My Personal Paranormal Experience

My husband and I were both what you could call "healthy skeptics" and pretty much paranormal non believers until we moved into our former home of 8 years. The general uneasiness of the place upon moving in was more than obvious, to me anyway. Upon moving in and setting up the children in their rooms, and us in ours, it was pretty much life as usual; or so I thought. I recall being in my bedroom working at my desk, and out of my peripheral vision seeing a black figure pacing back and forth slowly from the front door to my daughter's bedroom. It appeared to be a female dressed in antique dress, something that would have been the norm for the late 1800's to early 1900's. I never mentioned these incidents to anyone, as I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me, or new house jitters. I had also encountered unexplained balls of light that would flit around the room, and from time to time over my hand on my computer mouse. That lead me to believe I needed to have my blood pressure checked. I rationalized it in my mind over and over again considering all possible, reasonable, and logical explanations.

It really wasn't until one particular night we all sat down for supper, and our daughter 3 at the time, asked rather bluntly, "see the lady up there Mommy?" I looked up, looked at her, looked at my husband who was also looking up, he looked at me and we both looked up again. Not seeing anything, I asked her where is the lady now? She proceeded to tell me that the lady was sitting on the counter. I looked over at the counter area, and saw nothing, I looked at my husband he was looking too, and we again looked at each other, while trying to maintain what composure we had left after that hair raising experience. There have been too many things that have happened there to dismiss them all as "normal", believe me he'd have been the first to look into how and why.

I was awoken by my husband early one Easter morning by his eager prompting of me to get up and take a look in the kitchen. There were two chairs that were moved out away from the table, perfectly placed next to each other in the middle of the kitchen as if two people had been sitting there side by side, we joked, if we came back from Easter dinner and the chairs were stacked on the table as they were in the movie Poltergeist, we were outta there.

Our daughter befriended the lady for quite some time, getting irritated with me if I went in her room to check on her, because the lady would go away. I'd asked her many times where the lady went when I came in, and I always received the same answer, to the "spacement" (That's basement in 3 year old lingo) I would then ask her how the lady went to the basement and she always pointed to her closet. That went on for quite some time, until one night we had some friends over, and we were laughing and talking, when all of a sudden we heard her scream then start to cry, she had been sound asleep. We all went running in there to find a very obvious red mark on her face, and her screaming, "the lady hit me!" repeatedly. We calmed her down, our friends were rather unnerved as we had had made the mistake of telling them what had been happening there since we moved in, and they left, rather quickly. The next day I went to our minister and told him what had been happening, and he agreed to come over and bless the house. He too had the same uneasy feeling, that by then we had become somewhat accustomed to. He talked with our daughter without us in the room, and came out to tell us that at 3 years old she had way too much detail to be lying as 3 year olds aren't capable of forming such an elaborate lie, and went on to bless the house; room by room.

In the front entrance is a small door that lead to the basement, it was always near that door that I had felt the most uncomfortable, I followed him down those steep, small stairs and he found it intensely discerning as he neared the bottom step, he told me he felt as if there was an electrical current holding him back. We still said a prayer while on the stairs but never went totally into the basement. Let's just say I didn't go down there unless I really had to. After the house was blessed, things calmed down considerably. The lady was never brought up again by our daughter, and we didn't question her about it after that.

We still had some strange things happening, we've always had a problem with any type of clock that runs on batteries keeping time, new batteries and all, the clock will stop shortly after fresh battery installation. Other than that, a few of us still saw glimpses of things out of the corners of our eyes, but we really didn't discuss it much.

My son, at 14 years old, had things start disappearing, and turning up in the strangest of places. That seemed to quit when he got mad enough to yell out loudly, "knock it off!" There were other instances where he needed to put this same technique to work as well. One night he was lying in bed, and had his keys on his dresser. The key ring he had was like a climbers clip, but it had a light on it. The button to the light was very difficult to push, and you had to hold it in to keep the light lit. He was awoken by the light flashing in his face. He picked up his keys and turned them over thinking that the pressure of the button against the dresser may have been enough to turn the light on. Turning them over didn't help, as it began all over again. He resorted to yelling, "knock it off I have to get up for school tomorrow!" to make it stop and that it did.

