Our Haunted House (2)

I was recently remarried, with two children from a previous marriage. My new husband and I purchased a 100 year old home in a small railroad town that seemed at the time to be suspended in time.

The house was a colonial. There was an upstairs, middle floor and then a basement level. We found out that home was for sale because of the fact that the man who owned it had committed suicide. He hadn't done it in the home, but in an apartment down the street. This is how the history of the house goes:

The last family owned the home for over 20 years. The couple constantly argued. He drank too much and she spent too much. They raised a boy and a girl in the house. The boy was on drugs and the girl had an eating disorder. In fact our front door was broken down once by the fire department because the teenager had fainted after calling 911. It was a family in turmoil.

Finally the man and woman divorced. The man moved down the street into an apartment building and the woman stayed in the home. Eventually she remarried and moved her new husband into the home. They finally moved away and left the home in the care of their son and daughter.

One night after a drinking binge and being stopped by the cops, the man who owned the home, took a walk through it and then went to his apartment and shot himself. We heard numerous stories to this account from neighbors and friends.

Shortly after moving in my husband was involved in a car accident. A woman who lived in town and who also worked with him came to visit him after he arrived home from the hospital. She stopped in our doorway, and said, "THIS is where you live??? Do you know the turmoil that went on in this house?" She refused to stay and visit. She said she couldn't breathe here. She said she knew the woman who lived in the house and that the man had beaten her in the front yard many times and chased her down our street. She immediately left.

One week after moving in, I was settling down in bed. My son was asleep in the upstairs bedroom that was next to mine. He was 6 years old and in the first grade. My daughter was 10 and she was asleep in the bedroom on the first floor that was off of our living room. My husband was working 2nd shift and didn't get home until 2:30 in the morning. We had no pets. I felt uneasy in the house and chalked it up to the fact that it was a strange and unfamiliar place.

I was reading in bed about 11:30 pm when I felt the end of the bed dip down as though someone had sat on it. I put the book down and sat up and saw no one there. This happened numerous times, night after night in that bedroom. I never saw anyone.

One weekend my husband and I went to bed together. Just as we settled into bed, the bed dipped down on my side. I sat up and said, "Did you feel that? The bed just dipped like someone sat on it." He thought I was being silly. He never felt it.

Another night about midnight, I heard my son rustling through his school papers. I wondered what he was doing at that time of the night. I yelled, "Go to sleep honey, it's not time to get up!" He didn't answer. I got up and walked into his room, which was dark. The window was closed and there were no papers anywhere to be seen.

Another night I woke up at 4:00 am to hear my daughter in her bedroom below ours on the first floor. She was going through her closet, as I could distinctly hear her coat hangers sliding back and forth in her closet. I assumed she thought it was time to get ready for school and I was giggling that she was mixed up. I went downstairs and into her room to tell her it was too early, only to find her asleep in her bed, the light off and her closet door closed. I ripped open the closet door, only to find nothing. Not even a coat hanger swinging.

Once my husband and I were asleep and we kept our bedroom door closed. There was a loud knock on our bedroom door. It was a series of 3 knocks. I yelled, "Come on in," thinking that it was one of the kids. No answer. The door didn't open. I got up and opened the door and there was no one there. This has happened several different times over the last 8 years of living here.

One afternoon shortly after moving in, my husband and I were grilling on the back patio. We were deep in conversation when we both saw out the corner of our eyes, a black shadow come down the back door steps. I just thought maybe it was a lost dog or something. We finished talking and I couldn't stop wondering what it was. I walked over to the steps and looked and looked in front of the garage where it went. Nothing to be seen. My husband saw the look on my face and asked me if I saw that too. I said, "Yes! Did you?" He said yes. Only later did he admit that it was the form of a human and not that of a dog, as I thought.

One night we were all asleep and I was facing my husbands back in bed. I turned over to the open side of the bed. I saw as I turned over the black shadow of a man leaning over me. He had curly hair and was staring into my face. It was too dark for me to make out any features but I felt that he was curious about me and also glaring angrily at me. I took a quick startled intake of breath and as I did, he seemed just as startled that I saw him. He quickly backed up from me and flew backwards into the closet (which was closed) and was gone. I realized that his form got smaller as it backed away from me. I was up with the light on crying and telling my husband what I saw. He didn't believe me. He said it was a shadow probably of my own hair or something.

My son came to me one morning. He was about 8 years old now. He began to tell me that something pulled the blankets off of him last night. I said, "no, it was probably the cat." (By this time we had a cat.) He said no, that the cat was shut up in the basement. He said he had just gone to bed and was pulling his blankets up around his face when they were being tugged away from him. He looked down at the floor and could see the blankets being pulled. He says it was almost as though you could see the finger marks in the material, where the fingers should have been but weren't. He tried to call me and was so scared that the word, Mom, would not come out. He said he didn't sleep all night. I still tried to rationalize it away. Maybe a dream. He said no.

