About Rhetta
The Irish Slaves
Save on Rhetta's books at Booksamillion.com.
Haunted Marietta
· ISBN-10: 1596297379
· ISBN-13: 978-1596297371
Ghost
to Coast Tours and Haunted Places:
· ISBN-10: 0557040094
· ISBN-13: 978-0557040094
Ghost
to Coast
· ISBN-10: 0615154727
· ISBN-13: 978-0615154
·
T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do:Blues Women Past and Present
· ISBN-10: 1438233892
· ISBN-13: 978-1438233895 |
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Rhetta Akamatsu at Amazon.com
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Rhetta Akamatsu is a mom,
grandmother, paralegal, and author who lives with her husband and two cats in
Marietta, Georgia. Her latest book is The Irish Slaves, the true story of Irish slavery, indentured servitude and contract labor in history. She is also the author of Haunted Marietta, published September 2009
by History Press. Other books include Ghost to Coast, Ghost to Coast Tours
and Haunted Places, and T'ain't Nobody's Business If I Do: Women Blues Singers Past and Present.
All of Rhetta's books are available at most online bookstores. Haunted Marietta
is available at offline bookstores, as well. See all the books on Amazon here.
She is also a member of Ghost Hounds paranormal investigation
team and owner of the Ghost to Coast website at http://www.ghosttocoast.us and the Ghost to Coast Paranormal Directory at http://paranormal.boomja.com. In addition to her paranormal books, she is
the Associate Editor of the Journal of Anomalous Sciences, which can be found at http://thedimensionzone.com.
For some of her other
loves, Rhetta owns http://bluesnews.boomja.com and writes a regular column as the Atlanta Blues
Examiner at http://www.examiner.com/x-32020-Atlanta-Blues-Examiner. She also writes the Atlanta Historic Places column for Examiner.com.
Other
directories that Rhetta owns are Steampunk Trunk, Tattoo U, ,SciFi Factor, Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston,and Big Easy(New Orleans), and Ghost to Coast Paranormal.
You can reach
her by email at starmac@bellsouth.net or visit her at http://www.rhettaakamatsu.com.
See also Reviews and Media
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Ask for
Rhetta’s books at your local bookstore using these ISBN
numbers, or order online at AmazonBooksaMillion, Borders, and other major online bookstores (also available for Kindle!:
My Life, With Ghosts
by Rhetta Akamatsu
Originally published at Associated Content and in Ghost to Coast
I am fascinated with the paranormal and paranormal investigation. I'm not
completely sure what causes ghostly phenomena, but something does, and I want to
know what it is. I've had my own experiences, and I've decided to share them
here.
To begin with, my parents practiced an odd sort of belief/disbelief system when
it came to ghosts. As staunch Southern Baptists, they didn't believe in them, of
course. On the other hand, we had one. It wasn't really a ghost person. It was a
ghost car. I used to wonder about that, because obviously cars don't have souls,
right? But now I am a very firm believer in residual energy, which I see as
being a sort of hologram or audio recording stamped on the air by some event at
some point in time, and replaying in an endless loop indefinitely.
As a kid, though, all I knew was that we lived at the end of a dirt road about
half a mile from the main road and we were the only house on the road. We had a
circular driveway, and every day in the afternoon, around 3 pm, we would clearly
hear a car go all away around the house and back out the road. Yet there was no
car there. If I was outside playing, I would hear it but never see anything at
all. My parents just calmly explained,"Oh, that's the ghost," and let it go at
that. They never tried to justify using something they didn't believe in to
explain something they didn't understand. They just accepted it. That's odd, I
know, but Southerners know that sometimes not believing in something won't keep
it from happening. I was never afraid or worried about the ghost car, and I
wasn't worried about the more active spirit that followed me to college at 18,
either. I never saw or heard that entity, but it certainly made its presence
known.
