Signs From My Childhood

Full transcript of the My True Ghost Stories episode “Signs From My Childhood.” Listen to this episode.

Hello and welcome to episode 18 of My True Ghost Stories. For the last few weeks, I've been talking about signs and messages from the universe, telling stories about signs and messages from the universe via found objects, conversations with strangers. There are many ways that the other side connects to us. And today, I'm going to talk about signs and messages, predictions and psychic moments that I had in dreams when I was a kid. In the neighborhood where I grew up, every family on the block knew every other family on the block.

And we called each house by the last name of the family that lived there. And these names are all slightly changed versions of the actual neighbor's names. There was the backstirs, the Wagner's, the Lindsay's, the Santiago's, the Calla hands, the Benetes. And for those of us who grew up there, we still, decades later, call the houses by those names, even though most of those families don't live there anymore. If there was one house, the Bohax.

We, the kids, we knew of the Bohax because our parents called the house the Bohax, but we, the kids, did not know the Bohax personally because nobody ever seemed to come out of that house. So, to our parents, it was just the Bohax. But to us, the kids, Bohax was the haunted house. Somebody existed in there. Somebody that we never saw.

So we made up all sorts of stories about the house. These days, like now, every time I visit my mom, we parked down the block and we walked past that house. And I tell my family the story every single time with the exact same details and they say, we know this was the haunted house. You never actually saw the lady that lived in there. And they don't quite believe me because now that house is really fixed up, but back then, it kind of looked haunted.

And these are the details that inspired this story for us neighborhood kids. The house was big, bigger than the rest of the houses on the block and it was maybe a little rundown, but it had a spire. You know, one of those round things on the top that it looks like the top of a tower. And to us, that is where a wicked witch might live. And if you looked down the driveway to the backyard, there was a three-legged black pot.

In other words, a cauldron. It was actually probably just a planter but to us, it was a cauldron. And there was this one time and I'm going to try to express it like a 10-year-old wood right now. The windows were open at Boax and someone was playing opera. And we listened and we decided that the only words that you could understand in this opera were the words kill and murder.

And that's the story that circulated among us roving vans of 10-year-olds. We never dared to play Ring and Run at the Boax. No Ring and Run is this horrible 70s unattended child game where you would walk up somebody's steps and ring their doorbell and then run and hide. I think it's also called Ding Dong Dash in other parts of the country. And I don't really get the appeal of hiding behind a parked car, watching someone answer their door, look around and then go back in the house.

But back then, we thought this was thrilling. And boy, did I get in trouble when my mom found out that I was participating in that game. Anyway, we called it Ring and Run and we never dared to do this at the Boax. But for some reason, we would dare each other to sneak down the driveway towards that cauldron and pretty much 100% of the time the lady who lived in there would start screaming out the upstairs window to get off her property, which we were used to because we were always trespassing on someone's property and getting screamed at for it. But her screaming would result in our frantic escape level running and hiding because we knew that she was actually an evil ghost who made evil potions in a cauldron in the driveway and played opera records about killing and murder.

So I just want to pause right now in this podcast and apologize publicly to all the people whose doorbell I rang and ran into all of those people whose property I trespassed on. And this is on the extremely off chance that any of those people are listening, but I'm sorry. So back to Mrs. Bohak who we never actually saw. Only heard her screaming out the window for us to get the blankity blank off her property.

Mrs. Bohak eventually moved out or died. I don't know which. I just know that the house was empty and for sale one day. And it was on the market for a while, I guess, maybe a year.

I have no idea. I had a kid's sense of time so it could have been several years. But in that time that the house was empty, I had a dream one night. It was a vision type of dream, no story or anything. And in this dream, a family was standing outside of Bohak's and I could tell that they were going to go up the steps and open the door.

And there were two young kids around my age and the mother had short black hair and she was pregnant. And they had a big black dog with them who growled at me. But they had them under control so I wasn't too scared. And in the dream, we were all on the sidewalk and I was just looking at them. And then the mother turned to me and said, there are two ghosts in this house and that was the end of the dream.

So here's what happened. Eventually that for sale sign came down. It was months or years later, I don't know. But it must have been a while because I know that I was older and I was no longer sneaking onto neighbor's property or playing ring and run. And soon after the for sale sign came down, contractors arrived and started putting up a chain link fence all around the property.

And we wondered why this was mysterious. Nobody was moving in yet. There was just the fence. And one day, soon after that fence started going up, I was walking down the block to the bodega to buy some candy, which was a daily routine of mine. And I saw the guys working on the fence around bohacks and I also saw some people standing on the sidewalk.

And as I got closer, I saw that it was a woman with short black hair, with two children, and a big black dog on a leash who barked at me. I said hi. Everybody talked to strangers back then. And she said hi and she introduced her to kids who were a little younger than me. And she told me that they were moving into this house.

