About a month after their attempts to be seen through the security cameras, the J Crew and my family had comfortably settled into a routine. My wife and I would greet them whenever we came home, explain where we were going when we left, and talked to them every chance we got.
One evening, I was sitting in bed reading when I started to smell burning wood. I knew my wife was cooking dinner, but didn’t think there was wood involved. I poked my head out of the bedroom and sniffed, but smelled nothing except the delicious food she had going. Definitely no wood.
Strange.
I sat back on the bed, and the burning smell hit me again. I turned my head to the left and the smell went away, which surprised me. I tried several times and get the same result: look to the right, smell burning wood. Look to the left, smell nothing.
The familiar tingles hit, and my skin felt colder, which meant that at least of the ghosts was near. The words “white man Miccosukee massacre” popped into my head.
“You want me to search for that?” I asked. I got the confirmation, and realized that I was talking with M. “Are you trying to show me what happened to you?” He confirmed. To this point, J had been firmly against sharing the story, in large part because they didn’t want to talk about it.
I didn’t want M to get in trouble, so I asked, “Are your parents okay with you telling me?”
There was a massive CRACK on the wall next to me, and I got the confirmation shivers. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s search this.” I went to my browser on my iPad and searched those words. One of the very first links was from the Miami New Times. You can read it here, if you like.
While reading the article, their emotions started to flow through me. Anger, sadness, regret…but mostly anger. Rage might be a better word. My wife stepped into the room and glanced, then did a double take. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“M is telling me how they died,” I said. “They’re very emotional right now.” She sat on the bed and took my hand.
“Don’t cut it off,” she said. “I know you hate feeling emotions, but these are theirs, not yours, and they deserve to feel it.”
After some questioning, I had the story from M, if not the specific details. U.S. soldiers, trying to clear out Native Americans in that area, had killed the family. Some had been shot point-blank, and others had been burned at the stake. (I still don’t know who suffered which fate, and I don’t care to know. It’s horrific to even think about.)
Their bodies were unceremoniously buried in the ground that would eventually hold our condo building. They had no idea why they were ghosts and hadn’t fully crossed over, and they still don’t know.
M also explained more about their tether. He described it as a thick cord of darkness that wrapped around their bodies and kept them connected to the ground where they’d been murdered. They were able to roam a short distance, but that was confined to our first-floor condo.
My wife was even more horrified than I was, and spent some time spewing a lot of foul language about the U.S. soldiers who could just casually murder an entire family simply because they were Miccosukee and not white. We’d already been treating the J Crew like family, but now we had a new mission: shower them with the love and respect they should have had in life.
We knew we wouldn’t be staying at that condo forever, and our personal goal was to help the ghosts break free of their tether so they could do what they wanted and not be stuck again living with people who couldn’t communicate with them.
We had no idea it would happen as quickly as it did.