Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I’ve tried on numerous accounts to re-assure myself that ‘ghosts do not exist’ as somewhat of a coping mantra when I had lived in the home I did at fifteen-years-old. Because honestly, if you flat-out tell someone about the spirits haunting your house and so forth, there’s not a doubt they’re going to think you’re crazy. However, although I used this mantra many times a day to the point of not being able to count, I knew underneath that they are real. I just didn’t know how to deal with the stress of it at the time.

When I was fifteen-years-old, I moved into a little three-bedroom house with my father and step-mother. It was a house that he’d owned for years, since I was merely a baby, and still to this day. It was located ‘not-too-far and not-too-close’ to the main parts of town, therefore a quiet neighborhood which you could access the main street in about five minutes or so without a hassle. We were the only young family, too, and us moving into this house after it’d been locked up for thirteen years had caused enough of a disturbance to have senior neighbors by the thousands greeting us (and even peeking around through our windows and backyard…) with garbage pick-up schedules, bus schedules, and newsletters.

Sometimes, we made off-and remarks and came up with ugly names for the house – for even though it had been upholstered many, many times, it always failed to look even the slightest bit ‘newer’. There were always nicks, cracks, and just simply the way the house was designed had made it difficult to make true changes.

Within a week’s time, my father and step-mother left to three villages over, about an hour-and-a-half away, and stayed there for two months. Needless to say, I was alone during this time.

My step-mother, just a day before she left, had mentioned some things to me about my room specifically. She had told me that it frightened her when I left the door open and that she had to close it many times while she was watching TV. She asked me not to leave my door open anymore; to always shut the door whether I entered or left. But I didn’t think anything of my room or that anything was wrong with it. I thought she was just being, as to put it politely, ‘strange’.

I remember watching TV about three or four days after they left. My room was across the living room and at the end of a very short hallway. If you were sitting on the couch, my bedroom door was in plain and clear view. And I don’t know what it was, but the way the shadows looked inside my room (No, I didn’t see any ghosts) had scared me in a peculiar way, especially because it was July and bright outside. I rose from the couch and shut my bedroom door.

‘Maybe’, I thought, ‘This is what she was talking about’. But not to act crazy, I simply brushed it off. Or tried to.

A few nights later, the feeling arose to the point where I felt I couldn’t sleep in there anymore. I don’t know why, I was just… scared. I ended up pulling my mattress off my bed, putting it right in the middle of the living room, and sleeping there. I felt safer, but not by much at all.

And the next day, as inevitable, I felt I couldn’t even BE in there anymore. That morning, I ran in there as fast as my legs could carry me, grabbed the first tote I saw, and threw clothes and whatever I needed as fast as I could before running back out. I was sweating, my heart was pounding, and the hairs all over my body were standing straight up. It was almost as if I were scared literally half-to-death and I wouldn’t have been surprised if I really was.

After that, I never set foot in my room again. I kept everything that I had grabbed in the living room and treated that as a bedroom- as strange as that sounds. That’s when I began to think that maybe, just maybe, the house was really haunted. And my step-mom wasn’t a nut after all. But of course, I never told anyone that I thought this.

Eventually I became too frightened to stay on my own and often invited friends over for the night. Usually, it was my half-cousin, who was my age, that I was close to.

The first thing she did upon arriving my house the first time was use the bathroom. Only seconds later, she came bursting out, her pants barely on her hips.

“Oh, my God. I think your house is haunted or something.” I perked up after hearing her say this. “Really?” I replied, “Why? Why would you think that?” She stuttered for a couple seconds and then began to explain. “Well, I was going to the bathroom. And I saw the shower curtain move, so I was like, ‘Whatever, it’s just the wind coming through the window’. And then, when I turned back, the curtain was perfectly scrunched together and the window behind it was closed!”

I was in disbelief. I hurried to the bathroom, and sure enough, it was exactly how she’d described. I had never opened the bathroom window (it was beyond my reach, just a tiny thing close to the ceiling) and I always had the curtain spread out. It was neatly bunched together.

“I knew this place was haunted!” I said to her, “It really is, I swear to God. That’s why I sleep in the living room.” She laughed. “Oh, it was probably like that before and I just didn’t notice it.” I kicked myself for saying something as such to someone else and simply replied, “Yeah, probably. I’m just kidding, anyways.” and then tried- tried so hard to forget about it.

For the remainder of the time I lived there, I continued to sleep in the living room. I turned on as many lights as possible, plus I’d set the television to a sitcom or funny movie as an attempt to lighten my mood as much as possible during the nighttime (I didn’t feel safe sleeping in that house. I would stay awake and would NOT fall asleep until it had begun getting bright out.). I opened all the windows and turned on the outdoor lights so I could see outside. I avoided staying there alone, or staying there in general. The feeling of fear that I felt was so horrible that I felt safer outside, even in the middle of the night alone.

Now, this is the part where it gets a little crazy. I feel nervous about even posting this, but it’s completely true:

Sometimes, mostly during the day, I would see little flickers in the air. Not ghosts, shadows, demons, or whatever. Just little flickers. If it were indeed a ghost, spirit, or demon, it seemed as if I could see the air moving around it. But that’s all. It could’ve been something paranormal, and it might’ve just been my imagination playing tricks on me from being so on-edge from living there.

To this day, I don’t know how old the house is. I don’t know who built it or who had lived or died there before my father bought it. I don’t think I want to know, but all I do know is that I’m glad to be living somewhere else.

Is this a haunting? If so, what type of haunting? Is it a spirit or a demon?

Sent in by Kaitie Moore, Copyright 2011