Head on the Fence.

This happened earlier tonight to me, and I am still a bit freaked out by it, but thought I would share to see if anyone has any explanation other than my own conclusions. Unfortunately the only thing I can provide is my word, because it happened so quickly that I couldn't even get anyone in the room with me to turn around quick enough to see what I had seen. I do not take drugs, nor have I ever had any mental problems in the past, but I have had more than my fair share of strange experiences in several houses.

I didn't consider this house haunted at all, because up until tonight I have had no occurances happen to me, but others have here.

I was standing in the kitchen with my mother and my aunt. We've just had new windows fitted, and my family members were cleaning up the resulting mess and I was taking a break, looking at the kitchen window. My mother asked me to turn on the light, because the sun was setting and it was getting difficult to see. She was to my left, window in front of me, light switch slightly behind me to the right.

I looked at her, and as I brought my head around to look at the switch, my gaze was momentarily outside the window staring at a womans head on top of the midriff height fence that runs right next to our window. It happened so quickly that by the time I had registered the woman, I had to bring my eyes back for a double take. In that split second the head had gone, and no one else saw her.

My neighbour has blue garden chairs up against his side of that fence, and I couldn't see them through the head. I also noted that it was a different colour from the fence itself, a ruddy light pink compared to the red of the fence. She had some kind of hat covering dark brown hair, and shadows where her eyes should have been.

This is honestly so vivid that I could even draw a picture of her right now, and I think I will.

The occurance my mother had just over a year ago when we moved in was when she was down on the floor hand washing a stubborn patch on the wood. She saw an old woman from the corner of her vision who was not there, and my aunt herself has heard knocking noises in the hallway when she spent the night here that lasted for over two hours with no explanation. She explained as the sound of the light switch, and a distinct feeling that someone was about to enter the room, but no one came in.

I am wondering if I am witnessing the same entity, as these things only happen when we are carrying out the renovation works on this house, ruined by the previous owner. Neighbours tell us that the owner before them was an old woman who was very house proud. They do not know about the strange things that we have experienced.

Anyway, I have been trying to attain a higher spiritual awareness lately, and I wonder if I have been putting out some sort of vibe that would give this spirit energy to show herself to me for a fleeting moment, or opening up some sort of power that has been lying dormant within me, which would explain other things that have happened elsewhere in my life.

Excuse the rush job on the drawing. I had to commit this to something I could see again, get it out of my mind a little. The entire right side of the face seemed to be swept away, but it would have been the size of a human head.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/92137b563782.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by invetro


Wow invetro, what a story!! You should look into the history of your house. Thank you so much for sharing. And that is awesome that you painted a picture! Keep us up to date on anything else you may encounter.

Seeing a decapitated ghost head is pretty creepy, and the no eyes thing doesn't help any. Hope you sleep well.

Great read there! and you know what? That's crazy! Not in a literal sense...but I mean, reading that kind of freaked me out because it happens to me sometimes in my house. I'll be in my room playing a game or something and out of the corner of my eye (you saw it straight on though) I see something peeking around my door at me. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can't make out an actual face...just super human like movement from a shadow figure. Also, been seeing the same things walking around my house out of the corner of my eye that are almost shaped like a cat. Actually, yeah, our incidents are relatively different...but still, it is awesome to hear about something like that. It's unfortunate that no one else saw it.

It is very possible that you did see the woman who once used to live in the house.

Do you believe the woman saw you- interacted with you? Or did you just see the woman?

It is very likely that this was a Residual Haunting- and that the house, and the land, recorded the woman's imprint over her years of living in the house- and then through some unknown event- replayed for you to witness. This happens very often, and these often get called "ghosts". But a ghost is an apparition- not neccesarily an active or intelligent spirit communicating with you. Its like seeing a mirrage.

Not to freak you out, OP, but when i saw the thread title I was instantly reminded of a passage from Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes. They wore gold rings in their leather ears and in the wind their sparse and ratty hair twisted about on their skulls. The teeth in their sockets like dental molds, the crude tattoos etched in some homebrewed woad faded in the beggared sunlight. Spiders, swords, targets. A dragon. Runic slogans, creeds misspelled. Old scars with old motifs stitched along their borders. The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their skins and the raw skulls painted and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink like a blueprint for assembly.

Not saying it has anything to do with your experience...but...um...well, there it is.

[edit on 7/8/10 by silent thunder]

reply to post by philosearcher


When I was living at home with my parents, whose house was always full of odd things I'll never be able to explain, we got those cat sized shadows from time to time. They reached a peak right around one of the times my mom was experiencing a mental breakdown and hallucinations. My dad was always a skeptic but finally we sat down and each blurted out something to the effect of "Hey, have you been seeing these little cat sized blobs that move real fast so you can barely see them?" We were both relieved that both of us were seeing these things. What I never told him was I used to sometimes be awakened from sleep and as I was coming out of sleep I'd see blobs actually attached to my body kind of like jelly fish anchoring themselves with a tentacle. Once a blob even left a red mark on my skin as it gave me like a static shock as I awoke. That was the only time I ever had hard evidence something had been there.

