Quail, our new additions

About a month ago one of our neighbors, and elder man in his 80's announced he is moving further south, he can't handle another Kentucky winter. He didn't want to take his birds with him, Peach doves and quail, so we took them and added them to the growing collection that is the Wandering Wonderful Homestead. Several emails back and forth with the state, and reading up on Kentucky's laws proved that in order to raise and sell quail we would need a commercial license. We don't think we are ready for that yet. So for now we are keeping them for ourselves. Getting our feet wet in the world of raising quail. I have never ate quail meat or quail eggs but I have heard both are delicious. We bought a few more quail to add to the few that we were gifted, going through a licensed seller to obtain these. Here are a few pictures of our very cute quail.

Fresh from the quail farm

Hiding in the slanted corner

Moe, checking on things in the quail coop

Attempting to get their bearings

My Ghost Story

I have had experiences that I can't explain away logically.

A couple weeks before I started middle school, and met the Wanderer my grandmother died. She died very unexpectedly. My family is pretty old school southern when it comes to funerals. We believe in the old tradition of "sitting up with the dead". The night before grandmas funeral a group of was standing around the portico of the funeral home enjoying the warm night air. Suddenly an electric charge seemed to feel the air, the hair on our arms and back of neck stood on end, and then we heard it. My grandmother's sing-song voice. She called out to my uncle's wife. 3 times we heard her call her name. She was my grandmother's favorite daughter-in-law, her and my uncle met at a livestock auction. They were bidding on the same goat, she won the goat and he won her heart. 

Odd things had happened leading up to this. One aunt had heard someone coughing while she was in a bathroom stall. When she exited the stall she found herself alone. Others in our group had similar experiences that evening, but we brushed it off. We can't seem to brush off or explain away all of us hearing grandma's voice. 

Growing up our house was weird. I have already posted one story about our neighborhood, this is about our house exclusively. Sometime a couple years after we moved in dad saw a dark hooded figure standing in the hall way in the middle of the night. He kept this story from us for many years. I remember times during our childhood when we would hear something shatter in the next room, or hear what sounded like everything from our cabinets being throw into the floor. We would go into the kitchen and check, but everything was always in its proper place. I was a latch key kid and was often home alone for a couple hours every evening. At first I would sit in the living room and just listen to the sounds coming from down the hall, voices, often mimicking people I knew, trying to get me to come down the hall. Eventually it got to the point were I would sit outside on the porch, do my homework and wait for my parents to come home.

At night the blankets would routinely fly off the bed, this got to the point were I would roll myself in the blanket every night so it would stay on. I would wake to see the shapes of people in my room.

The topic of ghosts and the supernatural is always controversial. Mr. Wanderer is a non believer, I am a believer but I have no explanation as to what causes this or why it happens. 

Random Facts Friday

1. The Pentagon has a plan for combating a zombie apocalypse. 
2. So does the CDC
3. Iran arrested 14 squirrels for spying in 2007.
4. Two actors have died playing Judas in live Biblical productions by accidentally hanging themselves during his death scene.
5. The world's biggest family live together in India : A man with 39 wives & 94 children.
6. The world's oldest known creature, a mollusk, was 507 years old until scientists killed it by mistake.
7. In 2011 a woman bought a "non-visible" piece of art for $10,000.00. Has she heard of the Emperors new clothes?
8. In 2013 a girl survived Asiana's plane crash, only to be run over & killed by a responding fire truck. I don't recommend watching the video.
9. In Jamaica, sex between men is punishable with up to 10 years imprisonment & a fine of $1,500, while sex between women is allowed.
10. In 2011 a man killed his wife inside the Walmart where she worked. Rather than close the store, they chose to rope off the gore-splattered area while police investigated. We had a meth lab explode in our Walmart, the store didn't close for that either. 
11. Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour. 
12. The average woman uses her height in lipstick every 5 years. I am not the average woman...

Real Live Horror

It's getting close to Halloween, my favorite holiday. For most this is a time of cuddling up on couches and watching scary movies, or gathering around the flicking lights of a campfire for spooky ghost stories. I love a good horror movie, won't pass up a change for ghost stories, but what really gets me is true accounts of horror and mystery.

Earlier this week I stumbled across a Youtube channel called Mr. Nightmare. I am loving this channel. One video really stood out, because it brought back memories from my childhood that I would rather forget, but I know I never will. These are the memories that make me check the doors and windows multiple times before I go to bed. Memories that make look over my shoulder while walking my dog in our backyard at dusk. After all these years I still have the urge to reach for a gun when I hear a sound outside.

The video was 10 Real Creepy True Stories. This is my creepy true story. During the summer of 1988 we moved, not to far, just across the county to a house on a small private street, the area was pretty rural but a road in front of the houses acted as a short cut between two well traveled roads. Behind the houses was a hill densely covered with trees. Most of the husbands on the road worked nights, so most evenings it was just women and children home alone.

Not long after we moved in one of our neighbors mentioned that occasionally they would experience a "prowler" or peeping tom. The lay out of their house was nearly identically to ours, yet they had replaced their huge kitchen window with a much smaller window. The wife had reported that she had seen someone looking in the window at her several times while home alone.

I don't remember what our first encounter with him was. I remember a few times when my sister and I was home alone we would hear someone knock on the door or window, and when we checked no one would be there. He liked to sit just inside the tree line, we could see the glow at the end of his cigerette as he watching our houses. It wasn't constant, he would go months, sometimes a couple years without bothering us. He knew our names, sometimes he would call out to us late at night, just to startle us. One 2 occassions he poisoned our dogs, one dog was able to be saved, one sadly passed away. Another neighbor had a puppy disappear. Us kids found it, dead, tied to a tree on the hill. This was as violent as he ever got, thankfully.

One New Years eve, a friend from the neighborhood and I were home alone. My parents and sister were at New Years parties. The friend and I were old enough to be home alone, so that wasn't an issue. She was trying to lock my front door, the lock was finicky. I was down the hall. Suddenly I heard 3 loud bangs, she started screaming. I ran down the hall and found her with a shocked look on her face. She said she had been standing, straddling the open door trying to figure out how to get it to lock. It was being very stubborn. A man appeared out of no where and slapped the window 3 times before taking off running. We locked the door, grabbed a gun from the gun case and waited for an adult to come home.

A few times we would find hammers, screw drivers, or other tools on the front porch. When I was in high school I was reading a book by John Douglas, former profiler for the FBI. I hadn't had the book long, when it disappeared. I tore the house apart looking for this book. One night I devised a plan. I thought I knew who took the book, so I left our mysterious prowler a note. I told him if he returned the book so I could finish it, he could have it when I was done. I left the note on the TV. A couple days later I woke up and found the book sitting on the coffee table. Tell me, what would a prowler want with a book about killers, rapists and stalkers?

I believe the prowler had to be a career criminal, that would be a logical reason for him sometimes taking a year or two off before coming back to terrorize the neighborhood. Many of you may be asking yourself why we didn't call the cops. We did, our neighbors did, we would occasionally have cops laying in our bushes waiting to try to catch this guy. This was before Kentucky passed our Castle Doctrine law, but the Sheriff's office advised us that if we ever got a shot at the guy to take it.

We have sense moved away, but one of the girls we grew up took over her parents home, she has installed cameras around her house. She posted on facebook not long ago that she couldn't sleep, it was super early in the morning and she was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee because she had gave up on going back to bed. Movement on one of the monitors caught her attention, a man was standing in her long driveway, just staring at her house. She watched him for several minutes, trying to decide if it was worth calling 911 over, she knew he would be gone when they got there. Then he just turned and walked away.