Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

When I was a teenager me and my family rented a house that was only about four years old at the time.  Although it had been around for four years we found out that it was sitting vacant all that time.  The house was built right next to an old farmhouse and the land our house was built on was an orchard connected to the house. Almost right off strange things started happening.  We heard footsteps upstairs when no one was there.  That was our first hint.  But I thought nothing of it at the time, figuring that even newer houses can make noises.

I didn’t take it seriously until I started seeing her.  At 4:45 a.m. exactly I woke up one night and found this gray blob next to the bed.  It really looked like some kind of misty gray thing.  Even seeing this though didn’t really alert me that something was going on since I was half asleep when it happened. Then one morning, again at 4:45, I heard a bang on the door that woke me up.  I looked at the door and saw a blonde late teen girl walking towards my bed and turning to walk beside it. I thought it was my sister at first and was about to ask her why she was there when I noticed that the door never shut behind her when she came in.  I realized then that the door banged when the girl walked through the door!

I also noticed that the girl wasn’t my sister because I could see through her.  She was wearing a blue sun dress that looked old fashioned, but nothing older than say the 1920′s or 30′s because it came right about to the knee.  Her whole body seemed to be bluish but there was also somehow this fleshy color to it too. Her hair was short and blonde and her eyes were blue.  She never looked at me as she walked alongside my bed.  When she came along to where my head was she bent over.

A little before this, and this is the part that really scared me, I noticed that she had a bundle in her arms.  It looked like from the way she was holding it that it was a baby wrapped in a blanket.  I couldn’t see the baby’s face.  As soon as she bent over to put the baby down, because I surmised that this is what she was doing, she disappeared.  She didn’t go silently though.  There was a funny static sound when she faded, almost like the sound of saran wrap being squished in a ball. While she was in my room, I was totally shocked and frozen.  I could only watch fascinated.  But once she was gone, I started screaming for my parents.  They must have heard me but refused to come.  The horrible part of it was that I could not turn on the lights without getting up and going to that door she just walked through.  I couldn’t stomach that at the time.  So I screamed louder and louder until I heard my sister get up and scold my parents a little to go down to my room with her to see what was the matter.  Later she would tell me that as soon as she walked into the room she felt a cold spot near the foot of the bed. My parents did what parents usually do at times like this and said I must have dreamed it so I would calm down.

After this time, we experienced what I later learned from watching ghost shows on television, what is called a true haunting. A true haunting is one where the ghost will actually interact with the people it haunts instead of merely being like a tape recording of something that happened a long time ago. Our ghost truly wanted us to know that she was there.  She loved walking down the hall upstairs and rapping in the walls. Two occasions when she did these things really stand out in my head.  Oh, forgot to mention that she did these other things anytime of day, but when she decided to appear and bend over to put the bundle down, it was always 4:45 in the morning.  Even times when she didn’t come I would wake up at that time exactly, look at the clock and have a hard time getting back to sleep.

Anyway, her daytime hauntings for me usually involved walking in the hall or rapping in the walls.  One morning, when I was alone, I heard her start to walk down the hall then pause almost to see if I was listening.  It then sounded like running footsteps to where my bedroom door was.  I was downstairs at the time, and left immediately.  If she meant to scare me she succeeded.  Another time, she didn’t really scare me but sort of annoyed me.  I was reading in my room and she started to rap in the walls.  It was in the middle of the afternoon, so that helped me to feel fearless towards her, besides being a little used to her by then. I told her that she wasn’t scaring me and that I knew she was there so she didn’t need to knock on the wall.

My oldest sister was in the house at the time.  This was not the same sister that felt the cold spot and was very skeptical about the ghost.  So, to prove the ghost’s existence, I called her up.  The ghost was rapping constantly until my sister came, and she gave one loud knock for my sister and stopped. Either she was messing with me by stopping, or trying to prove her existence.  I actually think she was trying to prove herself because she made this last knock loud enough for my sister to hear before stopping.  Anyway, I made my point to my sister who couldn’t explain the knocking because of the location of my room on the second floor away from anywhere there would be pipes.

A time after we finally moved from the house, interesting things came out from the rest of the family from what they experienced.  I guess since I was the youngest and they felt, I was the most scared, they didn’t tell me they experienced anything until after we left. I found out from the sister that felt the cold spot that she kept seeing different colored lights floating around at night.  She completely believed the house was haunted.  My parents experienced the rapping in the walls.  My mom told me she kept asking my father what it was and he kept telling her it was the pipes.  I knew what it was. And the skeptical sister informed me when we still lived there that I was sleep walking at night.  I kept telling her that was impossible, but she insisted.  She said I kept walking down the hall at night. I can’t prove that I wasn’t sleep walking, but it sure seems more likely to me that it was our friend doing her thing.

Awhile after moving out of the house and watching shows on ghosts, I learned that sometimes true hauntings could happen near power lines.  It just so happens that our house was located very close to some very major power lines.  It made me think about the noise she made when she disappeared that sounded like static electricity.  I really don’t know enough about it, but maybe this sound occurred when she went into her own dimension. Another thing that should be mentioned is that my mom went to the owner of the farmhouse and told him about the ghost.  He got angry and said he didn’t know anyone who lived there who died and he had lived there for twenty-five years.  This proved nothing to me though since the ghost could have lived there before he moved in, or he was lying because he felt it wasn’t our business.  He was a grumpy, private man.

Anyway, another thing that bothered and scared me about the whole thing is the bundle and what she was doing when she put the bundle down.  Was this blanketed bundle a baby?  Was she putting it down into a crib?  Or was she putting the bundle into the ground?  Our house was built on the site of an old orchard, not the site of an old house, so it might make more sense that she might have been burying it in the ground.  Although I got used to the ghost because she wasn’t malicious, this still scared me.  Was this young woman guilty of secretly killing her child, and did her guilt keep her around after she died?  I will never know.  But, if she did bury a child under that house, the guilt might have made her try to tell someone the only way she knew how in her ghostly way.  She tells the story every time she puts that bundle down in a house built on an orchard.

This house was built in a part of California that was never developed, before the farmhouse was built, but as orchards.  And since it was right next to the old farmhouse that was built sometime around the mid to late 1800′s and the area was not developed before this time, there was never a house there before.

Why she chose to haunt only the upper level of the house was a complete mystery to me.  Maybe the fact that this was closer to where we all slept was why she did this?  I don’t know.  Ironically to me, we moved out only because the owner sold it.  Otherwise we would probably still be there because she never bothered us that much and we loved that house.

What is even more ironic, is that one day I noticed something scrawled crudely on the lintel of my sister’s door.  It said “halfway house.”  It really scared my sister because we knew about the ghost at that point and she thought maybe the ghost did it.  I told her that some kids probably got in there when it was vacant and did that.  I told a boyfriend of mine that worked construction about it, and he gave probably the best explanation.  He said that workers will call a house a “halfway house” when the builders only pay for the house to get partially built before they send the crew away.  He said some angry workers might have put that there and explains somewhat why the house was vacant so long.

But, what was funny is that the owner ended up selling our house to a company that hosts a halfway house there now for single mothers recovering from drugs and alcohol and their kids.  It just seems funny that it is now a real halfway house, and that young mothers are now keeping our ghost company.

Sent in by Kristin E., Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com