Author’s note: This is the last of a four-part story on the haunting of Sheryl Rackliff of Rockland, Maine. Rackliff’s troubles began by using a Ouija board at a friend’s apartment and, when she went home, something followed her.
What’s in my home? Sheryl Rackliff wondered during the days and weeks after she investigated her friend Alicia’s haunting. She felt drained, emotionally and physically.
But more so, she felt she was not alone.
“I blessed myself with holy water, sage and strong prayers for protection from this thing,” she said. But her energy was gone, and a creeping sickness had gripped her. “I feel as I no longer have an immune system as I am always getting sick now and I got worse after I started investigating her home.”
As she sat at her 18-year-old daughter Amanda’s computer before bed one night, she heard someone say her name.
“I heard my daughter and her boyfriend and my stepdaughter and her boyfriend call my name quietly,” she said. “I listened to be sure it was them calling my name because I hear my name called in here often. I then heard my daughter’s boyfriend say ‘no one is in the kitchen,’ then they called my name much louder.”
As Rackliff approached the kitchen, she heard the cupboard doors and silverware drawer opening and closing loud and fast. When she arrived, no one was there – but Rackliff felt there was.
“I kept feeling like someone is watching me,” she said.
Soon, as the boyfriends prepared to leave, the noises began again.
“I was standing near my basement door and we all heard the sound of someone playing pool on my pool table,” she said.
“Oh, my gosh,” Rackliff later wrote in her journal about that night. “I hear footsteps coming down or going up stairs right now! Sounds like it is upstairs as I can hear walking. I still hear it, now it's coming back down!”
Exhausted, Rackliff soon went to bed, but her sleep was restless. The sound of pots and pans banging rang from downstairs. Amanda heard it, too.
“It seems to be moving all around this house,” Rackliff later wrote. “What type of spirit or evil am I dealing with? This has done it tonight as to putting fear into my daughter big time. Everything that has happened here this night has her very scared.”
Night after night the cupboard doors and kitchen drawers slammed open and shut, and something pushed Rackliff’s boyfriend’s daughter to the floor. Lights started going on and off, latched doors opened and the mouse on Amanda’s computer moved on its own.
Then Rackliff’s world exploded.
Amanda’s friends stayed the night to get up early for a trip when Amanda began pounding on Rackliff’s bedroom door. One of her friends was acting strangely.
“Jen had woken up and looked at Jofi and started talking about her grandmother saying (she) hated her, then Jen's eyes closed,” Rackliff said. “They assumed that Jen was sleep talking until then she opened her eyes again and started to growl and hiss.”
Jen kept growling and hissing and began pulling her hair. By the time Rackliff reached the room, the others were holding Jen down.
“I ran to her side knowing that she was being possessed,” Rackliff said. “I started screaming her name.”
When Jen pulled her eyes open, Rackliff could only see the whites.
“Her eyes were so evil looking,” she said. “They were … very bloodshot, they were very glassy and her pupils were very small. I started screaming for whatever was doing this to her to get the hell out of her body.”
Then Jen fell forward. They laid her down and Rackliff demanded to know what happened.
“I said ‘Jennifer,’ do you know where you are and tell me who is with us in the room,” Rackliff said. “She said in her own very weak, frail voice ‘Sheryl,’ then her head turned up towards Jofi. She stared at him and her eyes were creepy looking again then her fists tightened and she started to growl and hiss again and then in her own voice but more so like she was a man she said, ‘I am going to (expletive) kill her.’”
Jen began fighting but couldn’t break the hold. Rackliff demanded whatever had Jen to release her and Jen collapsed. After the girl awoke, the teens left Rackliff’s house and slept somewhere else.
“I am scared and scared very bad,” Rackliff said. “What do I do? Whatever I am dealing with – evil, possibly demonic – I honestly feel it wants me dead.”
Rackliff’s house is still active. She’s contacted people familiar with hauntings and hopes they can rid her home of whatever is terrorizing her family.
