Ghost Encounters, Some Good - Some Horrible!

I have believed in ghosts all of my life. I never had experienced any supernatural experiences until I moved to Wisconsin in 1996. I lived with my in-laws the first year I moved there. There was never any mention of my first experiences with ghosts until after the fact.

My first experience happened when my fiance and I had gone out one Saturday night. We returned home to find that her parents were out that night too. It had to be 8:30 or 9 PM when we returned home. I decided to go into the basement as soon as we got there (mainly because I like my quiet time). I walked downstairs and turned on the lights to the family room. For someone to get to the family room, they would have to walk down a 20 foot hallway. Along side of the hallway was a door that led to storage (this is key). As I was turning on the TV, I heard a baby wailing off in the distance. I walked around to a basement window to peer out and see if someone was outside. It was pitch black outside. I called up to my fiance and asked her if she had heard it, and she had told me that she hadn't. I walked over to where the storage door was in the same hallway, and the wailing seemed to be coming from the storage room. I decided to open the door after a minute of trying to brush off the sound as my imagination.

Once the door opened, there was nothing there but my in-laws belongings. I asked my fiance if her parents had ever heard anything like it and she said told me that they hadn't. She did tell me that her mom had a miscarriage a year prior to my fiance being born. Her mother had bought a baby bed for the miscarried child and stored it into the same storage area that I had heard the wailing coming from.

The next experience I had was in the same basement. I was always down there when I wanted quiet time. My fiance and I figured that it would be the best way to stay out of her families way upstairs. From the time that we moved in, that basement was always 10-20 degrees cooler than the rest of the house. We would use the fireplace that her parents had installed before they moved in. It was never any help to warm the basement up, so we would always have to dress a little heavier if we were spending time in the family room. Over the time we spent living with them, wierd things would happen to one of us.

My fiance would complain that she would see someone at the end of the hallway as she would walk from the family room. Some stuff I would leave in the basement would be moved into different areas. We always would get the feeling walking upstairs to that someone was behind us.

One Saturday night, my fiance decided to go out for the night. I had some things to do, so I stayed behind. I was done with my chores about 10:30 that night when I decided to watch TV in the basement. My father in law was watching TV upstairs and my mother in law was asleep.

Nothing strange occured as I walked into the basement, but 15 minutes after I started watching TV; I had this strange feeling that I was being watched. Every time I would turn around there would be nothing there. I thought that maybe my father in law was downstairs and was grabbing something. When I proceeded to investigate a few minutes later, I found my father in law asleep upstairs in front of the TV. As I was coming back downstairs, I saw what appeared to be an older man. He had sunken eyes, grey hair, and was very tall. I thought it was a person, so I asked him who he was and what he was doing there. He just seemed to smile and turned around and seemed to walk away from me. I called for my father in law, and we went downstairs together to search for the man I saw. After looking through the basement, my father in law and I couldn't find the man I had seen.

A few weeks later, after talking to my fiance about it, her mom sat me down and told me that she had saw the man too! The man was the ghost of her step father who had died 30 years prior of liver cancer. She told me she would see him once in a while as she would do laundry and cleaning in the basement.

The last experience I would like to talk about is something that was by far more creepy and to this day nothing has been able to explain it.

My fiance and I moved out of her parents place in 1997, after staying there for a better part of a year. We rented an older home from her relatives. The home was in an older neighborhood (reminded me of houses out of the 1940's and 1950's. It was a two story home, the top floor had been shut off because of the pending remodel job that was to take place the following fall, and a creepy basement with an unexplained meat hook and a small room that was dark and had a wooden door. We asked the landlords about the meat hook and they couldn't explain it. Anyways, on to the story.

My fiance and her mom decided to go out for the night. It was a late June Friday night. I decided to watch some sports in my living room. It was very hot that week (80's at night with humidity). The forecast called for a clear windy night. I watched some TV and about 11:00 decided to go to bed. I walked into the room where we slept and had to open the window and shades. The window was about 2 feet from my face (significant fact later in the story). I noticed after about 15-20 minutes that the wind had really kicked up and it smelled like rain. I fell asleep soon after only to be woke up about 30 minutes later to what I thought was a man staring at me from the window! I couldn't make out the face, but the guy looked pretty interested in me. He had very piercing eyes, and an evil grin on his face. I couldn't believe what I was seeing..until all of the sudden the power went out. The next thing made me think about just losing sanity in general because the phone rang. I picked it up thinking that it would be my fiance, and all I could hear was a man on the other end, breathing deep into the phone and laughing in between.

The rest of the night, I could hear things in the basement below me. I was very tempted to go and see if my house was being broken into by an intruder, but I remembered that the unexplained meat hook was in the basement. The only noise I heard the rest of the night was scratching that seemed to be coming from the floor.

The next day I walked into the basement to find out if someone had broken in. To my surprise, I found nothing. Last year, I moved out of the home because of a divorce. I asked the landlords about what I had seen. Apparently a 12 year old girl was taken from her home a few blocks away in 1979. It turned out that they had found her body in the room in the basement of the house I rented!!!!!!!! They never found the killer.

I believe in things that can't be explained, and I hope to never have an experience I had in that house I rented.