Disembodied Voices -- Part 2

Author’s note: This is the second of a two-part story about a family plagued by disembodied voices.

The voice came from downstairs, but Alex McFeeters didn’t know why he heard his father’s voice. His father, Craig, wasn’t supposed to be home.

“Alex, come down here,” the voice said.

Alex went downstairs; maybe his father had gotten home early.

“He said that it sounded like I was sitting in the recliner, that I normally am sitting in, and that was where the sound came from,” Craig said. “He was surprised to see that I wasn’t there in the recliner.”

Alex walked around the house, but couldn’t find his father and Craig’s truck wasn’t in the drive. Alex realized something chilling – his dad wasn’t home.

“I asked him if he was certain that it was my voice,” Craig said. “He said that it was my voice, it wasn’t someone else’s.”

This was two weeks after Craig had heard a woman calling from outside his house – a woman who wasn’t there.

“This is a strange event, no doubt,” Craig said. “But this goes much deeper. This has happened to all of us in my family, where we hear the voice of one another, but that person isn’t home.”

Craig has heard the disembodied voices of his family for years.

“Numerous times I would be in the basement of our old house on the computer and I would hear my wife holler downstairs for me,” he said. “I would go upstairs and no one was home.”

The instances got so real for Craig he would often hear the front door open and close and feet shuffle across the floor.

“Then I wouldn’t hear anything more, no footsteps across the floors of the house like they had come on in,” he said. “Then I would go upstairs and no one was home.”

Craig’s wife heard this, too. One day as she sat in the downstairs office, working on the family’s computer, someone called to her.

“She heard me open up the door at the top of the steps and holler down for her, calling her name and then she heard nothing,” Craig said. “After a few minutes she came upstairs, and no one was home. This spooked her a bit.”

Then the voices – voices of family members – began shouting out more and more.

“We aren’t hearing someone else coming into the house, or calling for us, we are hearing the actual sounds and voices of people in our family,” Craig said. “I’ve heard my wife, she has heard me, our son heard my voice, so what is going on here?”

Craig began keeping tabs on the voices and found everyone in his household heard them.

“It seems in every case that one of us has been alone in the house, and the party that they heard, they were expecting home at any moment,” Craig said. “Then it seems like about 10 minutes, sometimes more, before the person or people return home, one of us hears them either come in the door or holler downstairs for them.”

At first Craig thought the voices and sounds of his family coming home may be a phenomenon similar to people seeing ghosts in their home doing things they would have in life.

“I wondered about it being some kind of residual energy at first,” he said. “Maybe something that builds up in the matter of the house or the walls or something.”

But he soon dismissed that because the voices his family hears are of people who are expected home soon. Craig thinks these auditory experiences might relate to a psychic connection he has with his family.

“It is like an anticipation of them coming home, or something,” he said. “I believed that my wife and kids were going to be home soon, and then what I hear is them all returning home, coming in the door, and the distinct sound they normally make coming in the door.”

Alex had the same feeling when he heard Craig call to him.

“My son believed that I would likely be home before long, and he heard me call for him,” Craig said. “Very strange indeed. I don’t know that I’ve heard or seen other reports of this type of thing, but I have to believe if it is happening to us, that it happens to other people as well.”

Whatever the cause, Craig and his family continue to hear voices and footsteps of people who aren’t there. Maybe the McFeeters on the road are just unconsciously telling the McFeeters at home that everything’s fine.

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.