ghost stories
Anyway, I've always believed in ghosts, and I've always been fairly certain that just about every house I've lived in has had some kind of spirit or somesuch in it. I'm currently in my seventh house, and out of those seven I'm _convinced_ that three of them were indeed haunted.
The first house that I lived in (for the first 16 years of my life) was rented to my family by my grandparents. My grandparents used to love telling my mother and I about how the family to rent the house before us was actually a coven of witches. They'd say that these people would throw wild parties, sit on the roof all night and cast spells. They bred cats in the closet that was in my room, held seances, communicated with the dead, etc. etc. Really, I was never convinced that anything like that had ever taken place. I just chalked it up to the fact that my grandparents were highly conservative and just happened to rent the place to a caravan of hippies. (Breeding cats and playing with a oujia board on the roof does not a witch make.) But some weird shit _did_ happen in that house, and I don't know where it came from, just that it was _there_.
Case 1: The Disembodied Hand
When I was very, very young, I used to share a room with my brother. A few weeks after being moved into this room, I woke up in the middle of the night for some reason or another. As I was trying to fall back asleep, I looked out the window that was at the foot of my bed. We had those shades that you tugged on to open and close, the kind that would jump out of your hand if you pulled too fast and pop off the window if you weren't careful. Anyway, the moon was out that night, super bright even through the shades, and apparently so was something else.
Jesus Christ, I nearly wet the bed.
There was a silhouette of a _human hand_ pressed up against the window, and it looked like it was scratching at the glass, asking to be let in. I froze completely, I don't think I was even breathing.
And then it started _tapping_. Just little taps at first. Then they started getting louder, harder, until I thought it was going to break through and I just utterly freaked out. I started screaming. My brother woke up and my mother came running in. I told them about the hand, but of course it wasn't there anymore. Mom calmed me down, and I went back to sleep, although not until the sun started to come up.
The hand came back a few more times, but didn't tap anymore. Everytime I saw it, I'd bury my head under the covers and hold my breath. Eventually, I moved into my own room, and didn't see it again.
Case Two: The Easter Bunny
Fast forward to a few years later, very, very early Easter morning in that same house. My new room is at the back of the house, and the way my bed is positioned, I can see straight down the hall and into the living room. The dining room and kitchen are right off of the living room.
Again, I wake up in the middle night for whatever reason. The first thing I noticed is that my door is open. I can't stand sleeping with my door open, I always have it closed. Oh no big deal, I think to myself, maybe mom opened it before she went to bed.
So I'm lying there, staring down the hall at nothing and trying to get back to sleep when I hear something in the dining room. Very faint thumps, like something very large and heavy is walking around.
Now I'm wide awake and trying to focus in the dark. I'm thinking it's my mother perhaps? It doesn't _sound_ right, but it had _better_ be my mother. A few minutes pass, more shuffling around, thump-thump-thump, and then, nothing.
I'm waiting, not breathing, the sheets halfway over my head, when I see this huge _thing_ GLIDE out of the dining room and into the living room. There's absolutely no sound as it moves, and I see that the top of it nearly brushes the ceiling. So it goes out of the dining room, through the living room, and apparently through the wall, outside.
Next thing I know I was out of bed, shutting and locking the damn door, and I slept with the sheets over my head for almost a year after that.
There have also been strange noises in that house as well. Scratching, knocking, whispers, and I swear one day I heard someone crying in my mother's room when, naturally, no one was home but myself.
Case Three: The Obligatory Woman in White
Eventually, the three of us moved out of that house and out of Kansas City to the small farm/college town of Maryville, Missouri. We settled into a nice duplex with a finished basement, and almost immediately shit started happening. The first night we were there, the thermostat maxed itself out, lights flashed in various rooms, and the fire alarm in the basement (where my brother had claimed his room) kept going off for no reason. Whatever, that could be attributed to just about anything, most likely faulty wiring. But through the night, my cat (who usually slept in my room) would crawl onto my chest and wake me up. She'd be sitting half-way up, incredibly tense, and staring directly at a spot on the wall above my head. This happened a few other nights, the spot changing from the foot of my bed, a corner of my room, and the closet.
A week later, my cat ran away (and was probably eaten by raccoons, according to my friend's dad ), and I forgot about the late-night kitty vigils.
Nothing too out of the ordinary happened until months later. By then it was summer. Our air conditioner was on the fritz and so we kept our windows open during the night. I'd taken on the habit of sleeping in just my underwear with a light sheet because of the heat, but that night the temperature had dropped significantly. A cold breeze from the window beside my bed woke me up. I toss and turn in my sleep, and of course by the time I woke up, the sheet was twisted up by my feet. Eh, whatever, I grabbed at it clumsily, got it halfway up my legs, then gave up and rolled over.
There was a woman sitting beside my bed, dressed in white, and giving the faint impression of glowing softly. She had long brown hair and a gentle face, and I don't remember being freaked out in the slightest. I blinked, slurred an "Uh, what?", and she pointed at me.
"You'll get sick," she said, "if you don't cover up."
