While in Riverton, Wyoming on our Labor Day Weekend trip, I would get up before my wife and Cousin-in-Law (CIL) and read. I’d started these two books on our upstate New York trip and had finished one of them (New England’s Ghostly Haunts, © 1983, by Robert Ellis Cahill), but was only about halfway through with the other one. That book is the More Haunted Northern New York, by Cheri Revai (apparently Cheri changed her name for one reason or the other, to “Farnsworth”).
I’d sit in the recliner out in the living room, with just the table-side light on and read. What had happened next, I don’t know if it’s really paranormal or not, but I have not found out the source of “the weirdness.”
On the first morning, as I sat and read, I noticed a sudden and definite scent of women’s perfume. It wasn’t an air cleaner/spritzer, it was definitely perfume. I didn’t think any of it, thinking it must be some scent released into the air. I let it go. The next morning, it happened again—twice. This time it happened just as I was finishing up the story about the Hand House (pages 68-70), on page 70. If you read five lines up from my thumb, you’ll read what I read as the two instances of perfume hit me:
Okay, at this point I put the book down and inhaled some more.
Perfume. Women’s perfume.
Definite, strong.
My wife doesn’t wear it. Neither does my CIL. Neither do his pets.
I put the book down and got up and looked around the shelves behind me (pictures on the shelves and that was it). Nothing. Not one thing that could cause the smell of perfume. I look above and below…I look to the rest of the living room. Nothing. I go out into the hallway…nothing.
Huh.
I sit back down and read the rest of the ghost story and book.
Later that day I ask my wife if she smelled any kind of perfume as she’d sat in the other room the previous day, and she’d mentioned that she had. I looked around some more but couldn’t find anything. I later ask my CIL, when he got up, and he had no idea. But later he brought me over to a knickknack he had. “Is this it?” he asked, at which point he placed what looked like half a geode into my face with a butterfly in the hollow.
I inhaled.
There was a faint scent of perfume. Faint.
He said that you had to run a hairdryer over it to release the smell.
I don’t know if it was the same scent, but I have this to say about the entire affair:
- I had to ram my nose right up and into that geode/butterfly thing to smell it. What I’d smelled was all around me. It was powerful and strong.
- No one ran any hairdryer during my early morning hours.
- This tiny “butterfly thing” was in the next room, around a corner, then recessed back from the entryway into the living room I’d been sitting in by about 12 or 15 feet? There was no way that extremely faint scent could travel like that and amplify it’s scent like it had. What I smelled was like someone had literally sprayed perfume into the air around me. Or like a woman who was heavily perfumed…had stood right next to me.
So…am I making too much out of this?
All I know was that on that second day (and not since) as I read the words “There’s also a very faint scent of perfume“…I smelled perfume. Twice.
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The Riverton Orb (fpdorchak.wordpress.com)
You didn’t explicitly say whether or not it was the same perfume smell. And what was the relevance of the butterfly geode to anyone who may have owned it (or loved it) and have passed away?
To be honest, I wasn’t sure! It smelled pretty close to it, but in the realm of prefumes, I don’t know much about them and many do seem to smell “the same” to me…and I wasn’t really focusing on the specific scent, just that a perfumed smell existed. And the butterfly scent smelled perfume-y is all I can say. I also don’t know the relevance of the butterfly or geode, just that it was a gift to my CIL.