Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

My story actually starts prior to my being able to remember. I am the youngest of 10 children, 12 if you count a still born and one that only lived two weeks, her name Helen. The house I grew up in was one my grandfather from Ireland had built himself. He did not die in the house but from what I understand held a strong attachment to it. His wife, my grandmother had died in the house. My grandfather had built himself an office in the attic that in later years got blocked by a false wall. My bedroom was right underneath the office and at night you could hear tapping coming from upstairs. It wasn’t a walking sound, but a tapping as if someone banging their fingers on a desk.

My older siblings and father had told me that when I was little I was sent to bed and had put up such a fuss because I wanted to take a balloon I had gotten that day with me, but my parents wouldn’t let me have the balloon in bed. I cried and cried while everyone else remained downstairs listening to me. When their attention was drawn elsewhere I had stopped crying and they thought I had just fallen asleep. A few minutes later, my father had gone upstairs to check on me only to see that the balloon was tied around my wrist.

Several years later, as a teenager, I was in the very same bedroom, which I shared with 2 older brothers and I witnessed something; the knobs on my stereo actually turned, the speakers went dead and my closet door suddenly went ajar. I would love to say I “heard” what I heard, but to this day I think that maybe I actually picked up on thought from a spirit that told me I was being watched out for. It was a girls voice and she said she was very close to me and will be always. My sister Helen had lived two weeks, one year prior to my being born. Doctors told my mother that if she carried me through the pregnancy she would be disappointed as being a 12th child to a woman now 45, in the mid 60s, it was not likely I would live. I have been watched out for she told me and I could sense the name Helen.

Several years had past and my dad had died in 2001 from cancer. He had stopped smoking his pipes for sometime now, months even. It was during the wake my mother asked me to run to the house to get one of my fathers pipes from his room. I went without thought of anything, except to get that which belonged to my father. I got to the top of the stairs, opened the door to his room, and all of a sudden a rush of coldness swept through me with such a distinct smell of his tobacco. But this wasn’t a lingering smell of used tobacco, it was as if it was being smoked right then. I went to the shelf to take one of the pipes and saw a little trail of smoke from a pipe that rested in his ashtray. It was warm.

Ghosts? I think these all are ghost stories. It makes one realize that if people were haunting a house they are, in this case family and I would have no reason to ever fear them. I hope to see them again soon

Sent in by celtictiger, Copyright 2011 TrueGhostTales.com