My Old House (5)

Back in Laos while I was growing up, my parents were very poor farmers, so we lived in a hand made house.

It was made out of bamboo with banana leaves as bedding. This was after the Vietnam war had died down quite a bit. My parents had fled from places to places trying to escape the ongoing war. Therefore we had nothing much with us and were forced to settle with whatever came our way.

We lived by the farm area where no one lives. All around us was thick forest and hills. Everyone lived about a mile or further from the farm area due to paranormal events believed to occur at night.

Not far from us was an old abandoned house. My parents once told us that a family used to live there but one of their daughters had died, and they decided to move away. They never told us why, though I was always curious.

Not long after we had lived there for a few weeks, strange things started happening.

Late one night my mother and father were staying up late discussing some family problems, to their surprise they heard pots and pans being moved around like someone was cooking in that abandoned house. They also heard sweeping noise like something or someone was sweeping the ground. They were really afraid and decided to head to bed. We had no light whatsoever except the red embers from the fire we put out earlier and the light of the moon peeping through the cracks of the house. I was asleep but my parents had told us the experience the very next morning. My dad was brave enough to go check out the house to see maybe if it was just a person passing through. He came back and told my mom the house was empty, no pots, no pans, nothing was in there. My mom was really afraid now but she kept that to herself, knowing that we had nowhere else to go. The noises were only heard occasionally and since that first night they never said much about it anymore. I was still very young about 4 yrs old and my older sister was about 6 yrs old. It was just us four and thank goodness I was fortunate enough to never hear anything.

One day my parents left to visit my sick grandma in another village. She told my older sister to baby-sit me. We couldn't go with them due to the many miles we would have to walk, because we had no transportation of any kind. So my sister and I would run outside and have fun. She would scare me often by saying, she's going to come and take you away, and I would run to her. What she meant by saying that was that the girl who had passed away in that house will come get my soul and take me with her to the other side. In our culture we believe that the dead can come back and take the living away with them if they choose to.

That very night after I had fallen asleep my sister heard noises outside our house and had thought my parents had come home. She was afraid but also rejoicing that we wouldn't be alone anymore. So she kept waiting for them to walk through the door but no one came, so she fell asleep next to me. She later on described the noise like that of a broom being swept on a dirt floor.

My parents had had enough of the bizarre events and moved us in with my grandma. They later found out that the family who use to lived in that abandon house had left due to their dead daughter coming back every night as if she were alive. They would see her sitting by the fire late at night or just walking through the cornfields. My parents also heard that the area she was buried was right under our old house.

If you had any similar experience or would like to know more just email me.