, and found another campsite hours later, the next day we tried to find that place again and Dad knew we were on the same road. There was no such town, arrows made of tree bark, no such campsite.

There have been other experience since then, and I'm not proud of it because I've had a troubled, plagued existence all my adult life. As a teen, staying home one night in 1967 while my parents and sisters went out, I heard some noises in the far end of the house. I thought we had intruders and I was so scared of them knowing I knew they were there (mystery reader), I wouldn't look up from my book. I didn't turn any pages either. I need to go to the bathroom but wouldn't even budge. My neck sarted hurting but I wouldn't lift my head. I know that a lot of minutes passed. Suddenly I did look up and standing at the end of the foyer next to the piano was a man wrapped in a sheet and I thought I saw a hat on his head (my memory of him). It was the image of a very close friend of my Dad's who had died from cancer earlier that year. Dad accused me of rummaging through their room and pulling out the picture of Jim Hill and his wife. After Mom saw I'd wet my pant's, she claimed to believe me.

In the early, very early 70's when I'd stay at my grandparent's house sometimes at 756 Bluff St., Beloit, Wisconsin (a nice neighborhodd back then), Grandpa let me use the far bedroom upstairs with an attached smaller room I thought might have been a sitting room many, many years before or a dressing room. One morning I awoke and none but me was in the house. I expect Grandpa had taken Grandma to a doctor appointment, and Uncle Cecil was out, too. The extra room had a refrigerator now and a hot plate with a tea kettle. I set the kettle on the hot plate and prepared a bowl of cereal. Then I went to have my bath. When I got done, I still was alone in the house and when I went back into the bedroom the hotplate was turned off, the refrigerator shut. I was bathing when I remembered I'd left it open.

Another time, a couple of winters earlier, end of 1969, start of '70, I awok to find myself covered with a blaanket and the windows shut. It was my first winter in the U.S. since High School, and the blizzard that night didn't chill me even though it was way below zero and I graduated from a Brat's school in southern Spain. Since then I've had a few more experiences, though lately its feeling the mattrees lower on the side of the bed either side as if someone just sat down. I can't explain this. Sometimes the mattress keeps that indent sometimes it feels like someone just got up from sitting there. I don't always experience a chill. As I said I've had a troubled life. In my late twenties I was diagnosed Manic-Depressive, but a separate trauma, with nothing paranormal in it triggered the imbalance. Besides the only effect is that my words, gestures, facial expressions aren't usually in sync. But I do believe that either an angel is protecting me or a spirit has decided to protect me because as sheltered an upbringing I've had and the difficulty to adjusting to this culture, it has been said to me (by experts) that it is a wonder I'm alive. I've had atleast two near-death experiences I can remember bits and pieces of.        THE END?

                                    -Martha Jean