The Haunted Duplex
By Sharon Renae, Spiritual Counselor

"I’m telling you, it’s haunted."

"No, it’s not, you just have an over-active imagination," he would say diligently.

We had been married less than a year and were living in a three room duplex in Benson, Arizona. My then husband’s old stomping grounds, I was all of eighteen.

He worked three hours away from home, and was living in the dormitory of his employer, Magma Copper Company, in San Manuel, Arizona as an underground miner. He would come home on his days off. He worked rotating shifts, so he would be home for one, two, and four day increments.

I worked at a small pizza parlor just down the street and would walk to and from work.

It all began very suddenly. I would come home after the lunch shift and my furniture would be turned around backwards, lamps no longer on the end tables but standing in the middle of the floor. It smelled of cheap perfume.

When I worked evenings, I would leave the porch light and the living room light on. I did not like to come home to the dark. When I arrived the lights would be off. Most everyone would tell me I must have forgotten to turn them on.

One night I decided to leave them off. When I came home all the lights were on and the shower was running. I thought my husband had decided to surprise me and come home. I was really excited, except the shower was empty!

There was a store room between our homes in the duplex. At night it would sound as if it were being rearranged. My neighbors said they never heard anything when I would ask them about it.

One of my husband’s favorite meals included home cooked butter beans. I had taken the package of beans out of the cupboard before going to work and set them on the counter so I could remember to start them when I came home from work that afternoon.

Again, when I returned, the housed smelled like bad perfume and the furniture had been rearranged. I just left it and went into the small kitchen to
begin making the butter beans, only they weren’t there.

I cleaned out all the cabinets, went through the refrigerator, the garbage and nothing.

When my husband came home I told him about the missing beans, he went to the cabinet, opened the door and out they flew. He shook his head and said something about how I must have forgotten where I put them.

It was getting harder to sleep at night with the banging in the store room, my husband had begun to hear it on the nights he slept at home. He even got up one night and went in there to see if someone was sneaking in at night.  After finding nothing, he decided it was probably a mouse or something and set some traps the next day.

He finally started to believe something was going on when we had gone off one evening. We returned to find the porch light off and the furniture rearranged. He called the landlord and asked if she had been in the apartment, she had said no, followed by a lecture of how he had insulted her by accusing her of such a thing.

I had seen things others didn’t, and it’s not what I would see that frightened me. It was always what I couldn’t that bothered me the most. It was a helpless feeling like something off into the distance, neither here nor there. When there is a silent communication it is not easy to understand. This was silence to me. I wasn’t use to spirits separating themselves, usually they were always happy to say "Hello, here I am." But this was different.  But that’s not all, wait to you hear what happened next!

While I was working one day, I began to tell my boss about all the activity I was having in my apartment. She was open and kept asking questions. It was a relief to me to talk about it.

What she found most interesting was the activity had come on quite suddenly.  She mentioned that it was interesting that this happened shortly after the suicide of a lady down the street. I lived two blocks down from the pizza parlor where I worked and the lady who died lived at the end of the block in between my house and the pizza parlor.

Her friend who had stopped by seemed to be quite knowledgeable about ghosts, and told me I needed to find out who was there and I should get rid of them as soon as possible. The longer they stayed, the harder it was to make them go.

A couple of days later my landlady was over putting things in the storage room. She was a drinker, (and no one’s secret was safe with her.) She began telling me about a tenant she had had many years ago. She went on and on, and then said, "it’s too bad she killed herself recently."

The hair on my neck stood up, I swallowed and then asked, "Did she live up the street, where the second hand store is?"

"You knew Dorothy?" she asked.

"No, just heard about it."

I thought this was really going to be the topic at work come Monday, little did I know.

Since it was Friday, my husband came home for the weekend. It went quite well, with only a few incidents.  The toilet flushed itself a few times, and the kitchen cabinets kept opening themselves up, but that was about it.

He had to leave for work about 4:00 a.m. on Monday, so we got up at 3:00 a.m. I was going into the kitchen to make his coffee and pack him a lunch when SMACK! I hit some kind of electrical wall. I fell with a thud upon my backside.  This shook both of us up, since we had recently found out I was pregnant. My husband sent me off to bed to rest and make sure everything was okay. It must have been because I went right back to sleep.

When I awoke I headed towards the bathroom. The entire house smelled of cheap perfume and made me nauseous, and I could strongly feel the presence of someone else. So in my stupidity I shouted, "Tell me what you want or get the hell out!"  Then continued into the bathroom.

When I came out and went into the living room, a lady was lying on my couch. She had long reddish hair and was wearing a pink fuzzy robe and slippers.  She smiled at me as if we were old friends.

I had a lump in my throat, I didn’t know if I was going to laugh of cry. I was petrified. Somewhere within the courage came.

"Are you Dorothy?" I asked.

"Yes, I am. I am so excited you know who I am so we can be friends."

"Are you earthbound?"

"I prefer to call it purgatory, but yes, it seems that way. Won’t you come and sit so we can talk?" She patted a green vinyl ottoman beside her and I went to it and sat down, quite terrified.

She reached out and put her hand on my wrist, it was so very cold and began to tell me about her happier days when she lived in the apartment. She had chosen to go back to the place that held her best memories.

She talked and talked. She talked about how we could be friends and share the apartment.

I remembered how my boss’ friend had said "don’t let them stay."

We talked a long time. Her about staying, me about her going to the Light.  I told her there were others who could understand and help her and that was where she needed to go, and that I wouldn’t always be there in that apartment that I would soon be moving.

Somehow, God helped me find the right thing to say and she agreed to go into the Light and leave the apartment and purgatory.

The entire room filled with warm golden light, she laughed and was gone.

Sharon Renae is a professional psychic residing in Navarre Florida. She holds weekly channeling sessions and is available for private readings. For more information contact her at 850-939-3806 or http://www.sharonrenae.com.