An excerpt from the book Where Spirits Dwell by journalist Karina Machado:
The kid who plays in Megan McAuliffe's apartment isn't hers at all. He's not even among the living. The woman has the ability to attract ghosts, which turned her life into a complete nightmare.
Cover of "Where Ghosts Live"
It's three o'clock in the morning, all normal people are asleep. I sit awake on the edge of the sofa and listen with horror to the sounds that come from my son's room. “This cannot be,” I say to myself, trying to dissolve in the darkness and become completely invisible.
Sounds, by the way, are not scary. Here came the sound of a child's drum. It seems that little hands are placing the soldiers before the battle and rummaging around in the box in search of a very necessary, but lost toy.
My son, Jackson, three years old, is not in this room right now. And there are no other children in the apartment. But I know that there is a girl in the room, and this makes me desperate.
I go back to my bedroom and turn on the light. The rest of the house is in darkness. Jackson sniffs peacefully in my bed, where I put him a couple of hours ago. I watch him breathe evenly. The eyes are tightly closed. The child feels that he is safe here and nothing that woke him up in the nursery will come here.
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Before that, I woke up five times from his scream. There was nothing to do but to move him to his bed, even realizing that he would no longer be able to sleep and the fidgety Jackson would definitely push me out of bed. I sit next to my son and continue to listen to the sounds of children's play, not daring to enter the room.
An hour and a half has passed, and the sounds continue to continue. From the outside, it probably resembles a horror movie, the main character of which, a woman with red eyes and a sinking heart, is scared to death by something that she herself cannot explain. I don't want to see anything. Gathering my strength, I send an SMS to my ex-boyfriend (Jackson's father), describe everything that happens, write to him that I am terribly scared. I need to talk to someone. He advises me to call the neighbors.
Gently wake up my son. I say that an animal seems to have entered his room, maybe a rat, and we need to leave the house. Phone in hand and Jackson around my neck, I carefully open the bedroom door. Closing my eyes, I turn on the light and run out of the apartment, heading for the neighbor's door. It's already five o'clock in the morning.
Photo: Getty Images
My neighbors - an elderly couple - listen to me kindly. They are worried and a little dumbfounded. They feed Jackson breakfast and pour me tea. The man says skeptically: "This does not happen, there is no logical explanation for this." With the first rays of the sun, a neighbor rises with us to our apartment. His first words: "Some strange sensation." Then he wiggles his nose and continues: "What is this terrible stench here?" The atmosphere in the room is really unpleasant, there is a stagnant moldy smell everywhere. I do not recognize my spacious beloved apartment.
Neighbors examined every corner, but found nothing suspicious. In the night symphony, they hastened to blame the birds that were busy outside the window. I was grateful to them, but this explanation did not suit me at all. I knew what I was talking about, and the sounds in the room were not fancy to me. I have already met the ghost of a girl when I lived in Australia, in Petersham, a nice suburb of Sydney. The baby even touched me. I will never forget those childhood hugs that caused me physical pain.
Three years have passed. At 37, I felt like I was split in two. Half of me works hard (I'm a website producer), raising a six-year-old son and trying to build a relationship with a musician named Anthony. The other half have been trying for twenty years to understand what happens to her at night. The main question is: why do I attract ghosts?
The first ghost came to me at the age of 17. I lived with my parents and two brothers in a Presbyterian condominium in northwest Sydney. One night I was awakened by the fact that someone opened the door and entered my room. Despite the deep night, everything in the room was visible as during the day. This was not a dream. I felt the presence of some kind of energy, something like a figure composed of dots, stood opposite me and sent a signal: "Leave, leave my room."
These events remain in my memory as a collection of short episodes. Here I am standing on the edge of the bed, and this creature wraps its arms around me, trying to calm me down. I resist desperately. In another episode, I'm sitting at the head of my bed, and a ghost strokes my hair as if to say “don't be afraid”.
Journalist Karina Machado
I have read everything that is written about the state of sleep paralysis, when people are terrified of falling asleep. I had something different. Every time before the visit, this "something" warned me with sounds. They resembled clap hands or the rustle of wings. At these moments I did not sleep.
The ghost haunted me everywhere, no matter where I lived or with whom. The script has been the same over the years. As soon as I heard the characteristic noise, fear paralyzed my body. I tried to fight it, but the ghost didn't care. He climbed into bed with me. I felt his touch, felt his embrace. I tried to chase him away, but he always came back.
He was not even embarrassed by the presence of other people in my bed. A former friend of mine, with whom we lived together for more than three years, often heard in a dream how I was trying to free myself from the ghost. One night he woke up with horror on his face. I - to him: "What happened?" He asked: "What does this creature look like when it comes to you?" “I don’t know,” I replied. "I'm scared to look at him, but I can feel his presence." Then he said: “I saw him. He sat on my chest and told me to leave you."
When I moved to the UK, the ghost followed me, disappearing only temporarily while I was pregnant. He started coming again when Jackson was 18 months old. I endured his visits for 15 years, and my strength was running out. It was time to end this. It is impossible to put up with the presence of a ghost in an apartment where a small child is growing up. It was becoming too dangerous for Jackson.
