This story may not seem super-scary, but it was to me and
is entirely true.
I am very well grounded, in my early
thirties, and have a Master’s degree in Business (MBA). I
also want to state that I pride myself on my ability to be
as objective, logical, and scientific as possible in all
aspects of my life. This may be why it took me more than 7
years to finally analyze and discuss the events that
happened to me over a couple of months during the winter of
1996. I didn’t even tell my wife until a year ago.
In September of 1996, my wife and I married after 3 years
together. Right after our marriage, we were looking to buy
a condo but hadn’t found the right one yet. My wife’s
grandparents, who always travel to Texas for the winter (we
live in Oregon) offered to let us stay at their house while
they were gone. We readily accepted, knowing it would give
us more time to look for a condo. The house was also in
the same suburban town we lived in, making it convenient.
I have no idea what the history of the house is, other than
that her grandparents had moved into it only a year or so
before. It’s a normal looking, one-level suburban
neighborhood house, built in the mid or late sixties. The
only unusual occurrence that I was aware of was that they
had a lamp that would come on by itself quite frequently.
It was one of those lamps that you just touch the base, and
it turns on (or off). I thought nothing of it at the time.
The first couple of weeks were uneventful. We set up our
living quarters in the spare back bedroom. Being a busy
young couple, we hardly spent any time at the house except
to sleep. Then my troubles began.
One night, I abruptly woke up in the middle of the night.
I don’t know what woke me up, but I had the feeling that
something was not right. My heart began racing, and I
listened intently, thinking that maybe someone broke into
the house and that was what woke me up. I listened as hard
as I could, but didn’t hear a single sound. I continued
straining to hear, unable to calm down, as I looked toward
the bedroom door and into the hallway. Although I couldn’t
hear a thing, I just had the strong feeling that someone
was coming down the hall very slowly. Just when I was
about to give up and try to go back to sleep, I saw a head
peek around the doorway looking into the room. I flipped
out. My first thought was to grab something to hit the
person with, so I frantically grabbed the closest object I
could think of: my old BB gun that I had put under the
bed. My adrenalin was gushing, and I jumped towards the
light switch, turned it on, and ran into the hall holding
my BB gun like a baseball bat. In the hallway I found…
nothing. I quickly turned on the hall light and every
other light while I ran around the house. My wife, woken
up from the light, asked what I was doing. Feeling kind of
foolish, I said I thought I heard something. She laughed,
saying I looked ridiculous standing in the hall in my
underwear with my BB gun. I proceeded to check all the
doors & windows, which were all locked and shut tight. I
wrote it off to an overactive imagination, and tried to go
back to sleep.
If that were all that happened, I would have forgotten
about it (besides the fact that my wife kept teasing me).
But unfortunately there was more.
We like to watch TV in bed at night before we sleep, so we had our TV at the foot
of the bed on a small dresser. I was a night owl, so I
usually stayed up a good hour or two later than my wife
watching TV. One particular night, I was awake watching TV
(like usual) while my wife slept next to me. Something in
the corner of my eye, in the corner of the room towards the
ceiling, caught my eye. It appeared to just be a little
fog, about the size of a watermelon. At first, I thought
it was an image burned into my eye, like when you look at a
bright light and then look away but still see an image of
the light. So I casually glanced to the other side of the
room, expecting “it” to follow the motion of my eye. It
didn’t. It stayed right where it was. Now it had my
attention. I still wasn’t spooked at this point, thinking
it might be some weird reflection from the glow of the TV.
It was kind of distracting me at this point, so to prove it
was the TV, I turned it off. The “fog” was still there.
Now I was starting to feel uneasy. It just sort of hovered
there, like a miniature cloud. I tried closing my eyes and
trying to ignore it, but I would get very uncomfortable
knowing it was there. I also did not like looking directly
at it. In order to try and take my mind off of it, I
turned the TV back on. While trying my hardest to watch TV
and ignore it, it began slowly drifting towards the center
of the room, over the TV. Needless to say, I left the TV
on all night and somehow eventually fell asleep. This
continued almost every night for the next several weeks. I
hated that thing and was becoming chronically tired because
I was staying up so late, unable to sleep with that
little “fog” cloud hovering around, and trying to distract
myself by watching TV late into the night. It never came
towards my end of the room, but always stayed at the end
that the TV was at, usually drifting slowly from the right
side of the room to the left, near the ceiling.
Occasionally there was another smaller “fog” about soccer
ball sized (but they weren’t perfectly round), that
accompanied the larger one, that did the same thing only
moving at its own pace. I was terrified, but I would not
tell anyone or even admit to myself that it was a “ghost”
because I felt that would be like admitting I was crazy.
The height of my fear came one night, when I had tried
turning the TV off and going to sleep about 4 times but
couldn’t sleep because of the intimidating “fogs”.
Finally, getting irritated, I thought to myself “this is
ridiculous, I’m just going to turn the TV off, ignore those
stupid things, and go to sleep.” I turned off the TV
again, laid down and closed my eyes, and just as I began to
drift off I heard a voice hiss, sarcastically, right in my
ear “Yesssss, so our guesssst can resssst”. I sat bolt
upright, suppressing a scream. Admittedly it sounds like
some corny phrase from an old horror film, but it sure
scared the heck out of me. The voice came from my right
ear, but almost like from inside my ear, I can’t quite
explain it. I was panicked, almost started crying in fear
and frustration, and did not sleep the rest of the night.
I tried to convince myself the next day that I was just
freaked out and imagined it in my head, but it didn’t
really seem that way at all. It was then that I really
began to believe, against all of my rational, logical
thought processes, that the house was haunted.
Only a couple months later my wife’s grandparents returned
early, because their 5th wheel trailer had flipped in a
freak windstorm. We moved out on our own shortly
thereafter, and I’ve never had any experiences like that
again. However there are a couple things that have
happened that made me think that it wasn’t just my mind
playing intensely real tricks on me.
For one thing, a couple of years after we moved out, my wife told me that
her grandmother mentioned that she woke up one night to a
man standing at the end of her bed. She screamed, waking
up grandpa, who turned on the lights and searched the
house. They found nothing, and all windows and doors
closed & locked. They are not the type of people to
believe in ghosts or even talk about such things. They
figured she must have imagined it, although she swore there
was someone there. The other thing is the lamp and their
big TV in the living room. To this day, both of them come
on at random times all by themselves, when no one is in the
room. My wife mentioned to me that the last time she
visited her grandma she heard the TV come on in the other
room, and assumed it was grandpa. When she got up to go
say hi, he wasn’t in there. She went down the hall to look
for him, and he was sleeping in his room, where he had been
for a couple of hours. When my wife asked about the TV,
grandma just said, “oh that funny thing just does that
sometimes”. When I finally told my wife about the foggy
apparitions I had been haunted by, she said she never saw
anything but always had a strong feeling of being watched
while we lived there.
Are all of these episodes just a coincidence? Maybe, but
due to what I went through, it’s hard to accept. I
certainly don’t patronize people who claim to see ghosts
anymore, I just keep my mouth shut. Whatever the case, I
just hope that it never happens to me again.
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