Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

Though dozens of strange things have happened in the years that I’ve lived in our house, I’ve only encountered ‘Pascow’ (as I call him) once.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a strange feeling in our house. The feeling of being watched when I’m alone, or hearing whispers when I’m trying to go to sleep. I’m a night owl: my family is always asleep before me. Most of the time, by time I go to bed, it’s 1 or 2 or sometimes even 3 in the morning. So, by logic, none of these things that happen late at night could be done by my family.

Things… have happened to me since I was little. Nothing too big or anything, just a door open when I knew I had closed it just minutes before, or a light coming on the middle of the night. I would be cleaning, leave the room for even just 30 seconds, and the corner I had just cleaned would be scattered with trash. Whoever was in the house didn’t do any harm, so I would pick up the new trash and carry on cleaning. That was my thought whenever something similar happened.

One night – I was 12, I think – I woke up at maybe 4 or 5 AM. For no reason at all, I just woke up. Something made me look across the room to the open door. The thing: I had closed the door right before I went to sleep. I remembered it clearly. VERY clearly, in fact. I had also turned off the hall light, I remembered that too. Anyway, backlighted by the hall light was a slightly-hazy figure, standing still in the doorway. At first I wasn’t sure that I was awake, and then I thought it could very possibly be my older brother, or my father – because I knew somehow that it wasn’t a girl standing there.

When my eyes adjusted, I saw the figure more clearly, saw features and clothes and a face for the first time. A teenage boy, maybe 16 or 17, stood there, watching me. He had dirty blond hair that fell over his eyes and wore a simple jeans-and-T-shirt outfit. There was a thin rivulet of blood running down one side of his face. Other than that, he seemed like a perfectly normal guy.

He stood there for several moments, muttering to himself – or maybe to me. I still don’t know. His eyes had an almost glazed-over look to them, but he stared right at me from under his bangs, with his head tilted down just a little. Then he snapped his head up and looked right into my eyes. To me, it looked like greenish fire was in them. Then he said quietly, “I’ll be back”. Without another word, he turned and disappeared.
The experience left me shaken, and still does when I remember it. At first I thought I was dreaming, but, when I stayed wide awake until 9, when I finally got out of bed, I knew I wasn’t.

Since then, other, much less strange happenings have followed me, at least in the house. One such thing that continues today is about my old Tabby cat, Zena. Her collar, which before belonged to our dog Penny until she grew out of it, has a buckle on it that keeps the animal from pulling it off. No cat, or dog, could undo that buckle – there have been a few times when I couldn’t! Every once in a while, maybe every two years or so, Zena’s collar just disappears. The first time we thought she had just slipped it – the dogs and our other cat did it all the time – but we found her collar after a while… the buckle undone. Whenever we find it, it’s as if someone unbuckled it and took it off, then dropped it somewhere. We always seem to find it in the strangest places, too: under the couch, on the kitchen counter, once in my dresser. Somehow, I know that it’s my nighttime visitor, who, since the night I saw him in my doorway, I’ve referred to as Pascow, after the ghost in Stephen King’s ‘The Pet Cemetery’.

Sent in by Lacy Sheridan, Copyright 2011