I am a twenty-year-old woman who lives in a little mid-
western town. I am writing this story to encourage those
people who have been troubled by odd experiences. I have
been there and I won! I know this is long, but once I
started typing, I had to get it all out.
Let me clear up a couple of things about myself before I
go on.
First of all, I do not believe in ghosts in the
traditional sense. I really don't think that lost, forlorn
souls wander the earth. However, I do feel that sometimes
things happen that defy explanation and I more than believe
that Satan likes to send out his friends to impersonate
people and animals to confuse us and scare us nearly to
insanity. It is not a comforting thought. I would rather it
was old auntie Kay coming back for one last good-night kiss.
I can't say that it all started when we moved into the
house. All of my life, I have been subject to "that
feeling". For most people, it's a tingle on the back of
your neck. For me, it is a feeling of dread that starts in
the pit of my stomach and runs up my spine, causing all the
little hairs to stand up on my neck and arms. Usually, it
only lasts for a second or two, sometimes a few minutes.
Sometimes it doesn't stop at all, it gets stronger, pushing
me to the edge of panic and I have to leave the area. It
leaves me feeling weak and disoriented, with a pounding
heart and a rather nauseated tummy.
Sometimes it comes when one would expect it to, like in
a creepy house, or when a light suddenly burns out,
plunging you into darkness. Many times it happens in places
you wouldn't expect it to, like the grocery store, or the
local county forest preserve (I love the woods). There are
some places I just can't go. Sometimes, I get a feeling
about a certain person, like they're dangerous. I have
learned to pay attention to that feeling because, when I
don't, bad things happen.
It all really started to snowball when we moved into
Vermilion House. Vermilion House is very old. So old that
no one really knows just how old it is. It was the second
home built on our street, and we live downtown. My neighbor
owns the third house built and his is nearly 250 years old!
When my house was built it was a small farmhouse. It is
considerably larger now, but you can still see the outlines
of the main house.
We moved in when I was fifteen. I got that feeling as
soon as we pulled in the driveway. I didn't want to go in, my mom made me.
It was a two-story house, but when we went
in, I couldn't find the stairs. The realtor finally showed
them to me, but we didn't see the second story of the house
until after we had bought it.
The door to the stairs had
been padlocked shut. Not with one, but two locks. No one
had a key and we had to wait for them to be cut off.
The house has three attics. One over the back addition,
one in my sister's doorless closet upstairs,and one in my
closet, also upstairs. I can go into the attic over the
addition without a second thought. I can leave the attic in
my sister's closet open long enough to get stuff in and out
of it. I have never been able to so much as poke my head
into the one in my closet. I tried once, as soon as my
hands hit the door, I got so dizzy I had to get off of the
chair I was standing on before I fell off.
My dad is the only person who has ever opened that attic. It was the only
time in the five years we've lived here that it was opened.
The thing that scared me about the upstairs was that I
felt like I was being watched, whether people were up there
or not. I wasn't the only one. One of my best friends once
stayed the night with me. I say once because she only
stayed once. She complained that she couldn't sleep because
she felt "creepy". She said that it was a collector doll
that I had on a high shelf. She felt like it was watching
her. I put the doll away but she still couldn't sleep. We
ended up going downstairs and sleeping on the living room
floor. She never stayed over again. In fact, I don't
remember her ever going upstairs since then.
The really weird stuff didn't start to happen until
we'd been there for about a year. It was like whatever is
in the house was building up momentum, waiting for the
perfect moment. When things started to happen, they
happened fast.
My closet door also had a lock on it. I kept it locked
at all times, I hardly opened it. It scared me and I didn't
wear my dress clothes very often anyway. I would come home
from school or work and find the door open. I would wake up
in the morning and it would be opened, or just unlocked,
like something was teasing me, letting me know it was
there, but not actually letting me see it.
At first I
thought it was my younger sister, who is a known clothes-
horse. She always denied it and soon I realized that the
door was being opened when she wasn't home.
My bedroom
lights would shut themselves off, as if something knew I
hated going up those stairs in the dark. The smoke and
carbon monoxide detectors would go off for no reason,
waking us out of a dead sleep. Several times, the smell of
natural gas or something on fire has permeated the house.
We've had it checked professionally several times and each
time found nothing wrong.
One of the scariest things was the door to the stairs.
Around the locks, the door was scratched, scuffed, and even
cracked as if someone had been trying to get out. I only
made this connection when my sister "accidentally" locked
me upstairs and then left the house. I had to climb out of
the window and down the T.V. antenna to get out. The marks
that I made on the door, were right over the older ones
that had been there when we moved in.
