Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

About ten years ago, I lived in a city named Grandville, Michigan. This town is a suburb of Grand Rapids and a road runs parallel to the highway called Indian Mounds Road, which is now a bike trail. Indian burial mounds actually exist in the wooded swampy areas next to the Grand River, and the road is completely desolate except for a few Vietnamese fisherman who build fishing huts on stilts. I lived about 1 mile from this area where all the roads were named after Indian tribes, so I am guessing that we lived somewhere in the vicinity of the burial grounds. I have never believed in anything that I couldn’t see, and still have a hard time doing so. Although something strange was in that house, I still don’t know what it was.

One night, everyone in the house was asleep. At around 3am, a sound rumbled through the house which sounded like a tornado was ripping the roof off. This was in the Spring time, so it was nothing to have severe weather roll through in the middle of the night. I met my parents on the stairs because my room was in the finished basement. We all had wide eyes and wondered what could have made such a noise. After scanning the entire house and the outside of the house, nothing was out of place, so everyone decided to go back to sleep.

About 1 week later, my brother was home from college and we were sitting in the basement watching TV. Nothing scary was on, and neither of us were thinking in the ghostly mindframe; in fact, I had not even told him what happened the previous week. As we were both dozing to an old movie on the TV, my mothers bookshelf, with all of her heavy quilting books, tipped over face down on the floor. This bookshelf was in no way unbalanced, and so it made both of us jump. Right after we got up out of our chairs, The which sat next to the bookshelf flashed on even though these were the days when we shut our computer completely down every night. After picking the books up and turning the computer off, we went back to bed.

Things were quiet for a while and in the fall I was once again watching TV in the basement when I decided to get something from the refrigerator upstairs. This was about 2am and my parents were asleep. My father is a light sleeper, so I never thought twice about him waking up when I came up the stairs. I had my face in the fridge when I heard my father walk up behind me. I thought he was going to ask how my day was, so I simply said “hi dad, my day was kind of long.” Still rooting through the fridge, I could not figure out why he wasn’t talking to me so I questioned “dad?”. I turned around and no one was there. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I had to gasp for breath. Needless to say, I left the kitchen empty handed and shivered myself to sleep thinking that my mind was playing tricks on me.

That winter, I had a friend over to the house to go snowboarding. We stayed up late that night and we had to leave early in the morning. Once again, we were watching TV in the basement and I decided to go to bed. I never told him about the strange occurrences at the house, which had happened previously. When I got up the next morning, he was awake and had dark circles under his eyes. He had been sleeping on the fold out bed in the basement den next to a window. He said it sounded stupid, but something had been scratching at the window all night, and he swore he heard someone digging his own grave. I asked him if he had seen anything, but he said it was just sounds, but it had scared him half to death.

Later that winter, I had my girlfriend over for the night. She was uneasy staying by herself, but I ran to the store and left her in my bedroom by herself. She was the only person in the house and I was gone approximately 15 minutes. When I came downstairs, she yelled my name. “Tim, is that you?!” I said yes and she told me to quit messing with her. When she walked out of the room, she saw that I had beer from the store and her jaw dropped. She said that she thought I had never left and she could hear someone walking down the stairs and up to the bedroom door over and over. She said she was too afraid to check outside the door and assumed it was me playing tricks on her. Since that time, it was a common occurrence to hear footsteps up and down the basement stairs at any time of day. It got to the point where I would yell “Shut up!” and the steps would usually stop for the day.

Even though so many strange things happened at the house, I still did not consider it haunted. After my other brother broke up with his girlfriend, he came to live at the house for a few months. It was Springtime again, and every weird thing that had happened vanished from my thoughts. My brother was a raging alcoholic, and he usually drank himself to sleep with a bottle of whiskey every night, so it was common for me to see him stone drunk and stumbling around after my parents went to bed. Again, we were watching TV in the basement when he decided to stumble up the stairs for a smoke in the garage. I heard him go up the stairs and toward the kitchen and his footsteps abruptly stopped. I muted the TV thinking that he had passed out on the floor. I heard him say “dad?”. No reply this time and again I heard him say “dad? is that you?” A few more seconds went by without a reply and he came flying down the stairs. I asked him what had happened, and he answered me completely sober. “When I got upstairs, all the lights were off.” he said. “The only light was the street light coming through the window and I saw someone standing in the living room. I thought it was dad, but when I asked if it was him the person only looked back at me. I turned around and ran back downstairs. I think someone is in the house.” Being 6’3 and 285lbs, I still shivered and grabbed the fireplace poker before going upstairs. We looked around, and all the doors were locked and no one was in the house. We decided it would be best if we just went to sleep.

The last strange thing that happened at that house was the next summer. I had been working second shift at a warehouse, and I didn’t get home until 3 or 4am. When I got home one night, I decided to go out the back slider on the deck for a smoke. I was pondering something deep I suppose when I looked up at a beautiful starlit night. A plane seemed to be heading in from the west toward the airport, so I started watching it. The aircraft had a long wispy jet fuel tail that I could see clearly because of the moon light. All of a sudden it seemed as if lightning flashed and the whole world was lit up for about 1 second. The sky was clear however, and when I looked back at the plane, all I could see was that long wispy jet fuel trail all the way to the horizon. Just 1 second earlier, it had been overhead. Again, I decided to go to sleep and not think about it.

Shortly after the last experience, I moved out with my girlfriend and have never seen or heard anything strange. Life has changed quite a bit, and my parents no longer live in that house. When I questioned my mother about the strange things that happened, she says that nothing ever happened to her. I guess I will never know, but these make good stories to people who are interested.I’m not sure whether the Indian Burial grounds have anything to do with the strange things, but that is my only explanation.
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Written by Tim, Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com

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