Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

OK, let me start by saying my grandmother’s house had been in our family for about 100 years. It was built, I believe, in 1907 by my great-grandmother’s grandparents along with a little summer cottage in the back yard that my parents now live in. There have been at least four deaths in that house, all of which were family (as far as I know).

I’m 22 years old with two children now and that house still freaks me out. When I was a little girl I used to be terrified to go in the basement (as most kids are afraid of scary basements). I would always feel like someone was watching me. I used to have nightmares about being at the bottom of the basement stairs and looking up them and the light would go off and the door would slam shut and I would try running to the top and as soon as I would get the door open something would pull my nightgown and pull me back down and I would wake up.

Of course, when your little, adults don’t tell you people have died in the house or that they have seen strange, unexplainable things. There have always been strange things I remember as a kid; like cabinets opening and closing in the kitchen by themselves, footsteps up and down the basement or attic stairs, TV’s and radios going on and off by themselves, lights being on when I know I turned them off, footsteps across the ceiling coming from the attic (which was in later years refinished into two bedrooms for me and my cousins, but we’ll get to that later).

But the first real experience that I remember as a kid I was about eight or nine years old and my best friend was spending the weekend with me as she usually did every weekend and summer. We were watching a movie in the living room late at night and could hear the normal rustle of things going on in the kitchen when I knew my grandparents were in bed and would have to walk by the living room to get to the kitchen. So I just turned the TV up and was trying to hear it better but I guess whatever was making the noises really wanted my attention because all of a sudden I heard a loud crash come from the kitchen. Needless to say my friend and I nearly jumped out of our skin. I got up to go see what the noise was and my friend was behind me begging me to stay with her but instead she followed me into the kitchen. The light switch was on the opposite wall of the kitchen so we had to venture in to turn on the light (pretty creepy) and when I turned on the light I saw that my grandmother’s large spice rack that had been on the wall for years was on the floor and the glass door on the front of it was broke as were some of the spice bottles. I didn’t think much of it and started cleaning up the pieces.

My grandmother got up and asked what all the noise was and before I could answer her she saw the spice rack on the floor. She asked how it fell and I answered with a shrug and told her we were in the living room and heard it fall. Of course she didn’t believe me and said the typical adult thing, “things don’t just come flying off the walls my themselves,” right as she said that I was inspecting the back of the rack to see why it might have fallen and saw that there was nothing broken on it! The two little triangle pieces that were screwed to the back were still intact and the nails in the wall were still there angled upward…? I looked at my grandmother and said “apparently they do, this would have to be lifted to fall off because nothing is broken!”

A few years later I had another happening. Now let me start by saying that years ago when people died it was customary to have their funerals in their home. I’ve been told by my grandparents that the family who had died in this house had been laid out in the living room where their couch now sits (great!). Anyway, when I was about 12 or 13 I was sleeping on the couch and I usually would fall asleep with the TV going and my Papa would get up in the middle of the night and turn it off. So I woke up in the middle of the night and the TV was off as I expected it to be but for some reason I had a feeling someone was still in the room. I looked around thinking maybe my papa was still in the room picking up toys but there was no one there. I laid there for a few minutes trying to fall back asleep and I started hearing what sounded like two men having a conversation but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Knowing that my papa was the only male in the house and it was about 3 am I knew it wasn’t him. I tried ignoring it and turned over. Then it grew louder as if it were in the same room with me but I still couldn’t hear what was being said, it was very garbled and mumbly. So I got up and turned on the radio in the living room to sooth me to sleep but not to loud to wake anyone else up. I laid down and all I could hear was the music and right as I started to dose off I hear it again, loud this time, as if right in my ear. I still couldn’t hear what was being said but it sounded angry, almost like the two men had stopped having a conversation and was directing their attention at me. I flew into my grandparents bedroom and told my Nana what happened and she just told me to sleep on the floor next to her bed. What made me nervous was she didn’t try to tell me it was a dream or all in my head but instead almost acted like she knew what I was talking about.