I remember sitting on the couch and thinking: "How can I get rid of him?" The room was dark. I felt that the ghost was here again, that he was moving towards the room where Jackson was. It was necessary to turn on the light. I quickly walked towards the kitchen, trying to control myself, when suddenly the sliding door to the nursery began to open and close by itself. It was not a draft. All windows were tightly closed.
I invited a very famous and authoritative medium to clean my apartment. He immediately sensed the presence of the old earth spirit. It turns out that I reminded the ghost of his daughters. He possessed powerful masculine energy. "How did you manage to fight him for so long?" - asked the medium. My fear made the ghost feel paternal. The repeated visits were caused by the spirit feeling guilty towards its daughters, whom it had raped during its lifetime, and now wanted to seek their forgiveness. The medium knew how to lead the ghosts to where they calmed down. That day I saw that spirit for the last time.
Photo: Getty Images
But my problems didn't end there. I returned to Australia again and settled in Petersham, in a wonderful, spacious, bright apartment with high ceilings. She was housed in a luxurious mansion with a rich history. The family of the Mayor of Petersham, Rollo Albert Cuyp, once lived here.
Cape's son John Leslie died in this house in 1885. The kid lived only 22 days. Following the Victorian rules, the mother of the child did not give free rein to her emotions, but the walls of the house absorbed her grief. In 1907 (22 years after the child's death) Cape himself also died here. I didn't know all these details when I looked around the new apartment. I remember thinking to myself: "How good it is here," not suspecting that someone was watching me. And this someone lurked for six months before showing up.
Jackson was still very young, and we dozed with him during the day. I remember being woken up by someone's touch. The little girl seemed to have her arms around my neck. The sensation was very unpleasant. Her embrace seemed too heavy to me. She held on to me quite tightly, and it was annoying. “You can't be here. Leave immediately! - I shouted at her.
After that, the apartment became noisy. Then you will hear that the door knocked or something touched the table. It seemed that invisible hands were moving objects, making noise. I tried not to attach any importance to this. My boyfriend Anthony also began to notice these oddities. He could come up and say: “You know, it seems to me that someone is playing in the children's room. But Jackson has been sleeping for a long time. And I answered him: "Okay, it's all right."
The fact that I ignored the problem only made it worse. I was shopping with Jackson one evening and Anthony took a nap on the couch in our apartment. Before going to bed, he carefully placed his bass against the living room wall. He was awakened by the shrill sound of a vibrating string. Anthony rushed into the living room and found that the guitar was standing in the middle of the room, on one side, swaying dangerously. The heavy guitar could not have stood like this without help, but there was no one else in the apartment.
That incident ruined our relationship. Anthony and I began to drift away. Soon he went to his ex-girlfriend, without any explanation. It was not like him at all.
About a year after her first appearance, the ghost girl started playing in Jackson's room. I was ready to move again and even informed my realtor about it. He promised to investigate, but all his new proposals did not suit me. I had to be patient and wait.
Jackson stopped being in his room altogether. He did not explain anything to me, but it was clear that he did not like it there.
Anthony came to see us one day. He stayed in the apartment for only a few hours. We were sitting and talking in the living room, when suddenly something thundered terribly in the bathroom. The antique mirror fell to the floor and shattered. For two years it stood quietly on the windowsill, and I didn't even touch it. Now only fragments remained of it.
I thought the child's spirit didn't like Anthony's presence. His visit upset the delicate balance that had developed. The ghost got used to me and Jackson and protested against new people.
I had to call the medium again. This time a girl who looked like a hippie came to us. Anthony and I watched everything she did. She went into Jackson's room. “There's a little girl here,” she said, and sat down in the corner and began to cry. “This is a very sad story,” the girl said that the baby died of an illness when she was three years old. The girl became very attached to me and to Jackson, mistaking us for her mother and brother. Eventually, the medium took her out of our house.
Is this where my story ends? If…
Soon, I again began to feel the presence of dark energy in the apartment, this time much more dangerous than the spirit of the child. A few days after the ghost of the girl was taken away from the house by the medium, Anthony and I smelled a strong smell of urine. Heavy fumes of the stench lifted us out of bed. We turned the whole house upside down in search of the source of the smell. It came from a small speck on the carpet, damp to the touch.
This was the last straw - literally, figuratively, in whatever sense of the word. We began to take the crucifix with us to bed. Anthony hung it around his neck. I held tight in my hands. I bought this crucifix in London as a souvenir. Then I had no idea that I would connect with him the hope of salvation from ghosts. My strength was running out. I didn't want to continue fighting the spirits of the earth. I'm tired of their visits.
We left our apartment in Petersham in 2009. When Anthony returned the keys to the realtor (not the one who had put me in it), he asked him a discouraging question: "Has your ghost gone?" Anthony asked, "How do you know?" The realtor chuckled: he had nothing to lose, and he said that his brother rented an apartment next door and the ghost of a girl came to him several times at night. This was proof that I wasn't crazy.
Anthony and Jackson and I are now living in a beautiful new building. “No more old houses,” was my main desire. But in our new home we faced old problems. A week after our housewarming, I woke up in the middle of the night from thirst. I went to the kitchen and heard the sounds of footsteps, from which my heart sank. “Top, top, top” is in the living room. “It can't be,” I thought. A few days later Anthony heard the same thing.
Two months ago, the toys in Jackson's room started making noise again at night. Now the three of us sleep together in the same room and are afraid to look into the nursery …