I just nodded, made a second, more successful attempt at getting my sheets untangled and went back to bed.
After that I started having dreams/nightmares about old, run-down farmhouses and bodies in the floor. I distinctly remember one where I opened my closet and body parts and farming tools came tumbling out.
We came to find out that a few farmhouses had been torn down where our street was, and duplexes built over them. After a little exploring in the basement, I found a door that led to nowhere in the entertainment room. My mother and I had tried to open that thing, but it stood fast, as if it had been nailed shut from the other side. We couldn't access the hinges from our side, so we just left it alone. The freaky thing about that though is that that door and whatever lay behind it was _directly_ beneath my closet.
Case Four: The Sad House by the Tracks
We house-hopped a little longer and come to rest in a place the size of a freaking warehouse in Warrensburg. No matter how much crap we put in there, it always seemed to damn empty. There were always drafts, and the train tracks were probably 20 feet from our backyard, no joke. It was always freaky as hell waking up to hear a train coming and thinking that 14 tornadoes were dropping down onto your house in the middle of the night.
Anyway, the basement there was half-finished, which meant just finished enough for my mother and new stepdad to have my brother and I live down there and they'd take the room upstairs.
I never liked it down there. For one, there was this oppressive aura of, well, sadness down there all the time. I don't know how else to describe it. It was unnaturally cold, even for a basement (which, by the way, wasn't even all the way under ground). During the night, you could hear someone climbing the stairs, slowly. One day my mother had even started yelling for me. I'd been out on the back deck having a cigarette, so when I came up behind her, she freaked out. She'd seen someone walk down the stairs into the basement and go into my room. Since I was quite clearly upstairs, and my dad and brother were out, there's really only one other explanation.
There were two reasons why I hated my room, specifically. One reason is because it was directly beneath my parents' room, and I could hear _everything_ that went on up there. From footsteps to an unneccesarily noisy bed (OMFG).
Another reason is because a particularly unhappy _something_ also lived in that room. I use the term "lived" loosely, of course. My closet door would slam shut in the middle of the night, random things would turn up missing, and the temperature in there would drop so suddenly you'd think someone turned on a fan. Also, it was the strongest point of depression in the house. i.e. you couldn't bring anyone in there without them suddenly feeling sad. I experimented with this a few times with people I hadn't talked to about the house, and they each reported the same feelings.
Right before we moved out, my room, or whatever was in it, started something new. About every other night, something would pad across the floor to a corner, and start kicking my walls. At first I thought it was the boiler or pipes or something logical, until the sounds started moving across the wall, past my door (without striking it), and it would usually stop right before it got to the closet.
So far there hasn't been anything like that in the house I'm currently in, which is nice. That means I get more sleep.
The first house that I lived in (for the first 16 years of my life) was rented to my family by my grandparents. My grandparents used to love telling my mother and I about how the family to rent the house before us was actually a coven of witches. They'd say that these people would throw wild parties, sit on the roof all night and cast spells. They bred cats in the closet that was in my room, held seances, communicated with the dead, etc. etc. Really, I was never convinced that anything like that had ever taken place. I just chalked it up to the fact that my grandparents were highly conservative and just happened to rent the place to a caravan of hippies. (Breeding cats and playing with a oujia board on the roof does not a witch make.) But some weird shit _did_ happen in that house, and I don't know where it came from, just that it was _there_.
Case 1: The Disembodied Hand
When I was very, very young, I used to share a room with my brother. A few weeks after being moved into this room, I woke up in the middle of the night for some reason or another. As I was trying to fall back asleep, I looked out the window that was at the foot of my bed. We had those shades that you tugged on to open and close, the kind that would jump out of your hand if you pulled too fast and pop off the window if you weren't careful. Anyway, the moon was out that night, super bright even through the shades, and apparently so was something else.
Jesus Christ, I nearly wet the bed.
There was a silhouette of a _human hand_ pressed up against the window, and it looked like it was scratching at the glass, asking to be let in. I froze completely, I don't think I was even breathing.
And then it started _tapping_. Just little taps at first. Then they started getting louder, harder, until I thought it was going to break through and I just utterly freaked out. I started screaming. My brother woke up and my mother came running in. I told them about the hand, but of course it wasn't there anymore. Mom calmed me down, and I went back to sleep, although not until the sun started to come up.
The hand came back a few more times, but didn't tap anymore. Everytime I saw it, I'd bury my head under the covers and hold my breath. Eventually, I moved into my own room, and didn't see it again.
Case Two: The Easter Bunny
Fast forward to a few years later, very, very early Easter morning in that same house. My new room is at the back of the house, and the way my bed is positioned, I can see straight down the hall and into the living room. The dining room and kitchen are right off of the living room.
Again, I wake up in the middle night for whatever reason. The first thing I noticed is that my door is open. I can't stand sleeping with my door open, I always have it closed. Oh no big deal, I think to myself, maybe mom opened it before she went to bed.
So I'm lying there, staring down the hall at nothing and trying to get back to sleep when I hear something in the dining room. Very faint thumps, like something very large and heavy is walking around.
