slammed, household items disappeared and reappeared, floor and walls shook, and voices were heard whispering as everyday occurrences. An old bureau in the bedroom where I slept held a mirror that, if you pulled it away from the wall, could be flipped around. (I am not sure if you are familiar with this particular piece of furniture, but it is fairly common. There was a mirror on the front side and wood on the back side, and it was built to accommodate all the various superstitions around mirrors.) Often, I would leave the room only to return to find the mirror had been flipped around (an impossibility considering the piece of furniture was extremely heavy and the mirror could only be flipped when it was pulled clear from the wall).
My aunt had a number of psychics and clairvoyants through the house and tried an endless number of things to rid the house of the ghosts. She tried to hold seances, she put salt in all of the corners to “absorb” the energy, she lit candles, she prayed, and on and on and on. All to no avail.
Strangers who came to investigate the haunting would leave the house after poking around (particularly in the basement), and almost all of them met with some bizarre accident or illness upon leaving: car accidents, broken bones, strange illnesses, etc.
The last day I slept in the house, before returning to my parents’ house, I was carrying my suitcase from my room upstairs to the front hall on the main floor. As I was descending the stairs, I felt a weight behind me, and I found myself lying at the bottom of the stairs with an incredible pain in my back. I pretended I was fine and waited for my dad on the front steps to pick me up. I remember irrationally thinking that if I told my aunt about the pain she would take me to the hospital and somehow I would be forced to recover from the fall in her house, as opposed to going home. This was an unfathomable thought for me, after living two months on edge. I remember getting home and crying for days (and finding out three years later that I had a slipped disc in my back from the fall).
After that summer, I think my aunt stayed for a few more months before moving out. My uncle, who refused to believe that there was such a thing as a ghost, came home one night and saw the ghostly image of a man standing in the drawing room. Wasting no time, he grabbed a hunting rifle and shot at it, leaving a bullet hole in the wall and scaring the life out of my aunt and his kids. This was the last straw. The next day my aunt moved out.
My aunt did a lot of research into the history of the house, including the fire that destroyed the mill next to it. She still believes that the sounds of the children crying and playing have something to do with the child labourers who died in the mill fire.
Someone to Watch Over Me
I grew up in a very volatile environment due to my parents’ alcoholism. One night when I was pretty young my mother and father had a particularly horrible fight, and I was terrified.
After everything calmed down and everyone else was sleeping that night, I was still lying in bed, wide awake, frightened and crying. There was a night light on in the room. At one point in the night I remember a strong feeling that someone was watching me, so I looked up from my pillow and saw an enormous shadow filling two walls: the wall beside the bed that I was on, and on the other wall, right behind the bed. It looked like a huge shadow of a nun’s head and shoulders. We weren’t Catholic, and I hadn’t been praying, just crying. It wasn’t any religious influence that would have made me think that, but I could immediately see that is what it seemed to be.
From the position of the shadow, it looked like she was right above me and looking down protectively, and that gave me immediate comfort. And I felt so much better when I saw this. I stopped crying and just stared at the shadow for a long time, and was so glad it was there with me.
Finally, though, I began to get curious as to what was actually casting the shadow. I got out of bed and looked around the night light and the rest of the room to see what could be creating it. But there was nothing that seemed to be causing it. Yet there it was, right above my bed, and so clearly defined. And I knew it had not been there for the first few hours I was in bed, it just suddenly appeared.
I climbed back into bed, exhausted, but kept opening my eyes to make sure the shadow was still there. It stayed above me all night. I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up in the early morning, the shadow was gone. I never saw it again. But I have never forgotten that, and I think it must have been a protective spirit, or angel, letting me know she was watching over me.
Do You See What I See?
I was helping my friend move into an apartment. After unpacking all of the boxes and getting everything organized, we went into the living room to take a break. The living room was situated at the end of the hall that led to the bathroom and bedroom.
While leaning against a wall in the living room I could see out of the corner of my eye that someone was approaching us from the hall. I turned and saw a middle-aged brunette woman in a navy blue dress walking up the hall toward the living room. She stared straight at me, and our eyes met for a second. She didn’t look very happy to see me standing there. Then she slowly turned around and headed back down the hall toward the bedroom.
My friend was also looking toward the hall in a curious way, and asked if I’d just heard someone walk toward us, stop, and then walk back down the hall again.
I explained that I had just seen that woman, but had not heard any footsteps. So we both thought that was really strange; I had clearly seen an apparition, or whatever it was, of a woman but hadn’t heard any sound. My friend had clearly heard the sound of footsteps walking toward us and then away again, but did not see anything at all.
We did a thorough check of the hall/bedroom/bathroom area, of course, but no one was there. We were the only two people in that apartment.
Ouija
When I was growing up my family had a Ouija board, and sometimes we would play with it. I never felt comfortable with the idea of communicating with spirits, though, so I never directly participated. But I was always curious enough to want to see what would happen when others used it.
My cousins were using the board one day. One of my cousins and I have the same unique name (and the same unusual spelling). So when the two people using the board asked who the next message was for, my name (and my cousin’s name) was spelled out. I was about twelve years old at the time. We asked which person they meant, and then my last name was also spelled, so it was clear the message was intended for me and not my cousin who had a different last name.
I was uncomfortable by the whole idea of a Ouija board and sure didn’t want to be singled out for any specific message from it. I asked my cousins to put it away, but they said they wanted to see the message and went ahead using it. The message was that I was going to die when I was thirty. Even though thirty sounded pretty old when I was only twelve, I was still upset about that message. If anyone else had been using the board I may have suspected they were just trying to frighten me and made that message appear themselves. But I could tell my cousins were almost as disturbed by what was spelled out as I was, and I knew they hadn’t caused it to spell that.
When I asked, with forced bravery, how my death was supposed to occur the word cancer was spelled out.
I asked my cousins to put the board away, and that time they listened to me, and we never used it again when they came to our house. And although I tried to tell myself it was just a silly game that couldn’t possibly have the ability to predict the future, I still couldn’t help but think about that
