Growing Up With Ghosts

Let me begin by saying that I don't know what a ghost is. There's obviously a phenomena occurring for which there is no explanation, but is it spirits? Residual energy? I don't know. But myself and my family have definitely experienced whatever it is. this might get a little long because a lot of stuff happened to us.

I grew up in a row home in Lancaster, Pa-PA Dutch Country. It was pretty ordinary from the outside but many extraordinary things occurred within.

The first thing I distinctly remember occurred in my brother's room in the back of the house. We were kids and I had seen a mouse in my room, so for some reason, I felt safer sleeping on a cot in my brother's room- guess I figured the mouse couldn't get me there.It was bedtime and my brother was laying on his bed and I was on the cot with the lights out.We were talking when all of a sudden, the entire corner of the room lit up blue and there was an electrical sound, like static. We both jumped up and ran downstairs to get my parents. They came up to investigate and came up with some lame excuse like it was static electricity. The corner of the room where it happened was totally empty and it was not storming or anything outside. It was bizarre.

Another occurrence was witnessed on separate occasions by myself and also my two sisters and one of their friends. On the third floor of the house, there were two rooms. The front one we used as storage and the back one was used by each of us as a bedroom at different times. There was a door between the two rooms that was closed with a hook and eye latch- the kind that has the metal piece that slides underneath to secure it. While it was my bedroom, on several separate occasions, the door would start pulling violently from the other side as if someone were tugging on it, but there was no one over there. My mom said it was the wind, but the windows were shut and the storm windows were down as it was winter, and it was being pulled way more violently than any wind could have done. My sisters had the same experience later when it was their room, only the lock came unlatched by itself and the door swung open right in front of their eyes. A friend of my youngest sister was there once when it happened, so it's not like family insanity or anything.

When I was a senior in high school, I was kind of bad and cut school a lot. I would be the only person in the house. I would go down to the bathroom and the water would be running. I would shut it off and go back to my room. Next time I went to the bathroom, the water would be running again. The happened repeatedly.

My dad and my youngest sister are the only ones who really saw any apparitions. My dad used to wake up during the night and see the figure of a man standing at the end of his bed or sometimes by the window. He even woke my mom up a few times, but she could never see the man. My dad said he beckoned to him and then turned around and walked out of the room. He also would every so often awaken and see an orb of light up in the corner of his bedroom. He said it would come rushing at him and veer off a the last minute and he could feel a breeze on his face as it passed. My sister, while occupying the aforementioned third floor bedroom, said she awoke one night to see a dark figure standing at the top of the stairs (the stairs opened right into the room). She said she was afraid someone had broken in and she tried to get up but she couldn't. Eventually, the figure faded away and she was able to move.

My other sister, despite the third floor door experience she had had, was a skeptic. Until one day her and my brother were alone in the house. My brother was sleeping with his door shut and a fan on and she was in the bathroom getting ready for work when all of the sudden she heard moaning coming from the bottom of the stairs. She peeked out because she thought maybe it was the dog, but there was nobody there and the moaning stopped. As soon as she went back in the bathroom, it started again. She said she locked the bathroom door and was scared to death. She investigated but couldn't find any explanation for the moaning.

I used to have experiences with things disappearing. I dropped a piece of paper once and went to pick it up. It was gone. I never found it even though I searched and searched for it. I would sit things down, and turn around a minute or two later to get them, and they would be gone. After awhile, this got on my nerves and I started demanding my stuff back. Usually, I got it within a few minutes- many times, exactly where it had been previously.

I also woke up one morning with scratches all over the left half of my body. I always sleep on my right side, so the left was up from the bed. At the time, I was playing bass guitar in jazz band at school. so I had no fingernails whatsoever. I tried really hard to duplicate the scratched because I figured maybe I had just had a dream and done it to myself in my sleep, but I couldn't duplicate them. That was very freaky. (This also occurred in the third floor. I also heard in that room what sounded like one end of a telephone conversation. It was in the room with me, but it was winter and all the windows were shut and, at the time, we had no phone upstairs.)

The most interesting things happened when my nephew came along. He and my sister live with my mom in this house (my parents divorced and my dad moved out). My sister and he shared my brothers old bedroom. One night, he had just gotten his bath and was sitting on the bed. My sister was trying to dress him, but he was looking straight past her and giggling. Then he started counting. My sister asked him what he was counting and he said "Fingers." There was nobody else home at the time.

He also saw my dead grandmother, who had died before he was born and whom he had never met or seen pictures of. We called her Nanny. My sister and he were in the living room and all of the sudden he said " You can go to bed now, Nanny." My sister asked him where Nanny was and he pointed to the video shelf and said "She's right there." My sister asked him if it was Nana (our other grandmother) or Grammy(what he call our mom) and he said no, it was Nanny.

The last thing I will tell you about is something that happened to my mom. she was home alone and in the kitchen there was a big bunch of helium balloons that my nephew had gotten when he was sick. My mom went upstairs to he bedroom. when he went to go back downstairs, the balloons were in the back bedroom upstairs (which was my brothers room and was now my sister and nephews). The balloons would have had to, in a very short time, travelled all the way through the living room, made what amounts to a u-turn and ducked to get through the doorway to go around the wall separating the living room and hallway, gone up the stairs, then ducked down to get through the doorway to the bedroom as the ceiling in the hallway was much higher. My mom was always a little skeptical of the happenings at the house as well, but she admitted that that was very strange.

The funny thing is, a lot of this stuff only came to surface after we moved out and were talking about the past. We were all having these experiences and we didn't know it until much later on.So it really wasn't like mass hallucination or anything. I don't know what it was going on in that house, but there was something. My mom recently moved out and I am really thinking about going to talk to the new tenants to see if they've had any experiences. But anyway, this has been long enough- thanks for your time and hope you enjoyed this...