My father grew up in that house and when I was older told me of things that had happened to him as a child. He told me as a child they had an antique typewriter that was kept in the attic that he would hear clicking away at night all the time. He got so afraid of it he threw it away and got a beating for doing so. Also his room used to be in the basement at one point and at night his doorknob would jiggle as if someone were trying to come in but it never opened. But his most frightening story was when he was about 10 he was going to use the bathroom and its in the middle of a long hallway with my grandparents bedroom on one end and a spare room on the other end. From what he said he was passing the hall and on the wall he saw a figure of an old woman wearing a shawl walk in the opposite direction of where he was headed. He later found out that my great-great-grandmother Mrs. Buckley tended to her ailing brother and husband which were placed at either end of the hall in each room and would walk back and forth between the rooms. She often wore a shawl!

When I was 16 I moved into that house and took the rooms upstairs in the attic for myself. There were always strange things that happened up there. My stereo would turn on by itself when I was at school and my grandmother would be up there trying to figure out how to turn it off and would give up and just unplug it. My TV would go on in the middle of the night or shut off while watching a movie. I would hear footsteps in whichever room I wasn’t in. I would often feel my bed shake while I was sleeping at night. Many friends of mine felt uneasy sleeping up there. My best friend actually jumped in my bed with me from the floor one night crying saying someone squeezed her hand. She believed that she was unwanted in the house because she was African American and thought the spirits were racist.

Nothing really evil has been felt by anyone in that house, just a lot of little odd occurrences. The only people who have seen a full body apparition were my father, my cousin, and my great-grandmother when she was dieing.

My cousin says that before I took the rooms upstairs when one of them belonged to her she saw a man standing in the doorway just looking at her. She was so frozen with fear she couldn’t move. She closed her eyes and when she opened them it was gone and she ran downstairs (passing through the door which she had just seen the figure of the man in). I believe her because she never spent a single night over there after that and hasn’t been to that house in almost six years!

My great-grandmother lived in that house her whole life and lived in the small cottage in the back yard for a good 30 years until she became ill at age 92 and moved back in to spend her last dieing years in her home. By then she was mentally long gone. Everyday I would ask her how old she was and some days she was 27 and other days she was 55. She was a sweet old woman but cried a lot for no reason. She was terrified of dieing and despite being out of her mind knew she was headed in that direction. I would ask why she’s crying and she would tell me she didn’t want to be put under the ground. She would always see people that were not there and there is a difference between senile and hallucinating!

We believe that as someone gets closer to death the wall between the dead and the living thins and they see the other side a lot more. She was afraid of the kitchen because she said there was always an angry looking woman sitting at the kitchen counter with a large floppy sun hat. As she got closer to her end she saw more and more people in her room that we didn’t see. I remember being in her room helping her eat and she grabbed my arm and was staring in the corner of the room and was yelling for who ever it was she was looking at to get out. This made me a little nervous and I went to go get my grandmother and could hear my great-grandmother screaming and crying for someone to “get out, leave me alone!”

She told us there was a man who would stand in the corner of the room and just watch her. We had to move her vanity dresser because she swore she saw two women and a man that would watch her from the inside of it. One night an ex-boyfriend and I were “babysitting” her while my grandmother went out to get dinner and my papa was at work. She was actually in a good mood and laughing (she loved my first boyfriend because he flirted with her and told her he was gonna take her out on a date) and all of a sudden she just got a very serious face and was staring behind us into the doorway of the hall. I asked her what she was looking at and she told me there was a lady in black smiling at her and when I turned around my great-grandmother looked at me and said I scared her away. I couldn’t wait for my Nana to get back with that food!

The day before she died she said there were so many people in her room and then she looked at the ceiling and counted, 1, 2, 3, 4… and said “they put the lights on for me” and just smiled. Early that next morning she passed away.

To this day my Nana still hears people rustling about in the house when she’s the only one home and often hears people calling her name. The occurrences are getting more and more frequent and I’m sad to say I think she might be getting closer to that thin veil between the living and the dead.

I don’t mind the skeptics questioning my stories because there true to me and all my family who have experienced them. I hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoy reading others stories.

Sent in by April Pettey, Copyright 2010