Working with Spirit, I've always had strange occurrences and experiences in the form of vibrant dreams. So, when I stepped on the property of the Whaley House last week, in March 2024, and realized that the place matched a journal entry that I wrote in 2018, I had to investigate further. There were too many coincidences from the dream.
Early in the year of 2018, I dreamed about a strange square two-story Greek Revival house, right on the cuff of a rolling hillside dotted with small boulders. It seemed to sit in a great dust bowl, as there was not much around it but a sandy dirt road out front, which appeared to be under construction. The house was plain. I only saw this for an instant. It was two stories, hedged in the back by the hillside that just peeked over the rooftop. The other side was one story, which also appeared to be under construction, as work was being done on the front façade. The look of the house was so distinctive, I was able to remember it plainly.
The next flash in this dream, I saw a staircase running up to an added balcony to the house. I saw a woman with dark hair, neatly parted down the middle and tied into a knot at the base of her head, sitting in a room at the back of the house, looking out over a short walkway, the hillside, and what appeared to be the top of a roof from the back porch area attached to the one-story side of the house. Feelings of sadness overwhelmed me as I almost looked out through the window as she would have done, through a very thin laced curtain.
Next, I appeared in the backyard. I heard the word, like a name, whale, but it was not Whaley. I did not see a well in the dream; however, the woman showed me a dirty apron that was tucked into the hillside. Also, she was writing letters, which appeared to be smudged somewhat with droplets of moisture, perhaps tears. She would then crumple up the paper and shove them into rocks and crevices on the hillside, almost as if the hillside was a wailing wall. Hence the name, whale.
Back in 2018, I had no idea that the Whaley House existed. It was several years later that I was able to make the connection that this property may be what I saw in the dream. A paranormal investigator pointed it out to me when I tried to tell him about the house and the dream from years ago.
Last week, I was able to visit the house for the first time. When approaching the property, I had the typical heavy ringing in my ears and quickly realized this was the house I saw in the dream from 2018. Even the name, Whaley, appeared to match. Except, there was no staircase, and there was no hillside in the back of the house. Despite this, I walked into the gift shop and told a woman behind the counter that I was going to sound crazy, but that I needed to ask some questions about the property. It just so happened at that moment the historian walked in the door.
After talking, he took me into the house and let me walk around a little. I pointed out some areas in the house that I saw specifically in the dream. He told me after walking around for a bit, that everything I said made sense, and that some of the things I said the public would not have known as some of the earlier images of the house are not displayed. We made a date for later in the week, when he would have the chance to pull out some old photos and information for me.
During the official meeting when I went back to the house, the historian showed me a series of images of when the house was first built, as well as a property survey of what was around the house. There were only a few houses dotted along the hillside at the time, with a large cemetery almost next to the house. Today, that cemetery is much smaller, most of it buried under the streets and buildings that now line this street. The images showed a hillside directly behind the house, with small boulders. The entire hillside was bulldozed to make way for development sometime after the house was built.
The historian was convinced that I had made a connection with the Spirit of Violet Whaley, a young woman who lived in the house. She was living in a secluded house with only the back garden that she worked in and her mother to keep her company. Her husband, who was a scandalous miser and cheat, made her an outcast in high society when she finally divorced him and moved back in with her parents.
Violet was known to have loved gardening, even planting the stately pepper-corn trees that can be
seen on the side and back of the house. The historian told me she would have worn an apron while gardening; not many people would have picked that up. The name whale that I heard in the dream, he believes also connects to Violet, in that she had tried to drown herself in the well that was located in the back of the property. Her father had saved her and locked her into a room on the second floor, facing the back of the hillside.
She would have been sitting in the window looking over that hillside. Another fact from the dream, she was known to have kept a journal and wrote many letters, but according to her surviving sister, she was burying portions of this journal in the yard.
So many connections from this dream left my head spinning. But one part of this story stands out and made this connection personal. Violet was on suicide watch for some time before she got out, got a hold of her father’s gun from a shop he kept in the front of the house, and proceeded to shoot herself in the chest out in the backyard. Her father, hearing the shot, found her still alive and carried her into the family parlor, where she died on a couch below a window facing the front road. When I was in the house, I took a photo of this house and caught a strange green light in this area below the window.
There have been several spirits over the past few years that I have connected with all dealing with suicide and depression. It’s personal for me because I too have struggled with depression for many years. All of these spirits are usually young women, all of the hurt somehow by family or men, and have committed suicide. It’s surreal that this is what I have connected with; for personal reasons, it’s the spirit world sending me reminders and healings. But for the spirits, it may also be to tell their story, which is what I intend to do.