Anyway I had read up on a bit of the occult, after running into a complete dead end with my friends at church, and learned that sea salt is sometimes used to chase entities away. I wouldn't go trying to cast demons out with salt or anything, but we did give the salt a try on the little blobs. We sprinkled the salt around all over the house, starting in the cellar and going up to the small attic crawlspace. It was kind of comical, really, a teenaged girl and her dad throwing salt around, waving a Bible and shouting "Spirits be gone, in the name of the Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost." Hey, a Baptist girl does the best she can, okay? My poor dad was always something of an agnostic but as a result of all the strange things he's felt and seen and heard in that house, these days he's a Christian and he keeps a Bible handy and prays daily.

The salting worked, we didn't see blobs for a long time afterward. We got my mom on medication and she got well. From time to time we'd get the blobs and re do the salting. It's kind of like spraying for termites. The blobs didn't seem to return after we adopted some cats.

Though blobs are no longer seen, there are still problems with that house. Nobody but myself can sleep in my old bedroom. And even I couldn't return there and sleep without two cats sleeping in there with me. My mom tried to move in there to get away from my dad's snoring but she got night terrors.

Interestingly enough when I made the mistake of agreeing to take my old bed and put it in the house I live in now, all hell broke loose in my new house once that bed got placed here. Hell for me anyway. My husband never sensed what I sensed and he was not present when something lifted and shook our bed with me and one of our cats on it when I was reading in bed and had our new baby sleeping in the crib next to me. I felt like the house was infested with many presences. The cats were acting odd at this time, too.

I reported my "hallucinations" to my family physician, who diagnosed me with post-partum psychosis and put me on zoloft. The zoloft did a great job dimming my feeling of sensing stuff. I've been off it for 2 years and am happy to NOT be sensing anything and hope it remains that way. I can't understand people who want to experience hauntings. It sucks. I also called my dad in to help me "salt" the property. And for good measure, I had my husband haul that bed to the dump. I rarely had a night's peace in it the over 20 years I slept in it. It had been my dad's bed when he was a kid. The twin of that bed is still in their house and in my old room. I advised my parents to get rid of it but they still think it was the house not the beds that was "off". My dad had night terrors as a child so I sometimes think something was in one or both of those twin beds all along.

Hi Invetro. That's a scary picture. I'm up late and about to go to bed. I hope I don't get nightmares. I really ought to just stick to political conspiracies on ATS when it's late at night. I can never resist though. I invariably read a scary post about the supernatural or scary cryptozoological animals and end up jumpy and spooked. You'd think after growing up in a pretty creepy room in a creepy house, putting up with the "hag" phenomena on a regular basis and other equally nasty things that I'd be used to it and nothing could scare me now. But I moved out almost 15 years ago and except for that brief period of turmoil with my current house, I'm used to peace and quiet.

I really feel for you. I hope that once your family finishes working on your house, things will settle down. You probably need to find out if the previous owner is deceased. Even if not, she may still be attached to it. Once I was taking a nap and I dreamed I was back in my parents' house. I was disoriented and inexplicably angry. I saw my mom and she looked wide eyed and asked me what was wrong. At that point I suddenly awoke. Some time later I phoned my mom and she said she could have sworn she saw a "ghost" of me, stalking around the house and looking pretty peeved about something. She said she asked me what was wrong and I disappeared! So I guess that goes to show you can't assume a "ghost" is a dead person.

My parents had experienced a "residual haunting" in their first house, and in their experience that sort of thing occurs like clockwork and is very impersonal. Like they'd hear someone taking a shower every night but nobody was there when they checked the bathroom. That seemed like a recording of old energy rather than an actual presence. With your situation it seems like someone is acting a bit territorial, since you're getting manifestations as a result of working on "her" home and she was known to be house-proud. It sounds like you need a therapist to help out rather than an exorcist. I wish I could help. I would just suggest not saying anything insulting about the way she decorated and kept house. I don't know that I'd do anything without knowing first with whom you're dealing.

Couldn't it have been someone standing there or walking by or even sitting in one of those lawn chairs?


Do you wear glasses? I can't tell you the number of times I thought I've seen something out of the corner of my eye, only to realize that there was something behind me being reflected in the corner of my glasses.

Even as a write this, I thought I saw something but it ended up being the cat walking behind me.

It could even have been a reflection of something in the room. I remember, as a child, momentarily being freaked out when I thought I saw an eye staring back at me from my mostly empty glass, only to realize that the shape of the glass and the small amount of water in the bottom was, in reality, reflecting the image of my own eye back at me.

