I used to lay awake in my bed
With the door open
And watch the shadow on the wall leading up the stairs.
My parents would leave the light on in the living room downstairs so it created the same shadow every night on that wall.
I wanted to make sure for as long as I could that no one - or no thing was coming up those stairs. And if they were I wanted to be ready. There were so many nights where I would do my best to fight off sleep. I was so...afraid.
And even to this day, some nights those same fears keep me up.
It's tougher here though, in this house. It's a much bigger house with less people living in it. And a few things have happened here which have really scared the hell out of me. I keep the mag lite and a louisville slugger under the bed for protection and have only had to pull them out from under the bed a couple times.
Part of me thinks that this might have been some old ancient burial ground that they built our house on. We have a pond in the backyard and it might possibly have been a good place for early pioneers or possibly Native Americans to settle. Maybe someone forcibly drowned another person in that shallow water or they found a few graves when digging the foundation for the house. Who knows.
What I do know is that my wife talks a lot more in her sleep here than anywhere else. And I have the most horrifying nightmares here too. Much worse than I ever remember having in any other living space. Some nights I'm afraid to go to sleep because I know I might wake up drenched in sweat, or screaming.
The following things you will read have really happened to my wife and me. I am not making any of this up - and the only reason I am writing this now is because something happened yesterday that has really bothered me. Some things I can just write off - or hopefully move past, but the brain likes to see patterns in things...
Major Incident 1: It is 2007. The wife and I are sound asleep one night when she suddenly jolts me out of sleep. She puts her hand over my mouth and shushes me and tells me to listen. She thinks there is someone in the house. Someone downstairs. I can hear it - it definitely sounds like voices.
Oh Shit. I think to myself. This is the real thing - what I've been worried about for years, someone breaking in to the house. I grab the flashlight and the bat and put my ear to the bedroom door to make sure whoever is in our house is not close - but I can still hear the commotion going on downstairs.
I open the bedroom door slowly and quietly, and actually try to listen harder. I can't make out what the voices are saying. I yell, "It's somebody in here?" The wife is hiding behind the 2nd unopened door of our bedroom and peeking out. I get no response.
I bound down the stairs stomping on them (hoping to scare anyone away) and when I get down there I finally figure out what's going on. There is some faint music playing - and immediately (this is how effed my mind is in this situation) I think that whoever is in the house has turned on our music docking station to drown out the sound of them moving around the house. I am now even more freaked out.
I yell up to the wife, "The docking station is on".
"Go check it out!" she yells down to me.
So I slowly walk towards the hallway light and turn it on. I see no movement, no shadows. I walk in to the living room and see that the ipod is for some reason playing and there's no one in the house to be found. I check all the doors and windows to see if they're still closed and locked. No trace of anyone. I look for the remote and there it is, sitting on top of the end table - no way that it could have accidentally turned itself on. I turn off the docking station.
This situation most people I think would just chalk up to random electronic surges, or something weird going on with the ipod. But every year that passes by where this doesn't occur again (it has never randomly turned on again) is another year that this situation freaks me out even more.
Minor Incident 1: I mentioned my wife talks a lot more in her sleep here. Recently she told me that while she was in bed she saw a lifelike person with horns on their head standing next to her in our bedroom. For some reason she thought it might have been me - but when she spoke to it and said, "Honey" (assuming it was me) and she got no response is when she freaked out. It was dark and she couldn't make out who it was but when I came home from a rec league game that night is when she came to the full realization that it wasn't me.
Minor Incident 2: Hearing things. I like to shower at night, in my own bathroom. That way I can stay up without having bother the wife while she's sleeping. One night before I hopped in to the shower I heard the sound of a little girl crying. It was very faint - a soft sob. This one I thought could possibly be our neighbors right next to us. My bathroom is one of the closest rooms to our neighbors - but when I think about how I can't hear our neighbors talk every day, or maybe even hear one of their TVs or radios while I'm in that bathroom - knowing what I heard that night is creepy.
Major Incident 2: I vacuum the house about once a month. I really take pride in how clean the house is and especially with how straight my vacuum lines are. Yesterday I vacuumed the house and this morning I was looking at the carpet and noticed what looked like some sort of hoof print in my carpet. Just one print. Out of nowhere. I took a picture of the print in my carpet - it's much easier to see in person because of the compression of the carpet there.
Can you see it? It's about 6 inches from the wall on the left, right in the middle of the picture - and there are 4 little markings which I'm assuming could be toes/claws of some sort.
After I found this marking is when I decided I had to write this post. A few things that have happened here haven't really bothered me - but this latest issue almost has me convinced that there is something going on inside this house.
Whatever it is, nothing terrible has happened to us so far. I don't want to believe in paranormal activity - I always think all of those ghost hunter shows on TV are fake - but after experiencing these things first hand it might be hard to keep ignoring it.
If anything else happens here that's out of the ordinary I'll be sure to let everyone know.
