Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

I was about 14 years old and living with my family in the small suburban town of Wappinger’s Falls, New York. I was a rebellious, angry, and sick teenager as I had bipolar disorder but didn’t know it.

My family life was horrible, stressful, and dysfunctional. My school life was a source of ultimate misery for me. I wasn’t well received or liked by most of my peers, I was chastised nearly every day, it was getting increasingly difficult to concentrate on school work and it seemed so unfair that I had no escape.

There was no emotional rest either at home or at school. I did have a small group of friend’s though and though my parents thought they were a bad influence, the time that I spent with them meant the world to me. It was my only reprieve from the dark state of my life. (I think this background info is important because I believe a person’s mental state has a lot to do with the attraction of entities).

Collectively, my friends and I were people that most would consider “freaks”, “odd”, “social misfits”. But we had good times smoking pot and educating ourselves in the paranormal. It wasn’t long before we began using the Ouija board and at first it just seemed like a fun game and we all knew that one of us was always moving the planchette.

One day, however, I decided to make a Ouija board, as I didn’t have one of my own and use it with my sister after school.  (We were latch key kids and were always alone and bored for a few hours until my mom got home).  So with a piece of cardboard, a marker, and a round clear cover of a roll of film, I’d made my makeshift Ouija board and planchette.  Almost immediately, it started moving and the spirit seemed to be a prankster. He would have funny answers to our questions and made us laugh. Then something so weird happened. With only two fingers each on the planchette it rose very forcefully and very quickly off the board. We were pulled to our feet and ended up on the same side with our fingers still only on the top of the planchette. In one sweeping motion, it seemed, it rose and pulled us out of the room, up the stairs, down the hall, into the bathroom, back out of the bathroom, back down the hall, back down the stairs, and back into the room where it came to rest on the Ouija board again.

We were shocked and we knew that neither of us could have possibly made it happen as just the fact that we were on the same side and our fingers were only on the top of the planchette, defied the laws of physics (unless of course we had glued it to our fingers which we obviously didn’t). Though it was weird and creepy, we weren’t TOO scared because the spirit still had seemed benevolent and funny (when it pulled us into the bathroom, it had almost dipped our hands into the toilet which made us laugh). Still we were pretty shaken up and decided to stop playing. I ripped up my cardboard Ouija board and threw it in the garbage. I would say that this was the defining moment. The moment that it entered the house and our lives but looking back, some weird things had happened even before that.

One day, weeks prior, I’d brought a book about witchcraft home from the library. I’d been reading it for a little while. I distinctly remember hiding it in an empty flower pot so that my mom wouldn’t find it and get mad at me, but then when I went to get it later, it was just gone. I’d asked everyone in the house about it and no one knew what I was talking about. I never found the book again.

Another day, I woke up in the morning with a key in my hand. It was odd because I knew it wasn’t in my bed when I had gone to sleep and furthermore it wasn’t my key or anyone else’s in the house. I found it to be strange and I set about trying it on every door of the house and the cars and it didn’t open anything. Didn’t even fit into the key holes. I felt very weird about this and I had just saved it for some reason. I put it in a jewelry box that I had with a secret compartment.

Some time later, things started happening. My mom had found pieces of the cardboard Ouija board I’d made in various parts of the house. I don’t know how as I had thrown it in the garbage.

Another day I was in the kitchen with my sister after school. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard so that I could pour myself a drink and then suddenly it just exploded. I hadn’t hit it against anything. It was in perfect tact when I had taken it out of the cupboard and furthermore it hadn’t broken but EXPLODED. Chunks of it shot all over the place, as far as about 15 feet away into the next room.

At around this time, I began to feel like I was being watched. I’d begun to have nightmares of evil in the house. One of them was that I was trying to say the Lord’s Prayer, to get these evil entities out of my house but I was too scared to say the words because with every line of it that I managed to say, these rottweiler dogs were barking viciously right into my face and they were getting angrier and angrier and I was sure that they were going to attack me so I couldn’t finish it. I’d wake up in cold sweats from these dreams.

One time when I was in bed, I was trying to go to sleep but was still awake. Suddenly it felt like someone was either sitting or pressing upon my chest with great force and I couldn’t breathe. It lasted for a few moments and then it stopped but I was shaken. So scared that I was too afraid to even move or cry out for help.  Yet another time when I was sleeping, I’d woke up from yet another nightmare about the presence in my house. I was so terrified from it when I’d woken up that I tried to scream but my whole body was paralyzed and it was several minutes before I regained the use of my limbs. I had wanted to scream but I couldn’t make a sound and I had to pry my mouth open with my hands. I was 14 but I had slept with my mom that night because of how frightened I’d been.

(More about Sleep Paralysis and here)

Another day, I was on my way to school. I was on the school bus when I suddenly felt a very strong feeling that someone was in my room. I knew that that was impossible because I was always the last person to leave the house in the morning and I’d locked the doors. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was in my room. When I went home, I decided to look at that key that I’d woken up with when all of this started happening. I went into my drawer, found the jewelry box that I had hidden it in and went into its secret compartment. The key was gone. I’d never told anyone in my house about the key so obviously they didn’t know where I’d put it. When my sister got home I questioned her about it and she didn’t know what I was talking about. When I explained the situation, I got her to help me look for it. We’d just about searched the entire house and outside. Then, at some point, I had decided to pick up this stuffed animal that I had on my nightstand. It was little plush dog that had its own chair. When I picked it up, I found the key under the stuffed animal, on its chair.

By this time, I was certain that this phenomena was an entity and I decided to write a note to one of my friends that I had used the Ouija board with to explain the situation so that I could give it to her at school. But half way through the letter I’d decided to just tell her in person when I saw her. So I ripped it up and threw it in the paper waste basket in my room. Later on, my mom found the note IN ONE PIECE in a pot under the kitchen sink.

During all of this the house situation had gone from bad to worse as far as my family problems. We were fighting more than ever before. And I’d gotten into major trouble in school and my parents decided to send me away to live with my grandmother in Florida as they felt they couldn’t control me and were convinced that my friends were to blame. After that, I’d never known what happened with the entity in my house. I wondered about it for a long time but no longer felt or seen anything.

Years later, my mom admitted to me that she had felt the presence too and she was so concerned about it that she had asked a friend what she could do about it. The friend advised her to get some holy water, sprinkle it in every room and pray for it to be sent away. My mom did this and when she had gotten to the last room, she said that she actually saw it. She explained it as a shadow that swept by her face. She said that it looked more like a creature than a person and that it left the room and disappeared. All activity stopped after that but perhaps because so much negativity had happened there, my parents decided to sell the house.

And this is perhaps the most important part of the story. Months before any of this stuff happened, my mom and I had a dream on the same night. It seemed to be a warning dream. We both dreamed that we heard God speaking to us. She dreamt that she was being tested but she was hesitating and He told her that she needed to have more faith to pass the test. The interesting thing is that my mom almost always speaks English but when she prays, she always prays in Spanish. The dream was in Spanish when all of her other dreams are in English.

My dream was more or less along the same lines only I wasn’t being tested. I was in a dark room and a dim light was shining on me. I was saying out loud how miserable I was and how I didn’t think anything I wanted in life would ever happen. Then a bible floated towards me and opened and fell into my hands. And I was told to believe and that if I did, all of my dreams would come true.

So that’s my story. I tend to think that this was a demon, not the spirit of someone that had died.  I’ll never play with a Ouija board again, and I guess if I were to make one thing clear, it would be that I don’t think anyone else should ever play with things like that. Its too dangerous and you may not be as lucky as I was in the end.

Sent in by Melissa A. L, Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com