The pantry door opened by itself, I would close it and make sure it's closed and latched, and it would be open again the next time I would look. I would keep shutting it, and then usually say something like, this is getting old, and it would stop. Things stopped flying off the top of the fridge (putting things up high became a habit after we had our first child) at 2 am, we went through a period where you could watch this certain roll of electrical tape fly off the top of the refrigerator and land 5 feet away on the floor, go pick it up and put it back, sometimes it would happen again, other times not. It never happened when I got my camera rolling of course.

There are times when things seem very peaceful, and times when you know for certain you're being watched. I had 4 outdoor cats, only one of them would come in, and when he did he would only go about a foot into the living room, and would sit in the doorway and stare in there intently watching even when no one is in there.

December 11, 2006 at approximately 5:30 pm, the kids and I had just finished putting up our Christmas decorations, and we had a tradition of taking a picture with only the candles and holiday lights lit to capture the ambiance. That was the first year we used an artificial tree, it was a six foot tree that we had put almost in a corner between a wall and the front door. The kids knew I didn't need them in the picture so they were sitting patiently on the loveseat across from the tree. The television was on, and they were waiting for me to get out of the way so they could watch the next holiday movie that was about to start. I finished taking pictures, and went to my room to upload them on my computer. In doing so, I saw an image that took my breath away, and I began to sob uncontrollably. My oldest son came in to see why I was crying, and saw the picture. Being the voice of reason, he told me, "Mom, don't cry, if it wanted to hurt us it would have, we were all right there." What he didn't realize, was that I was in tears because I finally had something tangible, something solid, some form of proof that I wasn't crazy. When you experience so many things that you cannot explain, you begin to question the core of your sanity, and wonder how intact it is. While I still cannot to this day explain what it is that showed itself in the picture, or what the light from the ceiling is emanating from, I can say that I am not crazy. Validation is a huge factor when you're going through something like this. (I have used the photo for the beginning of this article)

You know something is not right when your teenage son will not shower without his mother standing guard by the bathroom door. My oldest son was exiting the shower when he witnessed what appeared to be a black mass forming in front of the inside of the white bathroom door, then as he yelled out it dissipated. He was spooked to say the least. It seemed to target him for a while, he was dressing one night in his room, and I was in my bedroom on the opposite end of the house, when I heard him yell for me. I went in there expecting to see him bleeding from an injury, but I found him visibly shaken. I asked him what had happened, and had to wait for him to regain his composure. He pointed to a framed picture hanging on the wall in his bedroom that was swinging from side to side, and then told me a ball shaped black mass formed in front of him as he was getting dressed before it proceeded to fly past him and out through the picture on the wall.

The last, and most recent event prior to our moving out was when my daughter who had just gotten home from school, took some things into the kitchen, and on her way back to her room she set her phone on the computer desk in the living room which is next to her bedroom door. She proceeded into her room, and after being in there a few minutes she heard a thump outside her door. She went to see what happened, and there her phone was on the floor. She knew she had set it back far enough where it wouldn't have fallen, and the boys were in their bedroom, so she knew they hadn't done it. As she was standing back up after picking it up she reported a black hooded figure that she said was shorter than her, run past her from the kitchen toward the door to the boy's room and it vanished. She asked her brothers if they had seen anything, and they told her no, but they did hear her phone fall.

When it came time to move, the discomfort in the house grew. It was more uneasy as ever. I was glad to be moving, yet afraid whatever it was may follow us. We prayed as a family before we walked out the door for the last time, in hopes that we would never have to deal with anything like this again.

This article is just a summation of the encounters we experienced, there were many more, but is revealing to much an invitation to welcome it back into our lives? I'm not sure I want to risk it.