I share a guilty pleasure with my kids, Gabrielle and Drew. (No, besides every version of the Housewives series). We watch anything there is to watch about ghosts and the paranormal. 

We started with Ghosthunters. Ghost hunters are Roto-Rooter plumbers by day and paranormal investigators by night. They go around to haunted locations in an effort to debunk all things ghostly and fun. “Poltergeist party poopers,” if you will. They occasionally capture things they cannot explain. Good times!

Then we have the Ghost Adventures, which is about a kooky trio of investigators whose reactions are so over the top you might want to wear some Depends while you watch. But they, too, capture some creepy stuff in their adventures.

Ah, but the list goes on. We have My Ghost Story, Celebrity Ghost Stories, Psychic Kids and A Haunting. 

We like to torture ourselves because we are convinced (the kids and I, not my husband) that we had our very own ghost here in Mission Viejo. Before you start pooh-poohing me, just read and have some fun.

I took the kids to visit my dad in Eureka Springs, AR, and we visited the “most haunted hotel in America," the Crescent Hotel. My sister came along with her two kids as well. We took pictures of the kids in the hotel because it's quite beautiful, albeit very old.

In one of her photos there was a strange blue glow on my daughter’s head. We could not figure out how it happened because it was not there in the previous photo or the one after. Weird.

A few months after our trip, bizarre things started happening in our house, mostly around my daughter—unexplained banging on windows, lights turning off and on, front door wide open after being locked, screen pushed out of an upstairs window and the phone dialing by itself right before our eyes.

While lying in bed one night, I heard Gabrielle get out of the shower and open her bathroom door. A moment later I heard a blood-curdling scream. Gabrielle came running into my room, trembling violently and crying inconsolably. 

“Mommy, there’s a girl in my bathroom. I saw her in the mirror standing right next to me, and when I looked again there was no one there!”

My heart jumped out of my chest (dramatic license). I was thinking, “Oh #*@&”. Outwardly I remained calm and told her that she probably just imagined it. She slept on the floor in my room for months.

Fast forward a few months. 

My husband had friends over with their kids while I was out working. When I returned, we all sat around the kitchen island, chatting away when we noticed one of the cups on the island move. None of us could believe it.

I picked up my digital camera and said, “Oh, hold on, I think this thing takes video.”

We caught some great video of the event, and we still watch it because it's so freaky. Everyone thinks we faked it, but we didn’t. I posted it on YouTube, and if you watch it, please excuse the language, because we were freaking out.

I went back to Arkansas for my brother’s wedding, and the night before I left, I stood in the middle of my living room making a mental note of everything I packed. Then something touched my hair. I looked around and there were no windows open, and no one was there.

Funny thing is, when I retuned from my trip all the unexplained activity stopped. We moved.