Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I know that it is a common thing to be said in ghost stories ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’ I guess it’s to try and make them more believable. In this case it was when my younger brother started seeing them… I guess that’s when I started to believe.

I live in the North West of England. My house happens to be a 10 minute walk from the Norton Priory Museum, which is built around the grounds of an old Monastery. This was where all the monks were slaughtered around the time that Henry IV ruled. This was the key bit of information that leads me to believing in such thing as ghosts.

My younger brother was around the age of 4 at the time, myself at the age of 6. It first started when my baby bother didn’t want to tidy his room on his own, he threw tantrums and on one occasion he even tried to run away from home. He said that he did this because when he was left alone in his room, his toys would appear to change into snakes or spiders.

My parents said he just had an over reactive imagination, which seems plausible… Then he began to wake up in the nights and run into my room shouting that figures were going walking around the house. As any young child would be, I was terrified, and often had sleepless nights because of him.

When my mum questioned my brother he had said ‘you see mum, it’s not that they are scaring me, they are just annoying me and keeping me up’. Obviously, my mum asks ‘Who?’

This was when my bother described lots of men ‘with brown robes, bald heads, and lots of funny jugs of beer.’ Otherwise known as a monk, he said that they danced around his room and played strange music on funny instruments. That’s also around the time when he started drawing grave stones with ‘R.I.P’ written on them. –Bare in mind he was 4 years old, and had only just started school, he could barely write his own name!

This went on for months, and I had fallen into a routine of waking up in the night to make sure he was asleep in his bed, and wasn’t shouting about invisible monks. One particular night happened to be rather horrible. Doing my usual check on him, he seemed to be sound asleep, then all of a sudden he sat bolt up in his bed and yelled ‘Look out, there’s a man in a cloak behind you!’ I screamed and he then said: ‘oh its okay, he went downstairs.’

I continued screaming and ran into my parents room crying. I remember them putting me back into my bed- like they thought I was going to sleep!? And they put my younger brother in their room with them. They got him back to sleep for about an hour then, he woke again, shouting ‘There he is! Mum he is taking his clothes off and dancing! Make him stop! Why is he dancing?’ By this point my parents were well and truly freaked out.

I now figure that he was seeing a rather drunk ghost of a monk. It sounds funny now, but it was quite the opposite to be in the mist of it.

There was only one night I can think of that both I and my brother woke to something startling. It must have been early hours of a morning because it was summer, and it was dark. The stairs that lead up to both our rooms are around ten meters along the hall from the doorway. I appeared to hear the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, then stop at the top, when I heard my younger brother shout my name. I replied and he asked if I had just heard what he had. I said yes. We both agreed to confront whatever was at the top of the stairs at the same time.

We both emerged from our rooms to find the post piled up neatly at the top of the stairs. I was too scared to move. My little brother didn’t seem to be phased. He said it was the ‘men in the brown robes playing tricks on us’.

Ten years on and I still don’t have a logical explanation of for any of it. My brother stopped seeing them a few years after that, and had been perfectly normal and sound of mind since.

Let me know what you think.

Sent in by Nai D, Copyright 2011 TrueGhostTales.com