The door would also open and shut itself. My dad always
said that it was the air pressure. It seemed like a
reasonable explanation, except it did it every night, no
matter what the weather was like.
I moved out of the house
for two years and moved back in about four months ago. We
have had all kinds of weather and that door has never moved
unless someone moved it.
Sometimes, I would be home alone and hear these horrible
banging noises. They would shake the house hard enough to
cause the piano to play by itself and things to fall about
in the cabinets. They always came from upstairs. It was
like a wall had fallen in, or maybe an entire room. When we
looked nothing was ever out of place. The neighbors
wouldn't have heard or felt anything out of the ordinary.
I was beginning to think I was crazy. None of this was
affecting anyone but me! Then, finally, one of those bangs
happened to my dad and he admitted that something might be
wrong with the house. I think back on it now, and realize
that my dad NEVER went upstairs. I don't know if he was
just lazy, or if it bothered him too.
I started making excuses not to sleep upstairs. It was
pretty easy to do because the second story had neither heat
nor air-conditioning. However, my mom started to yell at me
when I didn't go upstairs at night. After that, I would
wait until she went to bed, then I snuck downstairs,
slept, and made sure I was in my bed before she got up. She
found out after a while, and I finally relented and told
her everything. She sent me to a psychiatrist. The
psychiatrist told me I had an over-active imagination. An
over active imagination did not explain the absolute terror
I had at the mere thought of being in my room alone.
Things got really bad. By now, I was eighteen and my
parents had gotten a divorce. The day I turned eighteen, I
flatly refused to see Dr. Klein anymore. She was nice, but
she wasn't helping me.
The last straw came soon after. I went up the stairs one
night to go to bed. I had strung Christmas lights around my
room, in an attempt to keep some lights on up there. It
wasn't just that I was scared, the stairs were very dark
and very dangerous. I've injured myself on them many times.
It didn't work, though. Those lights would become
mysteriously unplugged.
One night as I lay in bed, the
lights went out. I lay in bed waiting for something to
happen. I was too afraid to move. I had a really pretty
porcelain Indian doll. As I watched, her head turned to
look at me. I ran downstairs, crying, and after that I
boxed all of my dolls up and put them into storage.
I started waking up to feel my bed shaking. Once
something grabbed my shoulder. Then, one night as I was
going up the stairs, lights out as usual, something
terrifying happened.
There is a window at the top of the
stairs. As I walked up them, I noticed a man-shaped shadow
blocking the window, and my way to the light switch. At
first I didn't think anything of it. I had met my sisters
many times on the stairs. I said "excuse me" and walked past
it. I had sat down on my bed before I realized I WAS THE
ONLY ONE HOME! Everyone else had gone to visit family for
the weekend. I looked back and it was still there, a shadow
so black it was nearly a hole. Only now it seemed to be
facing me.
My first though wasn't "ghost" but rather "axe-
murderer"! I reached over and turned on the bedside lamp-
and it was gone. Then I smelled gas. I ran down the stairs
in a blind panic, nearly falling. As soon as my foot got
off the last step, a loud bang echoed (yes echoed, like in
a stadium) through the house and the door slammed shut
behind me. I slept in my car.
A week later, I had moved in with my dad. I didn't even
bother getting most of my things. I didn't want them, not
enough to go back upstairs.
A year later, my dad traded me in for a 23 year-old, alcoholic, slut; so I moved in with
my grandparents. Four months ago, I started feeling like I was a burden on my grandparents and I moved back into
Vermilion House. My dad owns it now (mom eventually lost it in the divorce). I have the entire second story to myself,
like my own apartment. Strange things still happen in the house, but not as badly. I think it might be scared of me
now. My days of running down the stairs, bawling, are over. Every time it has come, I have stood my ground. Every time,
it has backed down.
A final note, my mother is the only person in my family
who would not admit something was strange about the house.
Even my middle sister, who wouldn't know a "ghost" if it
were dancing on the tip of her nose, wouldn't go up alone
if the lights were out. My mother, who thought I was crazy,
(literally) finally admitted to it.
One night, soon after I moved out, she woke up to see my shadow man standing over
her bed. He was talking to her and handed her a blue piece
of paper with a date written on it. She can't remember the
date or what he said, and she swears that she must have
been dreaming. But it must've been an awfully realistic
dream, because she woke up trying to remember where she had
put that paper.
Imagination? Ghosts? Demons? Maybe just something caused
by the energy of a disturbed teenage girl's mind. You
decide.
Contact me here:ShiriSong_82@yahoo.com
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