She did not call it bohacks. And while she was telling me that, I noticed that she was pregnant. And she said, we are putting up this fence because our dog is a little crazy. And we have to make sure he doesn't escape or anything. And I was a little scared of the dog because he had barked at me.

But I saw that she had him firmly on the leash, so I relaxed and I introduced myself back. So after we talked a little tiny bit, I said goodbye and I continued my trek to the bodega when it all hit me. That was my dream. I had to make a big knit mom, two kids, slightly scary big dog under control with a leash and a fence. And I was scared by that.

That I had dreamed this exact thing. I didn't think it was cool or anything, especially because it involved the neighborhood haunted house. And in the dream, the mom had told me that they were two ghosts in the house. As far as I recall, I did not tell anyone about my dream prediction. I had had much experience with people not believing me.

Plus I was freaked out and I didn't want to think about it. This family, the one that moved into the bohacks, they turned out to be really cool. And my mother would talk to that pregnant mom often. And I assumed she eventually had that baby, but I don't remember when that happened. But what I do remember is that sometime later, I stopped to chat with the mom.

And she told me that they love this house. It was so beautiful. And that there were two ghosts. She went on to describe them. She says, oh, there's one at the top of the stairs and then one's in the basement.

And she was talking as if she was not scared of them. But I was scared while she was talking about it because this was the rest of the dream I had had. And there was nothing that I could do with this information. I couldn't tell anybody. I had to just keep it to myself.

I find that lots of messages and predictions come in dreams. And as a kid, this happened to me a lot. But I stopped telling people because they did not believe me or they would come up with what they thought would be a logical explanation of why I would predict that a pregnant dark cared woman with two kids and a scary black dog would tell me that there were two ghosts in their new house. Yeah, I don't think there could be a logical explanation for that. So like I said, the information from this intuitive dream went nowhere except suppressed in my consciousness somewhere.

And here is another experience like that that I had as a kid. My parents had many, many friends. Friends from college, from the neighborhood, from the food co-op, from the rock bands that practiced in our basement, from all over. Lots of really fun and cool people. And there was this one woman really pretty.

I have no idea who exactly she was and I don't remember her name, but we will call her Edith. And Edith visited our house a few times with other people, but I didn't really know her except that she seemed really nice. And one night I had this dream. It was also vision style like the one I told you in the last story. It had no plot or other details.

And in this dream, this pretty young friend of my parents who I am calling Edith, I was watching her from the side. And there was something like a ramp. And at the top of the ramp, there was a door. And the door was at the same angle as the ramp. It was slanted towards the bottom of the ramp.

And in this dream, Edith walked it to the top of the ramp. She opened the door and walked through. And that was the end of the dream. And you could probably guess what happened next. In the morning, my mom was upset.

And when I asked her why, she told me that last night, in the middle of the night, Edith had died in an accident. And this time, I just blurted out right away. I dreamed that. I dreamed she was walking through a door going up. And at the time, I did not understand that my mom was upset.

You know, and her reaction was to not want to talk about my dream, which is understandable. And I decided to leave it alone because it took me a little bit, but I did eventually realize that she was too upset to talk about my dream. A while later, maybe a few weeks, I told my dad about the dream. And he told me that when people die, they have a big dream. And he thought it would make sense that other people might experience the big dream of the person who was dying at the same time, which maybe why I had that dream about Edith.

And studies have shown that sometimes this big dream involves preparing to go. I put a link in the show notes to these studies, preparing to go like getting on a plane. And the studies are all done on hospice patients and Edith died suddenly, but maybe in that instance, she had a dream in which she walked up to a door and opened it. And I saw her dream. Or maybe I saw her actual ascension to the other side.

And this I will never know. But I know something supernatural happened with these two dreams. And I am lucky enough to have an immediate family who is open to this kind of thing, which is not the case for a lot of kids. And it's no one's fault. Most of us are conditioned to disregard these feelings, dreams, predictions, premonitions, intuitions.

In fact, I had mixed feelings about starting this podcast and telling these stories because I have been conditioned, not by my family, but by pretty much everyone else, that this stuff was not normal, not acceptable, not true, and don't believe it. It's your imagination. I got the courage to do this podcast and get a website and all that by reading a book recommended to me by my intuitive friend, Victoria, called Healing the Witch Wood. Also linked in the show notes, which is about this very thing, how we've learned to mistrust and even fear our intuition and all the history behind this push to hide these powers. And ultimately, this book taught me how to welcome this intuitive power back into my existence, get some courage and maybe go ahead and start that ghost story podcast, which is obviously what happened.

I'm very grateful to Victoria for recommending this book and to its author Celeste Larson for writing it. And I will talk more about that book in future episodes for sure. So if a friend or a family member or a kid or even a stranger tells you about a dream, a premonition and intuition, try not to shut it down. Keep an open mind that it could be otherworldly and that's normal. Thank you for listening to today's episode.

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