“Nothing evil will shake my faith in God,” she said. “Please pray I get my strength back and have the power to quiet it down until the team comes.”
Copyright 2008 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 c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
A Haunting in Maine -- Part Three
Author’s note: This is the third of a four-part story on the haunting of Sheryl Rackliff of Rockland, Maine. In part two, after a group of paranormal investigators stir up something in her friend Alicia’s apartment, Sheryl invites Alicia and to her home. That’s when the haunting gets more personal.
After a quiet night, Alicia and her children went back to their apartment, taking with them Alicia’s three-year-old granddaughter Dashia.
Dashia soon finds they’re not alone.
“Dashia screamed to Alicia, ‘Grammie, a man was whispering in my ear and breathing loud and made my ear hot,’ she said. “‘I screamed at him and told him to stop breathing in my ear.’”
The little girl’s claim was only the first incident of the day. Sheryl later stopped by Alicia’s apartment with her boyfriend and Meredith and found the activity had just started.
“We arrived just after Brie (Alicia’s daughter) had walked out of the kitchen and a pen came flying across the kitchen at her,” Sheryl said. “Then … we smelled burning coming from the kitchen.”
They rushed in to find the stove’s small front burner glowing red although that burner had never worked while Alicia had lived there. Alicia turned it off then noticed the refrigerator door open. Although she’d never had trouble with the door, it now wouldn’t close.
“She said, ‘what on earth? It always closes on its own,’” Sheryl said. “She repeatedly (tried to) show us.”
But the door wouldn’t close. Sheryl, her boyfriend and Meredith soon went home.
Days later, they lost contact with the paranormal team that investigated Alicia’s apartment.
“We could not find them any longer,” Sheryl said. “So I searched … only to finally find them working (in) Pennsylvania. I was extremely upset as it was such a bad feeling of abandonment.”
After researching the tools paranormal investigators use, Sheryl decided to handle her friend’s apartment herself.
“I had purchased everything any paranormal investigator would need and started conducting my own investigation,” she said. “This left me knowing why the (original team) never returned back. Evil. Pure evil. Possibly demonic.”
Alicia’s building, Sheryl found, had a sinister past.
A family of seven had once lived in the house. Soon after they moved in, something unseen began throwing the five children into the walls and the father supposedly became possessed, locking his children in the house and setting it on fire, killing four of the children.
Shortly after Alicia had moved into the building, Sheryl had a fascination with a pile of rocks in the basement and she soon found why.
“I have had this very strong fascination with some boulders and rocks piled up in the basement and just above them were charred beams from a fire,” she said. “There was a big mystery that lies below those boulders.”
During her investigation, she started moving the rocks – and found that something in the house didn’t like it.
“My EVP recorder came up with lots to hear such as it telling me to, ‘Beware,’ repeating my name over and over, lots of growling and hissing, swearing, you name it. All in a male’s voice,” Sheryl said. “I can say I was shocked but seemed to love it and grew more obsessed.”
Then, on another visit, she found something she wishes she hadn’t.
“Once I started investigating, activity started happening at my new home,” Sheryl said. “Each time I investigated the more drained of energy I became and the more irritable I became, which is not my nature.”
As she moved rocks from the pile, with Meredith and Alicia close behind, the basement doors slammed down by themselves.
Alicia tried to open the doors with no luck. She requested help and the doors opened.
“I am still tossing away and notice some sort of white material, so I moved a big rock and flipped it over, then Meredith screams, startling me a bit,” Sheryl said. “‘A hand. Sheryl, look at the bottom of the rock. A handprint.’”
A bloody handprint glared out from the stone Sheryl had moved. The white she had seen was a young girl’s skirt.
“I grabbed my stuff, leaving a few things behind to pick up the following day,” Sheryl said. “We just wanted out.”
When Sheryl arrived home, she discovered the skirt was in her equipment bag.
“I had asked everyone if they had put it in the bag and they said no, they did not want it removed from the basement,” Sheryl said. “Things started up very bad at my home. I put everything away not wanting to look at them any longer.”
The days went by and she grew increasingly weak.
Next: It’s in her home
Copyright 2008 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 c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.
After a quiet night, Alicia and her children went back to their apartment, taking with them Alicia’s three-year-old granddaughter Dashia.
Dashia soon finds they’re not alone.
“Dashia screamed to Alicia, ‘Grammie, a man was whispering in my ear and breathing loud and made my ear hot,’ she said. “‘I screamed at him and told him to stop breathing in my ear.’”
The little girl’s claim was only the first incident of the day. Sheryl later stopped by Alicia’s apartment with her boyfriend and Meredith and found the activity had just started.
“We arrived just after Brie (Alicia’s daughter) had walked out of the kitchen and a pen came flying across the kitchen at her,” Sheryl said. “Then … we smelled burning coming from the kitchen.”
They rushed in to find the stove’s small front burner glowing red although that burner had never worked while Alicia had lived there. Alicia turned it off then noticed the refrigerator door open. Although she’d never had trouble with the door, it now wouldn’t close.
“She said, ‘what on earth? It always closes on its own,’” Sheryl said. “She repeatedly (tried to) show us.”
But the door wouldn’t close. Sheryl, her boyfriend and Meredith soon went home.
Days later, they lost contact with the paranormal team that investigated Alicia’s apartment.
“We could not find them any longer,” Sheryl said. “So I searched … only to finally find them working (in) Pennsylvania. I was extremely upset as it was such a bad feeling of abandonment.”
After researching the tools paranormal investigators use, Sheryl decided to handle her friend’s apartment herself.
“I had purchased everything any paranormal investigator would need and started conducting my own investigation,” she said. “This left me knowing why the (original team) never returned back. Evil. Pure evil. Possibly demonic.”
Alicia’s building, Sheryl found, had a sinister past.
A family of seven had once lived in the house. Soon after they moved in, something unseen began throwing the five children into the walls and the father supposedly became possessed, locking his children in the house and setting it on fire, killing four of the children.
Shortly after Alicia had moved into the building, Sheryl had a fascination with a pile of rocks in the basement and she soon found why.
“I have had this very strong fascination with some boulders and rocks piled up in the basement and just above them were charred beams from a fire,” she said. “There was a big mystery that lies below those boulders.”
During her investigation, she started moving the rocks – and found that something in the house didn’t like it.
“My EVP recorder came up with lots to hear such as it telling me to, ‘Beware,’ repeating my name over and over, lots of growling and hissing, swearing, you name it. All in a male’s voice,” Sheryl said. “I can say I was shocked but seemed to love it and grew more obsessed.”
Then, on another visit, she found something she wishes she hadn’t.
“Once I started investigating, activity started happening at my new home,” Sheryl said. “Each time I investigated the more drained of energy I became and the more irritable I became, which is not my nature.”
As she moved rocks from the pile, with Meredith and Alicia close behind, the basement doors slammed down by themselves.
Alicia tried to open the doors with no luck. She requested help and the doors opened.
“I am still tossing away and notice some sort of white material, so I moved a big rock and flipped it over, then Meredith screams, startling me a bit,” Sheryl said. “‘A hand. Sheryl, look at the bottom of the rock. A handprint.’”
A bloody handprint glared out from the stone Sheryl had moved. The white she had seen was a young girl’s skirt.
“I grabbed my stuff, leaving a few things behind to pick up the following day,” Sheryl said. “We just wanted out.”
When Sheryl arrived home, she discovered the skirt was in her equipment bag.
“I had asked everyone if they had put it in the bag and they said no, they did not want it removed from the basement,” Sheryl said. “Things started up very bad at my home. I put everything away not wanting to look at them any longer.”
The days went by and she grew increasingly weak.
Next: It’s in her home
Copyright 2008 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 c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.
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