Now I'm wide awake and trying to focus in the dark. I'm thinking it's my mother perhaps? It doesn't _sound_ right, but it had _better_ be my mother. A few minutes pass, more shuffling around, thump-thump-thump, and then, nothing.
I'm waiting, not breathing, the sheets halfway over my head, when I see this huge _thing_ GLIDE out of the dining room and into the living room. There's absolutely no sound as it moves, and I see that the top of it nearly brushes the ceiling. So it goes out of the dining room, through the living room, and apparently through the wall, outside.
Next thing I know I was out of bed, shutting and locking the damn door, and I slept with the sheets over my head for almost a year after that.
There have also been strange noises in that house as well. Scratching, knocking, whispers, and I swear one day I heard someone crying in my mother's room when, naturally, no one was home but myself.
Case Three: The Obligatory Woman in White
Eventually, the three of us moved out of that house and out of Kansas City to the small farm/college town of Maryville, Missouri. We settled into a nice duplex with a finished basement, and almost immediately shit started happening. The first night we were there, the thermostat maxed itself out, lights flashed in various rooms, and the fire alarm in the basement (where my brother had claimed his room) kept going off for no reason. Whatever, that could be attributed to just about anything, most likely faulty wiring. But through the night, my cat (who usually slept in my room) would crawl onto my chest and wake me up. She'd be sitting half-way up, incredibly tense, and staring directly at a spot on the wall above my head. This happened a few other nights, the spot changing from the foot of my bed, a corner of my room, and the closet.
A week later, my cat ran away (and was probably eaten by raccoons, according to my friend's dad ), and I forgot about the late-night kitty vigils.
Nothing too out of the ordinary happened until months later. By then it was summer. Our air conditioner was on the fritz and so we kept our windows open during the night. I'd taken on the habit of sleeping in just my underwear with a light sheet because of the heat, but that night the temperature had dropped significantly. A cold breeze from the window beside my bed woke me up. I toss and turn in my sleep, and of course by the time I woke up, the sheet was twisted up by my feet. Eh, whatever, I grabbed at it clumsily, got it halfway up my legs, then gave up and rolled over.
There was a woman sitting beside my bed, dressed in white, and giving the faint impression of glowing softly. She had long brown hair and a gentle face, and I don't remember being freaked out in the slightest. I blinked, slurred an "Uh, what?", and she pointed at me.
"You'll get sick," she said, "if you don't cover up."
I just nodded, made a second, more successful attempt at getting my sheets untangled and went back to bed.
After that I started having dreams/nightmares about old, run-down farmhouses and bodies in the floor. I distinctly remember one where I opened my closet and body parts and farming tools came tumbling out.
We came to find out that a few farmhouses had been torn down where our street was, and duplexes built over them. After a little exploring in the basement, I found a door that led to nowhere in the entertainment room. My mother and I had tried to open that thing, but it stood fast, as if it had been nailed shut from the other side. We couldn't access the hinges from our side, so we just left it alone. The freaky thing about that though is that that door and whatever lay behind it was _directly_ beneath my closet.
Case Four: The Sad House by the Tracks
We house-hopped a little longer and come to rest in a place the size of a freaking warehouse in Warrensburg. No matter how much crap we put in there, it always seemed to damn empty. There were always drafts, and the train tracks were probably 20 feet from our backyard, no joke. It was always freaky as hell waking up to hear a train coming and thinking that 14 tornadoes were dropping down onto your house in the middle of the night.
Anyway, the basement there was half-finished, which meant just finished enough for my mother and new stepdad to have my brother and I live down there and they'd take the room upstairs.
I never liked it down there. For one, there was this oppressive aura of, well, sadness down there all the time. I don't know how else to describe it. It was unnaturally cold, even for a basement (which, by the way, wasn't even all the way under ground). During the night, you could hear someone climbing the stairs, slowly. One day my mother had even started yelling for me. I'd been out on the back deck having a cigarette, so when I came up behind her, she freaked out. She'd seen someone walk down the stairs into the basement and go into my room. Since I was quite clearly upstairs, and my dad and brother were out, there's really only one other explanation.
There were two reasons why I hated my room, specifically. One reason is because it was directly beneath my parents' room, and I could hear _everything_ that went on up there. From footsteps to an unneccesarily noisy bed (OMFG).
Another reason is because a particularly unhappy _something_ also lived in that room. I use the term "lived" loosely, of course. My closet door would slam shut in the middle of the night, random things would turn up missing, and the temperature in there would drop so suddenly you'd think someone turned on a fan. Also, it was the strongest point of depression in the house. i.e. you couldn't bring anyone in there without them suddenly feeling sad. I experimented with this a few times with people I hadn't talked to about the house, and they each reported the same feelings.
Right before we moved out, my room, or whatever was in it, started something new. About every other night, something would pad across the floor to a corner, and start kicking my walls. At first I thought it was the boiler or pipes or something logical, until the sounds started moving across the wall, past my door (without striking it), and it would usually stop right before it got to the closet.
So far there hasn't been anything like that in the house I'm currently in, which is nice. That means I get more sleep.