Lately there have been many things on my mind, many life questions. I feel exhausted from how much I've been thinking lately. I know I'm a little behind on the curve, but I'm finally thinking seriously about my life in the aspect of what I want out of it. The past few years I've kind of fallen off course a little, but over the last few months I've had some serious down time to think about this.
After my last failed relationship it's no secret I became stuck. I've been so focused on how to get back to how my life was before instead of how to adjust my life to the way things are now. I've been watching the Lord of the Rings over the past week at work and today I finished the Return of the King. I heard a quote from Frodo I had never caught before.
"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in you're heart you begin to understand, there is no going back. There are some things that time cannot mend, some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold."
I realize now that things in my life will never go back to the way they were. Too much has happened, and that's ok. Sometimes that's just how it has to be. That's one of the things I love and hate about life is it's unpredictability. You can never bet on life, because it will always throw you a curve ball somehow, somewhere and in someway it will catch you by surprise. It's how you handle the curve ball that defines your life. For instance, when you realize your life has turned out nothing like you planned when you were sixteen and thought you knew everything. When the people you thought would be in your life for what seems like forever leave without any warning, and when eternal promises are broken and shatter you to your core. It's how we face those times that will define your life. If you keep trying to get back to where you were you just keep running circles. I've been around that circle so many times I can't even figure out where it started, but I can feel the dizziness now. I realize that I've been going absolutely nowhere for the past few years. Better late than never, I suppose.
It's time for me to learn to let go of the idea that I will one day get back to where I was before, because I don't even know now where that was. I don't think I'd recognize it if it hit me in the face. I need to adjust to what I've been handed and what I've had taken away, because for some reason it has to be this way. Whether I think it's fair or not is irrelevant. It's happening now no matter what I do. It reminds me of this song I used to listen to on repeat when I was in high school, World Spins Madly On by the Weepies.
Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you and where you'd gone
And let the world spin madly on
Everything that I said I'd do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
and the world spins madly on
I let the day go by
I always say goodbye
I watch the stars from my window sill
the whole world is moving and I'm standing still
Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you and where you'd gone
And the world spins madly on
I thought of you and where you'd gone
And the world spins madly on.
I'm dizzy and tired of it. I'm ready to figure out my next step forward. My next step in this new life.
One of my biggest pet peeves in life is when people completely change who they are to impress someone. It is one thing to allow someone to make you a better person, but to change yourself entirely so you can continue being with someone is out of control. It's not fair to yourself nor is it fair to the other person. It's exhausting living a life pretending to be someone you aren't. Eventually you will get tired of it and won't be able to keep on the mask, and then the other person is going to be completely taken aback when you do a complete 180 from who you were the day before. You are misleading them entirely. I don't understand why people can't just be themselves. It's like junior high and high school all over again. Pretending to be someone to fit in with a certain crowd. We are in our mid twenties. It's time to grow up.
Another pet peeve of mine is people who complain about things that are in their control. For example, people who complain all the time about being tired but they don't come home until two or three in the morning knowing they have to be up and around by seven. If you're tired there is an easy solution, go to bed earlier. Get the rest you know you need. Another example would be people who complain about how they are stressed out because they "can't" balance their time between friends. Actually, there is a real simple solution, especially once you realize that there is a problem. Make time for everyone. Yes that probably means time will have to be sacrificed from your other group of friends, but if you don't want to do that quit complaining about being stressed over it because you are doing it to yourself. No one else has control over that. It's like I said before, we are in our mid twenties. It's time to take some responsibility and quit acting like we have zero control over anything.
Remember when I told you that I veer off course a lot? Well, this is one of those posts that has absolutely nothing to do with any of my other posts. If you don't want to hear a ghost story then stop reading this now.
I have always been one to believe in the paranormal ever since my father told me he saw a ghostly figure in a field at Big Cedar Lodge. I was in early elementary school so this has been pretty much my whole life. Until this past weekend nothing solid had ever happened directly to me. I had only heard other peoples' experiences and taken them with a grain of salt. I am also an avid watcher of the television series Ghost Hunters, again taking things with a grain of salt. However, this past weekend I got my experience or experiences I guess I should say.
I went to the infamous Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, AR with my roommate's sister and father. We stayed in room 419, more commonly known as Ms. Theadora's room. Theadora was a nurse and possible love interest to the phony Dr. Baker who claimed he could cure cancer. In 1937 Dr. Baker purchased the Crescent Hotel and ran it as a hospital. People were flocking here once they had heard of his "six-week cure for cancer." He pulled this scam for about three years before getting caught on mail fraud for signing his name Dr. Baker when in fact he had no medical license. He later died from liver cancer, ironically enough. Karma is a bitch. In his time at the crescent Dr. Baker stayed in what is now the north penthouse located directly above, you got it, 419. There is a secret passage from Theadora's room to the penthouse that has now been sealed off. You can see this door behind the chaise lounge in the photos.
Upon our arrival the concierge told us good luck when he found out what room we were staying in. It is rumored that when Theadora is ready for you to leave she will pack up your things and set them up against your door so that when you come back something is blocking it making it hard to enter the room. Needless to say we were so excited to stay here. We were almost guaranteed an experience in this room. So, we go upstairs and unload our stuff and left to go back downstairs and park the car. While we were outside I took a picture of the front of the hotel. I didn't see it until I was reviewing everything yesterday, but in one of the front windows there is a black apparition of a man standing with, what looks like, his hands bent behind his back. When you zoom in his head isn't completely solid either.
