COLD CHILLS In April 2001, I met Maddie. We bonded instantly, and since her grandma (who is deaf)lived right across the street from school, we went there almost every day. Pretty cool, right? That's what I thought, until I found out her house was (still is, actually) haunted, the hard way. The first time I went to her house, we had two paranormal experiences. The first one was pretty cool, but the second one scared me really badly. Here they are, in order. We were messing around in the living room, playing with some stuffed animals, when I started to get a feeling that someone was watching us (by the way, you know how you can tell if they have good intent or bad intent toward you? I'm just gonna call it good vibes or bad vibes.), and they were giving off some really bad vibes, so I told my friend about it. She said that she had had experiences with the paranormal before, and we decided to test whether it was just my imagination, or whether it was a presence there. The vibes were coming from next to the storage shed, so we put a stuffed animal about half a foot away from the wall where the vibes were coming from, and went into her old room to wait. 10 minutes later we went back and looked at it... It was touching the wall, also facing that way. We got scared, but decided to go outside and look, to see if the entity was angry at us, or if it was just territorial. Once we got outside, we went over to the shed where we saw a dim, misty shape that looked a lot like a young child and Maddie swears she saw a flash of light and in the middle there was a spark of understanding. She told me that it was an overprotective mother and her child there, and she (the mother) wanted us to leave her alone. We told her that we lived here now, and she needed to move on to the next life. Surprisingly, it worked, and we haven't seen her since. The next story isn't so good. After we finished with that, we walked over to the pool to go back inside, but something stopped us in our tracks. We were looking over at the garage door, where we were going through to the front yard, when we saw a strange reflection. It was a man dressed like a farmer scowling evilly. He was giving off really HORRIBLE vibes. We turned and ran into the house, screaming. I dragged Maddie into her grandma's bathroom, which is the closest room to the garage. We stood there for about half a second, when I felt a knife sliding down my spine, and at the same time, Maddie gasped, froze, and later she told me she felt the same thing. We ran into the living room, too scared to scream. That was the closest we ever went to her garage, EVER. THE GHOST IN THE POOL I went over to Maddie's house a few times during the summer, but only once did I have a paranormal experience. It was a really hot windless day in mid-July, so we decided to go swimming. We put our bathing suits on, grabbed towels, and ran outside. Now, Maddie HATES getting water up her nose or in her eyes, so she got her goggles out. I jumped in as she s l o w l y waded through. She got used to the water quickly and dunked her head. She came up about 2 seconds later with a strange look on her face. She grabbed my arm and said, "Gwen, you need to see this. Use my goggles." So I put on the goggles and ducked under the water. What I saw was a boy of about 14 swimming around in the deep end of the pool. He had an angry, almost sad, look on his face. As he swam around, I noticed that he was swimming in a sort of odd pattern, as if he were racing with something. He was muttering something that I couldn't understand, but as I listened, it became clear that he was doing some sort of ritual. I was about to go up for air when he turned toward me. I saw a look in his eyes that was scared, but at the same time, hungry. I got really scared and swam up to the surface really fast. I told Maddie what had happened, and we ran onto dry land. We looked out to where we saw the boy, and there were ripples moving around in that same pattern, like he was actually taking up physical space. As we watched, the ripples started moving toward us, but suddenly stopped at the edge of the shadows. Light was creating some kind of barrier to him. On a sudden inspiration, I called out, "What's wrong? Why are you here?" I saw a smokey shape rise out of the water as a male voice I had never heard before told me that he was here for the swim meet, and why was he the only one here? He told me his name was Tim. I told him he was in my friends backyard, and he got really angry. he screamed,"NO! I'm not in your friends backyard, I'm at the swim meet!" As we watched him, terrified, he got up and DISAPPEARED... We haven't seen him since, although I seem to hear his voice when I'm all alone. Contact me here: lillia@boxfrog.com Submitted From: Lila Johnson, CA, USA