Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I’m not much for sharing personal information over the Internet but the supernatural has always fascinated me and I feel compelled to tell my story in hopes of getting some answers.

From what I’ve read and understand about the subject, houses can have some residual negative energy residing in them that can affect things for the people living there. I believe this is the case with the house I grew up in.

I’ve often thought maybe I’m turning the house itself into a scapegoat to blame it for my family’s problems, sort of a psychological trick to avoid responsibility. But there are just too many things that don’t add up.

We moved into the house when I was four years old. I had the bedroom across the hall from my parents, and my two sisters shared the one by the bathroom. At the time, my little sister was very ill. Her heart was only half-formed when she was born, requiring her to undergo multiple surgeries. Twice a year, my parents had to take her to the Driscoll Children’s Hospital 120 miles away for another operation. On one particular operation, she never came back. Months after the funeral, things began to happen.

Every night around 2:00 in the morning, I would hear dishes rattling loudly in the kitchen. The first time I heard this, I just assumed my mom was up doing dishes. That was until the time I got up to go see her one night and saw her through the open bedroom door, sound asleep next to my dad. The next excuse I told myself was that she must have turned the dishwasher on before going to bed.

One Friday night, while taking advantage of being able to stay up late on a weekend, I watched her go to bed. I was up watching horror movies in my room when again, I heard the familiar sound of dishes rattling around in the kitchen. My mom had not turned the dishwasher on before bed.

After that, I told my sister and the neighbor girl about it. They thought I was trying to scare them, until I got her mom to let her stay over with us one night. I was determined to prove them wrong. We all stayed up in my room playing board games, when like clockwork around 2 am, the dishes began to rattle. The thing that gets me looking back is just how LOUD they were. The kitchen was down the hall and behind the living room – quite a ways off, and we could hear it perfectly. I was amazed that my parents didn’t wake up. After that, my sister and the girl refused to go back to her room and they slept in mine.

Then there was the Nintendo. My mother started getting on to my sister and I each morning for sneaking out to play Nintendo after bedtime. We kept denying it, and she would tell us she’d be in bed and hear us playing Super Mario in the living room. One night, I heard the game playing myself. I got up to see who was on it, and found the living room dark and empty. I slept next to my parents’ bed that night.

This all lasted a few months, then it all seemed to stop. For a while, there were no weird occurrences to speak of. Then, when I was about nine years old, I began experiencing what I’ve since come to learn was sleep paralysis. The experiences terrified me and filled me with anxiety every time I had to go to sleep. It always went that I would wake up face down on my pillow, unable to move. The worst part was that I couldn’t roll over to get air and felt like I was suffocating. I’d try to call out for help but couldn’t make a peep. Half the time I thought I was going to suffocate and die there, face down on my pillow like that, and then I’d finally get enough strength to roll over. This happened to me several times.

One day, my dad called me out to the yard. He had been plowing an area to make a garden and held out his hand. He had found several Native American arrowheads in the soil.

By the time I was 12, the neighbor girl was my sister’s best friend and we let her feed our animals while we were on vacation every summer. One summer after we got back from Colorado, she told my sister and I how she would feed the cats as quickly as possible and get out because she felt uncomfortable being alone in our house and it scared her. One night she stayed over with us and she and my sister told me they saw a black shadow enter my room from the hallway.

Fueling off all this, we decided to buy a Ouija board from Toys R Us (you know one of those Parker Bros. ones that glow?) and try to contact some spirits. We set up a tape recorder by the board to record the experience. It started out with us moving it ourselves just to be stupid, but then we began to suspect it was moving itself. The conversation we had was short and not very scary in itself, but the real terrifying thing came after, when we played the tape back. Every time we asked a question on the tape, a low voice I can only describe as demonic would answer back on the tape while we were moving the planchette. But not very loud, you had to listen closely and make it out through the static. But there was no doubt it was there. This unnerved all of us to no end and we put the thing away and never touched it again.

The years after were really bad for me. As a young teenager, I had many problems with depression and anxiety. I stayed in my room a lot and disassociated myself from my family. Sometimes I would wake up with pure DISGUST for them. I mean the feeling was so strong, like it made me physically ill just to be around them I was so consumed with hatred. When I was 16, I attempted suicide by way of overdose on painkillers and was sent to psychiatric counseling for the next few years. It didn’t help much and neither did the medication.

I graduated high school and remained there so I could attend community college for two years. I was very smart but I had no self-esteem, no motivation to go off to a university. I was so insecure about myself. I would start college classes only to get discouraged and quit going every semester. Once I thought I was doing better and made the mistake of dropping my counselor appointments. I had made a couple of friends and we started drinking and doing drugs every night in my room. My parents became sick of company being over all the time, and they knew we weren’t studying in there. My drinking got so out of control, I had an entire stash of liquor bottles hidden in my closet. It got worse when I was 21. I would take anti-depressants mixed with alcohol to heighten the effect. One time I even passed out and went to the ER. Soon after, I began cutting myself on my arms.

I was a total mess. But not just me. My entire family was a big ball of depression. My dad drank beer all the time, as if trying to numb something. My mom was a basket case. And my sister went to work and came home every day only to sleep. It’s like she had no social aspirations at all, no friends, nothing. She was depressed as well and took antidepressants.

None of this sounds very paranormal, until I mention that my bedroom was the only room in the house that remained 10 degrees colder than the rest. My mom and sister would enter and complain about how cold my room was. It was a noticeable difference from the hallway stepping into my bedroom. My dad found no explanation for it.

One day, I was sitting outside in the yard and my mom was planting flowers on the side of the house. There was a hoe leaning against the wall next to her, and I actually imagined what it would be like to kill my own mother with it. I felt nauseous afterwards and sick to my stomach at the IDEA of me even THINKING something so horrible.

I also became fascinated with the occult. At one time, I proclaimed myself to be a Wiccan and tried to learn magic. I read everything I could on the subject.

Eventually, I started dating someone and finally moved out of that house. The funny thing? Now that I’m gone, I am totally fine. I finally know what it feels like to be happy. I’ve quit drinking and I don’t need counseling or medication anymore. It’s like a complete 180. I feel better about everything, I’m even doing well in college and staying on track. For two years now, I have felt like a completely normal, happy person. Too bad it took me until age 23.

But my family is still the same. My sister is 25 years old and hasn’t gone to college. She has no friends, no social life. She goes to work and sleeps the rest of the day. My dad still drinks a lot, and my mom just ignores it all.

Is it really that house? All this has me wondering, is there something negative in that house that affects the moods and personalities of everyone in it? Or is my imagination working on overdrive? This is all confusing to me, but I’ve heard of residual psychic energy and now I do feel deep down in my heart that that house is bad. I only wish my family would just move out, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Can someone give me an opinion on this?

Written by Kevin Clark, Copyright 2008