Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I’ve never been sensitive to the paranormal, neither have I ever wanted to be, so I can’t conclude whether my experience is truly paranormal or in fact just a product of an overactive imagination as a child. You be the judge.

When I was around eleven or twelve I lived in a very old house in a very bad part of Los Angeles, shootings, police sirens, ambulance sirens, and less-than-admirable activities were a daily occurrence. The house I lived in was occupied by my psychotic grandmother, alcoholic uncle, and depressed father along with myself. The house itself was set atop a hill above a very dirty street, it was around like 360 something steps to get all the way up to the house, neighbors literally lived ‘above’ you on the hill. Now that the scenery is set, I’ll give you a little back story.

My father is an amazing person, and around the time I saw the spirit my father had slipped into a nasty depression because of the death of my mother, leaving me in the care of my grandmother who sat on the couch all day and watched the television. She was never too fond of my father or me, seeing as she wasn’t my fathers mother, and she found the fact that my mother hadn’t married into her own ‘race’ (my mother was Mexican, my father was white) not very, uhm, positive.

My alcoholic uncle came home drunk about every other night, and his room was right next to mine (his room was literally a hallway that led into the living room). The door was closed and I was trying to sleep, but I could never sleep in that ‘home’. I was often plagued by nightmares, really bad ones. Ones that kids really shouldn’t have. More often than not I would wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat, shaking like a leaf. And I would be shaking hard, and I wouldn’t even have a clue why. I wouldn’t have a memory of a nightmare, so it seemed I had no reason to have the symptoms of being frightened.

Another thing about that house was the way the “dark” was. Normally, when the lights are off, things are just simply, dark. But not in that house. The darkness there was black. Not just absence of light, but black. More often than not you had a feeling of being watched in that house. And now my dad and I have long since moved on and out of that house, but my dad still tells me stories of days when he was home alone. My dad is a perfectly rational person, and to hear stuff like he would hear footsteps and the faucet go on and off kinda got me thinking that maybe I just wasn’t a scared child but there was a presence there.

Now, all of the above occurrences can simply be chalked up to an unhappy home, depressing situations, and an unhappy child dealing with stress in her own way, but one thing I cannot explain is almost every night for as long as I had my own room I’d be lying awake in bed and turn toward the door that separated my uncles room and mine, and I’d see something there. It looked like a static figure of a man or person about 6′ 2″, just standing there looking at me. His whole body was composed of static and he’d just stand there, he wasn’t threatening, wasn’t really loving, he was just there.

I remember one of the first nights I saw him I thought it was just my eyes playing a trick on me. So I turned the other way and tried to fall asleep. I couldn’t fall asleep so I had turned back the other way and it was still there. For the longest time I just stared at it, I wasn’t really scared, I was just, well slightly uneasy. I wasn’t sure if it was my eyes or not, so me being me I had slowly gotten out of bed and walked towards it, expecting it to disappear because it was just a trick of light. It didn’t. The closer I got to it, the more it seemed like a static person. It didn’t stand perfectly straight but swayed and lightly moved like a normal person would. Except he was static, no eyes, no defining features but I could tell there was arms, a neck, a torso, and a defined shape of head as well as a top hat. I touched it, and my hand went through it. It just felt maybe slightly warmer then the surrounding air.

Being a child I got extremely uneasy, and went to go wake up my father. He came to see, and saw nothing. At this point I was in tears because my father was mad I woke him up, and he didn’t believe I was seeing this. He went back to bed and so did I, effectively ignoring the thing that was STILL in the same place. I should mention that as this all went down the things head moved to look at us. I went back to bed, not entirely sure of what had just happened but willing to ignore it because I was tired.

The static figure was there from every night onward until the day I moved. I had gotten so used to the strange thing that I often felt weird on the off occasion when the thing wasn’t there.

So, I’ve told my story. Have an idea of what the thing was? I’d love to hear. And I should mention that I don’t believe the night terrors and the thing were related, because not once did I feel threatened by it, or felt it meant ill harm. At my worst I was uneasy with it, but I wasn’t scared of it.

I’ve long since moved away, and gladly had no other experiences with the paranormal.

Sent in by Nicolee, Copyright 2010 TrueGhostTales.com