Voices in the Wee Hours

A West Virginian woman posted something eerie on a paranormal website.

"One night after my husband and I went to bed I awoke in the middle of the night hearing what I thought was a female voice calling my name. I sat up in bed and looked at my clock it was 3am. I sat there for a minute and listened thinking maybe I was dreaming."

Strange, eh? Well just this morning on NPR's Morning Edition there is a story that warns of many kinds of ghosts from India, including this one that calls out your name...

"...But you have to watch out for the very dangerous nishi, who call people by name in the dead of night and lead them away, never to be seen again."

Ghosts - ghosts that call your name, take you out, then do unspeakable things to you AND get honorable mention on National Public Radio?

Oh big deal! Loads of times I have heard my name shouted aloud; disembodied voices calling to me in dark before dawn.

An example; I moved to Sacramento in 1990. Got myself an apartment in a fancy up-scale complex and if I were into labeling weirdness as paranormal, I would not be amiss to label that apartment as being mildly haunted. While living there, numerous times I would wake from a sound sleep, because I would wake, hearing a breathy voice whispering into my ear.

"Claire!"

Waking, there was no one there but me and my dog. And no, Chiquilla, my dog, never spoke.

At other times I woke, hearing my name called aloud from the living room. ‘CLAIRE!’

Did that cause me to worry about newly immigrant ghosts? Nawww... never once did I believe or think I was being called by a ghost, spirit or daemon, from here in Sacramento or anywhere else for that matter. I do admit, that whimsically, I refereed to the voices as my 'Angels'. Calling the voices such was just how I made reference to the calling in my personal journals; for literary purposes, there were playful angels messing with me.

In reality, I always presumed, and still do, that what I heard was not angels, but my own brain messing with me, a facet of my long history of abnormal dream sleep; a miss-firing of my brain's neurological circuits, my brain chemistry gone awry.

In my current home, 'angels' called my name only once or twice. Still, on a dozen or so occasions, I have been woken by the ringing/buzzing of an alarm clock, that I do not own, and is not in my house, much less my bedroom. I am saying that I am woken by a phantom alarm clock. Yes! Me! Allow me to explain.

My current alarm clock is my old Razor cell phone, which wakes me up to the ring tone of a pod of singing Orca Whales. Trust me - singing whales sound nothing at all like alarms, or buzzes. So I am not hearing the Orcas and thinking they are rings/alarms. And anyway, the alarms/buzzes wake me long before my old cell phone has a chance to sound out.

What happens is if I go to bed fretting about over-sleeping (an event I can say has happened maybe twice in my entire life), while I sleep, my subconscious runs through it's file cabinets of sounds-of-the-past, pulls up the exact sound of alarm clocks I have known and loved in the past, and then plays those sounds to wake me. The sounds that wake me on those 'oh so special' mornings, sound exactly like an electronic alarm clock going off in my room. I wake and wildly search for what is shrieking on my night stand - an annoying way to wake up, I can assure you.

So, currently, at least, there are no ghosts in my house; no spirits, daemons or angels. Only by reading information on-line did I realize, some people believe hearing their name called out when no one is there, means a ghost calling them. Ok, I know you can understand their logic - disembodied voice = ghost. But, the way I see it, either those frightened people are sadly mistaken. or perhaps... could it be... is it I who am in denial? BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!