 Was the Tatum’s home haunted? |
 Kay says she heard the drill outside her room |
CASE DETAILS
Mysteries Unsolved - In a quiet suburb near Atlanta, Georgia, Jim
and Kay Tatum built a new home, with plans to retire. But in January of
1986, five months after they moved in, the Tatum’s began to experience a
series of incidents that would ultimately force them to put their house
up for sale. One night, Kay Tatum couldn’t sleep. She sensed a strange
presence in the hall outside her bedroom. When she got up to
investigate, Kay caught a glimpse of a man walking past her open door:
They said a ghostly man walked by the doorway
“It was definitely a man, and he
was swinging his arms lightly, and his head was slightly bent, and he
walked briskly past me. At first I thought it was my husband. And I went
into the bedroom and there my husband was in the bed, so I thought we
had a burglar.”
Jim searched the house:
“There was no evidence of any
entry, or of anyone having been in the house. So I thought perhaps Kay
had just been using an overactive imagination.”
Shortly after the incident, Kay began to suspect that it may have not been an actual living person at all:
“I had fear, and I was perplexed
about what happened. And while I was tossing and turning, I suddenly
remembered that I didn’t hear any sound as he passed me. I still am
unable to figure out why it happened.”
She said the drill was off, but it made noise
Two months passed without further incident.
Then, one night in March, Jim was working upstairs on the house. He
stopped when Kay called him down to dinner, and, as usual, made sure to
unplug his drill. As the evening wore on, Jim decided to watch a movie,
while Kay went upstairs to read. One hour later, Kay heard the sound of
the drill outside her room. She assumed Jim was teasing her about having
seen a ghost. But before long, she felt the joke had gone on long
enough. But when she got to the hallway, it was empty, and the drill was
unplugged. Kay Tatum:
“I was really frightened and I reached down and felt on it and it was ice cold. It had not been turned on.”
Now, Jim too started to believe something strange might be occurring:
“I was very confused, too. I knew
very well that something was happening because Kay is very
level-headed. And she was truly frightened.”
The strange events continued. One night, Kay
heard the sound of coins falling in a bowl. But she was alone in the
room. Another time, while cooking, Kay felt two sharp tugs on her
blouse:
“After that incident, I decided
we had a problem in this house. There was something going on. It wasn’t
something that we could understand or explain, but there was something
definitely going on.”
Did a small bell ring on its own?
The occurrences all seemed to center around
Kay. Terrified by what was happening in their house, Jim and Kay turned
to an expert for help, parapsychologist William Roll:
“The question comes up, why is
this family having these experiences? Is there some sort of ghost that
has come back to haunt them for some unknown reason? What’s taking
place? A lot of people have these experiences. It’s part of who we are
as humans, to have these so-called psychic experiences.”
Dr. Roll believes that memories can actually
be transferred to physical objects. These residual memories can be
triggered by ordinary people.
It wasn’t long before Jim finally had his
first strange experience. It started with a small bell. An early riser,
Jim always got up hours before Kay. When Kay woke up, she would ring the
bell if she needed anything upstairs. One day, Jim heard what he
assumed was Kay ringing the bell:
“I’d grown used to climbing the
stairs after hearing the bell. And so I did so, and it wasn’t Kay. She
was asleep. So I went in and looked at the bell, and it was there. I
obviously heard something else, other than the bell.”
After the third time this happened, the
Tatum’s decided to make up a code in order to outwit the entity. Kay
would ring the bell three times if she wanted Jim to come upstairs. One
morning Jim heard the call:
“It rang three times. I knew this
was Kay, because this was our signal, but Kay was sound asleep. And the
bell was in the other bedroom, where it stays. I went in and looked at
it. I turned around and walked out the door, and the thing rang again!
So, I began to, to see how Kay felt. I was frightened. My hair stood up
on my neck. I told Kay then, no more bell. I’m not going to answer that
bell anymore. And that bell has not rung since.”
William Roll is no stranger to these types of incidents:
“There are a number of haunting
cases that are not very striking, not very strong, but where the
phenomenon is, nevertheless, quite disturbing to the family. It might be
a bell ringing, a fleeting glimpse of an apparition. The events are
trivial, but they’re deeply upsetting to the family because they don’t
fit into the picture that most of us have of the world. And that image
of the physical world, particularly of our home, is intricately related
to who we picture ourselves as being.”
In the end, things got so bad that the Tatum’s moved out of their home and put it up for sale. source http://www.unsolved.com/ghost.html