I lived in a dorm room that I shared with a roommate. We shared a bathroom
with the next room over. Many times, when my roommate was out and I was
studying in the room alone, I would walk into the bathroom, walk back out,
and my books would have moved to the floor or the bed. This happened many times.
In theory, someone could have opened the door, moved the books, left the room
and closed the door, I suppose, but they would have had to be very fast and very
silent. Several times, I found the books under my bed. Once or twice, they
showed up under there when both my roommate and I were in the room and had been
sleeping. But I could justify those times, if I assumed that my roommate was
playing a very out-of-character joke on me. However..
One weekend my roommate had gone home for the weekend, and so had our
suitemates. In fact, that particular weekend only a few people remained in the
dorm. I was
studying for a test, and I locked the door so I would not be disturbed. I
was getting tired, so I decided to take a shower to wake myself up, so I
double-checked that the door was locked, as women are prone to do when they are
taking a shower in a nearly-empty building. Then I went into the bathroom,
turned on the shower, and climbed in. At that time, people still got their music
on vinyl, and albums were pretty cheap. I loved music, and I had around 100
albums in the room. I had just got a new Bob Dylan album that week, and it and
about 30 other albums were stacked on the floor next to my bed. Yet, when I got
out of the shower after about 15 minutes and went back in the room, the albums
were nowhere to be found. I was panicking. I checked the door; it was still
locked. I checked the one small window; it was secure and someone would have had
to climb up two stories to get in it anyway.
I was frantic. I unlocked the door, stepped outside, and there were my albums,
all neatly stacked in the hallway right outside the door. I went ballistic. I
was so mad I was yelling at the spirit in my room, "Are you crazy? My albums
could have been stolen out there! My new Dylan! Leave my stuff alone!"
I must have made an impression, because after that all the
pranks stopped. Books quit moving, records stayed put.
I didn't have another experience until years later, after my parents died in the
80's and my first husband and I and our two kids moved into the house I grew up
in. Almost immediately, we started waking up at night to the sound of the water
running and dishes rattling in the kitchen. It sounded as though someone were
washing dishes, but when we checked, of course, no one was in there. Still, in
the morning from time to time a few dishes I had left in the sink would be
washed, and as the mother of two small children, I was fine with that. A
dish-washing ghost was very helpful. I kind of figured it was probably my
grandmother, who was a much better housekeeper than I am.
One night, I suppose my slovenly ways may have been a little too frustrating. My
husband and I slept next to the kitchen, and we woke up because we heard a
strange swooshing noise, followed by a soft thud. I was worried about the kids,
but when I checked on them, they were both in their beds, asleep. So my husband
and I walked into the kitchen, and there, sticking in the wall behind the
kitchen table, was a small butcher knife. The knife was stuck in the wall at
about head-height. Even though the doors were locked and no one could have
gotten in without our hearing them, we checked the entire house and around the
outside, but no one was anywhere around.
I never figured that the ghost who threw it meant to hurt anybody, since the
kitchen was empty. I think she was just making a statement about people not
washing up at night. It never happened again, but the slit in the wall stayed
there for years until we sold the house and the new owner renovated the kitchen.
Since then, I've not had any major experiences with
spirits or poltergeists. Another relative had the ghost of a little boy in
her house, apparently, and he whispered to me once or twice, "hi! hi! hi!," but
as soon as I said hi back, he hushed.
I am very sensitive to the feeling of places, though, and often know facts about
houses or locations that I've never read about or visited; not great details but
whether there were children there, or if there's a graveyard nearby, or things
of that nature.Oh, there was one other sort of incident related to that. My
cousin used to live in a very small trailor. He was divorced and lived alone. He
was not a particularly good person, and he did not have a terribly happy life.
