Childhood Experiences (2)

When my sisters and I were kids, a number of weird things happened in our house. They started, as far as I remember,when I was around two years old. Apparently, I had a ball I loved playing with, until it went missing. My parents looked everywhere for it, and eventually gave up, thinking it must have got lost outside and taken by one of the other kids in the area. The ball turned up in the living room, a few months later, in plain view.

Before my youngest sister was born - I would have been four or five at the time, and my sister three or four (my youngest sister is six years younger than me), we used to play on the stairs a lot, sliding down the steps on our fronts etc. One night, we were playing before bedtime, and instead of us bumping down the stairs as usual, we 'floated' down, and were stood upright at the bottom. This happened a few times - until we told our parents. Then it stopped.

Over the years, other things happened to us individually. We would hear an insistent voice shouting our names from behind - usually mimicking our mums' voice. This would happen on the landing outside our bedrooms, or in the bedrooms themselves. I would often have my hair tugged when sat on my bed, or feel something sitting at the end of the bed whilst in it, before going to sleep (this would happen whilst reading etc). While we were downstairs, we would often hear a noise like the sound of something jumping off the bed upstairs, like the sound a cat would make. The floorboards didn't squeak of their own accord, so it wasn't that, and although we did have cats a few years later, this started to happen well before the cats were around. When we did have the cats, they would sometimes refuse to go into that bedroom, and would stand hissing at the doorway. They would get jumpy in the hallway, too.

My sisters and my mum were generally more susceptible to hearing things than I was - I tended to be skeptical( I think I wanted to blank it out!). They would hear footsteps coming up the stairs at night, when no one was up, and see 'shadows' in the hallway. My youngest sister and my dad saw things like knives move around on their own in the kitchen, and see little balls of light dancing around. A friend of my parents once said she saw a black figure (a bit like those in Lord of the Rings)in the hall, though I'm not sure I believe her as she was a bit of a flake, and no one else ever saw it.

These experiences don't sound like much, but they scared us - we never would stay downstairs on our own, and we learnt never to get up in the night to use the loo! Even now, I am a little afraid when I return to the house (I haven't lived there for over ten years now).