So, not noticing anything weird, we went back upstairs to set up our cameras and everything for the evening. When we were in there I got online to write on a friend's wall and tell them that I was staying at the Crescent in Theadora's room. He's into the whole paranormal thing as well. When I was typing it out I asked Whitney if Theadora was spelled "T-h-e-A" or "T-h-e-O," and she responded, "I spelled it 'T-h-e-A." And then, she freaked out a little and said she felt a cool breeze go up her back under her shirt. I completely blew her off. I thought she was just trying to freak me out. However, we did decide to try and do an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) session just in case. For those of you who don't know an EVP is when you pick up the voice or noise of something of someone or something that isn't there and you didn't hear at the time but when you playback your recording it shows up on there. So, we told Theadora how to talk into my phone and proceeded to ask her how to spell her name. When we played it back we didn't get an answer. So, when we went to bed I decided to turn on my voice recorder on my phone over night expecting to maybe pick up some footsteps or something. The next morning when I woke up I immediately went to review it. Needless to say I was surprised at what I picked up in the first six seconds of the recording. I played it back three or four times thinking I was crazy, but clear as day you can hear a woman whispering "Eden, A." It's so loud its as though she were leaning over into my phone on the nightstand an couple inches away from my phone. Which also would mean she was about a foot away from my head. You can hear Whitney, Roger and I talking in the background so you know it's none of us. It was wild and I definitely have racked my brain trying to figure it out, but Theadora is the only thing I can come up with. We were all so excited because we hadn't even been there two hours before we caught some type of evidence. So, we were pumped to see what the rest of the weekend had in store for us.
Saturday evening we ate dinner at the Sky Bar located down the hall from our room. Roger's friend, Sonya came and visited us while we were there. After dinner we brought her and her friend to our room to play them the EVP we caught and to get there take on it. They were amazed. We stood around and conversed for about 15-20 minutes before I noticed Sonya's facial expression change and she got super quiet. It wasn't even two minutes after I noticed this that she said she wanted to leave the room because she didn't feel good there. She said she needed to leave and was fumbling around on the doorknob trying to get out quickly. So we decided to go down to the front desk and purchase and EMF reader. I asked the bellman what was one of the craziest things that has happened to him while working here. He proceeded to tell me a story about the north penthouse, again directly above our room. He said that there has been a black mist that many customers have reported seeing accompanied by the inability to breathe. He, himself, had experienced this mist as well. Successfully creeped out we went back up to our room to investigate and by the time we got back up in there we no longer had an erie feeling in the room and our EMF's weren't detecting anything. While we were standing at the foot of the bed, Whitney and I were talking about the black mist. Out loud mind you, I said, "You know, I associate black with being evil. And if that's in Dr. Baker's room that would make sense since he was a horrible man." Right after I said that I realized if by some chance Theadora was in our room listening at this time she wouldn't appreciate me talking about her man that way. I immediately felt uneasy and apologized out loud because of how uneasy I felt. I went to the bathroom after that then walked out and sat down on the carpeted floor in the living room. I was sitting indian style and when I ran my hand across the back of my leg I felt a sting. I looked and there about halfway down my calf was a thin scratch, still fresh because the blood was wet. We retraced my steps in the room and there wasn't a thing I could have scratched my leg on. You can see that in the pictures as well. So, then I got scared. I was having a hard time breathing. It felt like someone was sitting on my chest. We had to leave soon after that to go on the ghost tour, and the further we got from our room the better I was feeling and the easier it was for me to breathe. After the tour and some more investigating throughout the hotel we had to go back to our room to go to bed. I started having trouble breathing again and the uneasy feeling came back. Not in a slow creep, but as soon as we opened the door, WHAM! It hit me. Now, I am not one to toot my own horn but it takes quite a bit to scare me to the point of desperation, but that night I was horrified. I just knew something awful was going to happen. Roger, Whit and I all crowded the main bed the second night, because none of us felt too comfortable. I was texting one of my friends that night before going to sleep about how horrible I felt and scared I was. Then, out of nowhere, my phone just shut off as if the battery died. I had charged it earlier that afternoon and it still had a full battery when I went to bed. So I plugged my phone into the wall and it took it about an hourish to finally turn back on. So, I finally was able to fall asleep only to wake up a couple hours later, somewhere in the four o'clock hour, to a shoulder pain. The muscle that connects your neck to your shoulder was just super sore. I thought maybe I had just been laying weird so I was going to turn over and right as I started to turn over I almost started crying because of how scared I was. I felt something in our room behind me. I refused to roll over for fear of what I'd see or what would happen. I almost woke up Roger and Whitney to see if we could get out of the room, but instead I commanded and begged myself to just go back to sleep. I finally did. The next morning around 8:30ish I got up to go to the bathroom and while I was washing my hands I say something red peeking out from under my shirt on my collar bone. I pulled my shirt back and thought I was crazy. I had Whitney look at it to make sure but there was a handprint as if someone had grabbed me in the night. So, basically I was horrified. I was ready to get out of that room. I had royally pissed off Theadora. Some of our photos from that night around the 4 o'clock hour have a black shadowy mist over my head and then moving across Whitney's in a series of three photos. Then it disappears. It's really odd that it corresponds with the time in which I was so terrified, huh?
I will post a link to the pictures as soon as I get them posted to Facebook and Google+. Crescent Hotel Pics