He died as the result of injuries he received during a robbery and assault that
happened when he was away from home, fishing. After he died, my uncle and his
wife separated, and my uncle moved into the little trailer briefly, but then he
died of a heart attack at age 59, also away from home. I thought that my cousin
might have had some things that belonged to my mother, so a few months after my
uncle died, two other cousins, my husband, and I went to the little house to
see. As soon as we opened the door, the most horrible feeling came over me. I
was not really surprised, because I knew that both my cousin and my uncle had
suffered from some very mixed-up feelings while living there and, like I said,
I'm sensitive to those things. But I had to get out, and I realized if anything
of my mother's was in there, I didn't want it. My cousins were anxious to leave,
too,although none of us mentioned the feeling, and my husband stayed outside the
whole time. This is my second husband, who never lived in the house or knew my
cousin, although he had met my uncle briefly. He is not usually sensitive to
places at all. But he said to me, "That house had the worse feeling to it that I
have ever felt." As far as I know, nobody has gone in there since. I don't think
it's haunted, but I do think it soaked up some truly negative energy, and that
energy didn't leave when the people did.
So that's my story. All of it's true, and you may choose to believe it or not.
But, like I said, Southerners know that sometimes not believing in things
doesn't mean they don't exist.
ADDENDUM TO THE STORY:
Do I still have experiences?
Yes, sometimes.
For instance, I am a huge Beatles fan, and I have a number of action figures
of the group. The John Lennon figure disappeared one day. I figured I just
misplaced it somewhere. But when it turned up months later, it was in a closet
that I had literally not opened in years (there was furniture in front of it),
under a pile of old clothes. How did it get there? I don't know, but a couple of
years later, I had all the figures on top of a heavy bookcase, and I
accidentally knocked them off. i managed to sweep all of the figures out but
John, but I couldn't reach that one at all, so I just decided I would have to
wait until I had a chance to empty the bookcase and move it to get him
out. The occasion did not arise to do that, and as far as I knew the figure was
till safely behind the case. Then, one day, I sat down to play the keyboard that
is in that room, and when I put my foot on the peddle, I felt something. There
was the John figure, on top of the foot pedal, missing an arm.
How did he get there? I don't know. Perhaps a cat dragged him out, although I
really don't see how any animal could get between that bookcase and the wall.
And, given the other incident, I have just chalked it up in the unexplainable
category.
Several years ago, my husband and I toured the Thomas Wolfe house in NC. I
was standing in the hallway of this former boarding house, thinking of the
rather unhappy childhood Wolfe had there, when something unseen suddenly
scratched me across the cheek. I was not standing against the wall, there was no
one near me, and I checked but there were no nails or other sharp items n the
vicinity. It felt like fingernails scracthing me. When we got outside, I did
have a small red scratch on my cheek in exactly that spot.
Last week, March 21, 2010, we were celebrating my birthday at Jekyll Island,
Georgia. I love the marshes, the ocean, the Spanish Moss, and I always feel a
lot of emotions in these areas. We were exploring the ruins of the oldest tabby
house in Georgia, and I walked back a bit into the woods behind it. Suddenly, I
stepped on a bit of wood and fell slightly forward. Quick as could be, i felt
something catch me and turn me entirely around, quite forcefully, in the
opposite direction I had the distinct impression that whatever or whoever caught
me felt the woods were a dangerous place for a clutz like me and was telling me
to leave, so I did. My husband did not see the incident; I wish he
had, because I am sure it looked very interesting when I was suddenly spun
around like that.
A bit later, we were walking in the burying ground for the families that
inhabited the tabby house in the 1700's and 1800's. We were walking between two
stones, and I was remarking, "This is such a peaceful,beautiful place..." when I
felt that I had literally been frozen in place. I couldn't move; it was as
though there was a wall or large obstacle in front of me that I could not go
around or through. I couldn't speak for a moment, and then the sensation was
gone. I don't have an explanation for that, either.
None of these things are evidence, of course, and should not be accepted as
such. They are just interesting things that have happened to me and as such I am
sharing them with you.
Walking between these two stones, I was brought to a halt unexpectedly.
Read samples of some of my books:
Ghost to Coast Tours and Haunted Places, Ghost to Coast,
and T'ain't Nobody's Business If I Do:
