Helena: I don't believe in scary ghosts

Opinion

I don't believe in spooks, at least not in the way ghosts are shown in movies as evil, supernatural beings out to get you. Maybe they just want us to know we’re not alone, or to not forget them.

Unexplainable things happen and, sometimes, that just may include unexplainable encounters with the unknown.

Helena Rodriguez

I was getting ready for work recently. I was the only one awake at the time, lost in my thoughts, thinking about the day ahead, when I was startled by a noise above. It was a clinking and banging on the ceiling. The banging was a loud thumping. The clinking, well ...Somehow the chain hanging down to turn the ceiling fan on had suddenly wrapped itself around the top of the fan and the ceiling fan turned on and started spinning.

I gasped. “What the …?” I thought aloud.

We have central heating and air blows through in another corner of my bedroom. My ceiling fan turns on with a light switch, but I had not used it in months and it had never turned on by itself or caused the chain to wrap around the fan.

"Who’s trying to get my attention?" I asked.

I don’t remember if it was the previous night, or that very morning before I arose, but Grandma Chaya was heavy on my mind. When this happened, it was days before the first anniversary of grandma’s death. She died on Jan. 19, 2015. When I told my daughter, Laura, about this occurrence later that day she told me that Grandma Chaya had been heavy on her mind, too.

I thought that if I posted this on Facebook that people would think I was a crazy, but my friend, Lisa Tarin Gregory, soon replied, “This would happen to me after my sister passed away. The light would even come on and the fan would go to a faster speed.”

Another friend, Dolores Maldonado Guzman, wrote, “It's her (your grandma) asking for prayers. A priest told me once that when someone who has passed on comes to your mind you should pray for them. Maybe even have a Mass said for them.”

I turned off the light switch (which also controls the ceiling fan, and by the way, the ceiling fan had been turned off manually before this incident) then headed out the door to work.

Helena Rodriguez is a Portales native. Contact her at:

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