by Peter Twitchell
There was an interesting question posed to two contestants on the Family Feud show today. Host Steve Harvey asked each member of the family this question: “What makes you suspect that your house is haunted?”
Some 20 years ago I started hearing about houses that were constructed in western Alaska villages where the owners of the newly constructed houses started waking up to the clatter of dishes in their kitchen – noises that woke them up from their sleep.
Family members of the homeowners woke up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and would see a shadow of a person in their kitchen. After which they would walk to the kitchen to see who was up besides them but they found no one else in the kitchen awake.
Other homeowners in the village shared a like story saying that someone was looking into their house from a window. Some windows to their houses needed something to climb onto to look inside.
They went to their windows to look to see who was outside their window but there was no one to be seen, no peeping Tom, and no tracks in the fresh snow.
Again and again different homeowners experienced noises and sights of a person inside their home who wasn’t there. Some became afraid thinking, who is that in my kitchen with the pots and pans? When they went to look who it was, there would be no one in the kitchen and the door was still locked.
When these unexplained phenomenon continued again and again the homeowners became afraid and started sharing with their neighbors what they experienced, the unexplained. They complained to the housing office of the strange noises and sightings about a person or persons who wasn’t in their home.
Sometime later the housing office said that the building material lumber originated from the Pacific Northwest from a place where there were once Native American settlements – that area where the forest was where are the lumber plywood had come from.
Soon the villagers began talking about those abandoned settlements where the graveyards were inside the forest and started believing that the spirits of those people came with the lumber to their house.
This story made sense to me because the spirit is real to the Eskimos, the Yupiaq of Southwest Alaska.
When I was a boy our Elders who have long passed used to tell us young people: be good – those who went on before us are watching you so behave yourself. The theory that the spirits of people who have gone on, our ancestors spirits, made perfect sense that they are in the spirit world watching us. I believe this belief of my ancestors and Elders is real today as it was since time in memoriam. Thus, the hauntings new homeowners in western Alaska in the villages experienced in their new homes.
I’d like to use the cliché I heard once, “Believe it or not.”
To me the haunting phenomenon that the new homeowners experienced is believable. You see, I cannot judge my Elders and my ancestors and say they were superstitious. They believed in “The Son of the Universe”, “the Almighty Creator God”, “Ellam Yua, the son of the universe” and the souls of our Ancestors who live on today and are anxiously waiting for their loved ones to join them.
