Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

While I do have a few of my own personal paranormal experiences to share, I’d like to offer up a secondhand tale in the hope that someone else out there might be able to shed some light on it- it’s fascinated me for years.

About eight years ago, I lived in a dingy little apartment building in Uptown Minneapolis- a shabby place made worthwhile by my fantastic neighbors. Even though they were all one bedroom apartments, I was the only single person in the building, and they all sort of looked after me.  My neighbors down the hall had three children that I adored, and the mother, (I’ll call her Sherri) shared this story with me one day when it was just the two of us.  She was extremely embarrassed to tell it, but she knew I collected ghost stories, and she’d never told anyone who believed her before.

Sherri had sort of a rough life- she grew up with a single mom and a sister, got pregnant at 15 by a man much older, and had been with him ever since. Let’s just say he was not awesome, although I got along with him well enough for the sake of the kids and Sherri.  She’d just recently gotten her GED, which was a big source of pride for them; her common-law husband was barely literate. They were extremely awed by my college education and book collection- they came to me for a lot of advice and help with forms, applications, etc.

One day, when it was just us and the kids, I asked her if she’d ever seen a ghost- the kids were looking through my ghost story collections- and she said, “Well, I don’t know what they were.  But I saw something.”  And she told me this story:

Sherri, her mother and older sister lived in a small house in Kansas for a few years- she was about 8 when they moved in.  She and her sister shared a bedroom that faced some old train tracks.  The closet door was at the foot of her bed, and her sister was on the opposite wall; the door to the hall was between their beds.

Every night for a couple years, she would open her eyes to find figures standing at the foot of her bed, peering at her.  They were very tall, she said, and made of light.  They looked human-like, but they weren’t human.  She could not hear sound, but she could see them communicating with each other.

“They were always talking about me,” she said.  “I could see them point at me and turn back to each other.  Sometimes I couldn’t move, I was so scared- but when they saw me awake, they’d back away, and sometimes go back into the closet.”

Her sister never saw them.   Sherri would scream and wake her up, and they’d be gone.  Sometimes they’d drift out the door and down the hall, as though they were just passing through.

Neither her mother or sister believed her, but Sherri was so terrified her mother let her sleep with her for a couple nights. At first, it was fine.  But on the second night, she saw a few of them drift by the door, turn around, and peer in at her.  She said it looked like they were looking for her.

She recognized some of them after a while- they were regulars.  But there were also figures that would travel through once and she’d never see them again.  After a while, she had to get used to it- nobody was going to help or believe her.

“It happened every night.  I’m not crazy.  I know it happened. I was so glad when we moved.”

I believe her.  I frankly don’t think she’s even capable of making up such a detailed and fantastic tale; that isn’t her personality at all. I’ve always wondered what they were.  I don’t think that this is a ghost story, per se.  Could her house have been in a place of travel for something we don’t know about yet?  Has anyone had a similar experience? I would love to hear about it.

Sent in by “Honeychurch”, Copyright 2008 TrueGhostTales.com all rights reserved.