Chapter 1 Prologue and Don't Open Your Eyes

• There have been many things I have seen over the years that I can’t explain. Many of which makes me wonder if I hadn’t gone insane when I was younger. Or even sometimes I have wondered if I hadn’t died in my car accident instead and this is all something else. Several of these stories had come from true events that I made into fiction stories. One I remember well, Chapter 3: Who Says Death Is the End. I was in college at the time, living in the dorms. Because I was always depressed, I often thought of death. At Halloween, I had a cheap plastic glow in the dark skeleton decoration hanging on my door and it so happens to be, that of course that night it decides to move on its own. At the time, my boyfriend now ex-husband, had thought it was absurd that I was freaking out about a decoration. He didn’t know what exactly I saw at the time, until years later when other strange things happened that neither one of us could readily explain. The rest of the story, however, was made up to make the story more interesting. When I was a kid, I used to read all kinds of horror stories from various authors. From Stephen King to Anne Rice, to Dean Koontz. They all fueled my dreams from time to time, but nothing like my real-life experiences did. For instance: In Charlie, I really did have a ventriloquist doll as a small child. I remember one day my brother Bill came into my room with it in his hands. As a child growing up with parents that never had a lot of money, I was thrilled by the prospect of having something like that given to me. I would play with it at first, and even tried to do the ventriloquist thing, even though I wasn’t good at it. But the first night that it sat in the corner, I started to have nightmares. Strange dreams that ran ramped because of my highly creative mind. There were times that I could swear that after waking up, I would find it in a different place then before I had gone to sleep the night before. I would always wonder if my brother hadn’t been playing tricks on me to scare me or something. But one night in particular it scared me the most, when I woke up in the middle of the night and my room was pitch black. All I could hear was someone calling my name quietly from the side of the bed. Trust me, I covered my head with the sheet and didn’t come out till morning. The ghost stories stem from truth, because still to this day I see the shadows float through the rooms in search of something. Perhaps they don’t know they are dead or that they are shadows from another time like a memory of sorts that lingers in old houses. Or one never knows if they are buried under the concrete, because when these old farmhouses were built, there were often family cemeteries not too far from them. To give you an example: Just the other day I was walking out of the bathroom after washing my hands. I saw someone pass in front of me and go into the next room to the door. I automatically thought it was my oldest daughter because she had to feed her chicken outside at this time. So, rushing over to ask her something, I look around and see no one there. At that moment, I feel a shiver go up my spine, and then a coldness in the room that wasn’t there before. When I walked into the next room, I didn’t feel the strangeness anymore and felt fine.