Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

Okay, so before I start, I thought I should mention that the house I currently live in with my family is around 120 years old. We moved in when I was six, and I am now nineteen. Although I didn’t experience anything involving the paranormal when I first moved in, it started a couple years later. And with that said, here goes.

I guess you could say the happenings started a decade after my family moved in. I was sixteen when I had my first encounter with the paranormal. I was in our office upstairs, both my parents were in town and both my brothers were downstairs watching television. When I got done with the schoolwork I was doing, I decided to go downstairs to see what my brothers were watching. And to do that, I had to go past my parents’ bedroom, and the door was closed at the time. I walked past it as I normally do when I want to go downstairs, but this time it wasn’t so normal. I took three or four footsteps in front of the door when I heard a female voice say in a whisper “Help me!” loud enough for me to hear. I backtracked, opened the bedroom door looking for a woman, and found nobody there. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, it wasn’t the only paranormal experience I’ve had in this house.

A year later, my family received two dogs that we named Maggie and Bear for Christmas. A few months after that, my brothers were in school and my parents were at work. I had the day off from classes that day, so I was watching a rerun of “NCIS” with my dogs in the living room.

In the basement, we have a washer and a dryer that make a very loud banging noise when closed really hard (or even softly). While I was watching TV in the living room, I heard one of the doors in the basement bang like it was being slammed shut. I muted the television, ran down to the basement to see what happened and again found nobody there. I then went down to the washer/dryer and slammed the dryer door, trying to recreate the sound I just heard. It sounded exactly like the slam I heard a few minutes earlier.

Oh, there’s more.

Around 10:00 one night, I was getting my family’s dogs inside from “doing their business” outside, and when I unhooked them and let them go inside, I happened to look up out towards the pasture we have adjacent to our backyard (which is a few yards away from the actual house) and saw a big golden orb just floating there. I stood there in shock, not knowing what to do. I dismissed the possibility of it being a tractor for two reasons: it was one ball of light, not two; and the pasture had only cows, never any tractors. And as soon as the orb appeared, it disappeared just as quickly.

A couple days ago, my friend and I decided to do some ghost-hunting inside the house due to claims from two friends that the house gave them the creeps, and one friend told me that the air got really thick around the basement area when he was over, and he says that’s the sign of a spirit.

Now, I personally have never heard thick air as being a sign of a presence, but let me know if it really is a sign. Brad (a pseudonym for my friend) was in the downstairs bathroom washing his hands when he noticed the medicine cabinet mirror above the toilet moved an inch. That may be pretty easy to dismiss (since air could have done it), but just to clarify, the air was not on at this time, and when we looked closer at the mirror, there were fingerprints on the corner where you open it.

Then the first place Brad and I looked was the basement. We spent about a half-hour down there with a recorder without getting anything really significant. The attic yielded about the same results. But when we got to my parents’ bedroom (where I heard the female voice whisper for help), we got some evidence there.

Brad asked for a sign from any spirit that might have been there with us, and almost as soon as he asked that, a big whoosh of cold air came across his face. Although the air conditioning was on at the time, we dismissed that as being the cause because the air vent in my parents’ room is covered by my dad’s dresser and some DVDs, and Brad and I were sitting on the edge of the bed, which was nowhere near the air vent. He (Brad) also saw what looked like a woman in the mirror above my mom’s dresser. He described her as a “Caucasian woman with longer black hair, looked to be about mid-30s, early 40s”. This could have been the same woman who whispered for my help three years prior.

After a few more minutes of call-and-response with the recorder, Brad said he heard footsteps in the bedroom. I’ll admit, my family was in the house at the time. But it couldn’t have been any of them since my younger brother was playing XBox in his room, and my parents were downstairs. And so were my dogs. The footsteps sounded like flat-footed shoes, according to Brad.

We then decided to leave the recorder untouched in the basement for a while we relaxed in the living room. When Brad played the tape back later that night, he heard a banging noise that sounded like a cabinet door being slammed. And that was only on part of the 90-minute tape. Who knows what else could have been caught?

I guess we’ll just have to listen to it and find out.

Sent in by Benji Greenwood, Copyright 2010