That picture is kind of disturbing.
2nd

reply to post by invetro


Very interesting post and your art just blew me away! I have heard that renovations can bring entities to the front - perhaps that is what is happening now. She is most likely just checking things out and hoping the house remains intact so she can stay there. It doesn't appear she is trying to do harm. Do not use Ouija Boards or harsh means of communication, you might stir up something else more sinister. Good luck and please keep us informed.

Thankyou for your replies.

I do wear glasses. I am short sighted would flounder without them, but this wasn't a corner of the eye thing. I was staring directly into those dark pits of eyes for just a fraction of a second. Where it was sitting would have been nigh on impossible for my neighbour to have placed something there, removing it in that instant that I looked away before the double take. He would have had to squeeze between chairs, and it's not any head of a person living in his household. He doesn't have much hair to speak of and his wife is very light haired. There is a gap between our fence and his, and looking at it today it is wide enough to squeeze a head in, but the person doing it would have to have no body as the gap underneath the wide top section is about three inches deep. To stand behind that section of the fence and stick your neck through would choke someone and possibly cause a dislocation of the verterbrae.

I will not be trying to contact this spirit by means of harsh intrusion into their space, but I was toying with the idea of buying a digital voice recorder and asking some polite questions, even before this happened. It's always been a goal of mine to try out some EVP work, but always remaining respectful to whoever or whatever is lurking around. This would be done with protection beforehand. I don't want to give rise to anything disturbing.

I was freaked out, but not scared. I got no bad feelings from this head, I just felt a bit shocked at what I had saw, understandably. I will chalk this down to something residual, as my father told me today that the land was under ownership of estates and farms before the houses were there. The victorian look would definately fit in with that. I'll do some digging locally and if nothing else, I will have discovered the history of where I now live.

reply to post by invetro


Interesting experiences, thanks for sharing.

A poster mentioned that house renovation can disturb spirits, and this is because often the spirits seemingly do not take too kindly to such renovation, but it sounds to me that the renovation you are doing is restoring the house to it's original state and the spirits may be encouraging you not to stop.

It's the head on the fence that intrigues me....is there any case of a woman being impaled on a fence through their skull in your area? On that very fence that people are keeping quiet so as not to upset you?

Residual haunting has been mentioned by another poster, and this is like the "stone tape" theory, where an event in history is recorded by the enviroment and played out repeatedly, like a tape recording.

Is the fence old? It may not be the house that is haunted, but the fence. If it's wooden, perhaps it goes back to before it was a fence, to when it was in a woods or a forest, and an incident there.

Your picture is very good, the woman looks like she is wearing a white bonnet. Your haunting may originate from a hundred years ago or more.

Your spiritual awakening that you say you are going through may invite these appearances, think of it as you tuning in to their frequency signal.

Yes, we are definately restoring the house to what it once was. The previous owner was one of those terrible do-it-yourself addicts. For instance, he removed the ceiling light in the livingroom, completely, (we don't even have a light cable in the ceiling for the time being and make do with floor lamps at night) and he didn't turn off the electricity. I am quite surprised he didn't kill himself, but we were told he blew himself into the kitchen with the electric shock.

There's no possible way of knowing how old the fence is. It doesn't look too old. Maybe the spirit doesn't like the new colour we painted it. I couldn't even say if the wood is local. It probably isn't. It looks like your run of the mill hardware store fence, and I haven't got a clue where they get their supplies from.

I also haven't heard of any skull impalements. I hope it isn't that, with some tortured soul reliving their death every so often. I do know there was a bit of a rail disaster early last century about a mile away with reports of a white lady that haunts the wooded creek, but that would be grasping at straws to relate it to my own situation.

I will keep digging around, and if I come up with anything I will share it out.

Originally posted by invetro
Yes, we are definately restoring the house to what it once was. The previous owner was one of those terrible do-it-yourself addicts. For instance, he removed the ceiling light in the livingroom, completely, (we don't even have a light cable in the ceiling for the time being and make do with floor lamps at night) and he didn't turn off the electricity. I am quite surprised he didn't kill himself, but we were told he blew himself into the kitchen with the electric shock.

Good grief!

Originally posted by invetro
There's no possible way of knowing how old the fence is. It doesn't look too old. Maybe the spirit doesn't like the new colour we painted it.

I couldn't even say if the wood is local. It probably isn't. It looks like your run of the mill hardware store fence, and I haven't got a clue where they get their supplies from.

I also haven't heard of any skull impalements. I hope it isn't that, with some tortured soul reliving their death every so often. I do know there was a bit of a rail disaster early last century about a mile away with reports of a white lady that haunts the wooded creek, but that would be grasping at straws to relate it to my own situation.

Interesting stuff. When I think of a head on a fence, I think of impalement, decapitation, something like that. I would not rule the rail disaster out, especially with the white lady.

It would be eerie if the fence was made from rail sleepers where the rail disaster occured, or from wood from the wooded creek.

Originally posted by invetro
I will keep digging around, and if I come up with anything I will share it out.

Please do keep us posted.