One night I got up to go the downstairs restroom. I got a drink of water and hurried back to bed. I was just pulling my blankets up around me. I got into bed and turned my back to my husbands back. Instantly the blankets were yanked off of us and pulled under the bed. It was a hard, "human" tug. Not one that a cat could do. My husband stirred in his sleep and tried to pull the blankets back and they were still being tugged. He turned over and looked at me when the blankets were released and said, "What are you doing?!" I said I didn't do that. I jumped up and turned the light on. The cat wasn't in our room or under the bed. Our bedroom door was closed. It was just as my son had explained.

My husband Mark and I soon had a child of our own. We put her crib in our bedroom with us. Often her pacifiers would come up missing. I just assumed they'd fallen in to the couch or something similar. I was constantly purchasing pacifiers. One day I'd had enough, and tipped the couch over and vacuumed in it and under it. Not one pacifier was found. I then began to wonder what was happening to them. One night we were down to one pacifier left. I prayed that this one didn't come up missing. In the middle of the night our daughter cried and I switched on the light. I removed all of her blankets and there was no pacifier. My husband got up and we even took her mattress out of her crib and turned it over and looked under the bed. Nothing. The bedroom had been recently newly carpeted and was not cluttered in any way. There was just no pacifier in that room. I was so frustrated and went downstairs to search in a kitchen drawer for one. I stopped and looked up and yelled loudly...."OK! I've had enough! Put it back!".... to whatever unseen force was in our home. My husband called down to me in a strange voice. "Sue, come here!" I walked upstairs thinking, no way. He had it in his hand and looked at me strangely and said when he heard me say that, he turned around and there it was, right in the middle of the floor, where moments before we had checked.

One of the strangest incidents that we have experienced was when the phone rang in the middle of the night. My husband ran downstairs to answer it thinking something was wrong with a family member. I sat up in bed listening to his conversation on the phone at the bottom of the stairs. The house was very quiet and I could hear the woman on the other end of the phone. Mark said, "No, I'm sorry, she's in the bed already. Can I take a message?" I heard a woman screaming on the other end, all the way up the stairs. Mark remained quiet and then I heard him quietly put the phone back on the base. He slowly walked up the steps and sat on the end of our bed, scratching his head. I said, "Who was that? What did she want?" He said it was the strangest thing. The woman on the other end of the phone knew his name and my name and asked for me. When he told her I was in bed, the woman lost it. She began fully screaming at him that it was her house and she would come over here if she had to. She said I was her daughter. Wrong number? We didn't know, but how strange that it frightened us the way that it did and that the woman had gotten a house with people with the same names in it. I often wondered if it was a call from the other side.

One Saturday afternoon I was in the bathroom on the first floor. I heard the back door open and someone come inside. I heard the footsteps going to the base of our stairs. I then heard a girl call up the stairs, "Rachel, are you up there?" Rachel is my oldest daughter. I heard no response from my daughter but I knew she was up there. Finally I heard the person walk up the stairs. I finished up and went outside and found my husband sitting on the back steps of the door that had just opened to our guest. I asked him who had come over to visit with Rachel. He said no one. He said he was sitting there the whole time. I told him no I heard the door open and finished telling him the story. We walked inside and I called up to Rachel who responded. I said, "Who is up there with you?" She said "No one." I walked up to her room and there was no one there. When I told her the story she looked as scared as I was.

One evening while laying in bed reading, my husband and I had an argument. He stormed out of the room and I went back to reading my book. I heard his footsteps bounding the stairs angrily. Then I heard him throw a book up the stairs! I could hear the pages twirling in the wind as it flew up the steps and hit the wall at the landing on top. I couldn't believe him! He came angrily back up the steps and stepped into our bedroom. He stood there with his hands on his hips. He looked at me and yelled, "HOW DARE YOU THROW THAT BOOK!" I said, "I didn't throw the book!" I showed him it was still in my hand. He just looked at me puzzled. I said I thought he threw the book. We got up and looked and there was no book on the stairs.

Finally, our daughter was about 2 years old and we put my oldest daughter in the bedroom that used to be my husbands and mine. They could share that room and my husband and I took the basement and turned that in to our bedroom. We had a baby monitor so we could always hear the baby upstairs. My oldest daughter has had the same knocks on her door in the middle of the night. She also had an angel that stood on her headboard and every morning that she woke up, the angel would be turned around to face the wall.

When our little one was 4 years old, she was playing outside in the back yard one morning. She came in and said, "Rachel where are you?" She was laughing. I said, "Honey, Rachel isn't here. What do you need?" She said, "Then who is calling me? Yes, she's here. I just heard her calling my name!" I said, "No, sweetie, she isn't." She sat down on the kitchen floor and began to cry. I picked her up and said that it was ok. She said that someone was calling her name and playing hide and go seek with her. I went outside and no one was home. Not even a neighbor around.

One evening as I was tucking her into bed she looked at me strangely. She said, "Mommy when you check on me tonight, will you wear the same nightgown that you wore last night?" I said "Which nightgown? What color was it?" She said it was one she'd never seen before. She described it to me and it was nothing like anything I owned. Another night afterward, she said to me, "Was that you in my room last night?" I said, "What did you see?" She said she saw a woman that was kind of like me but not me standing in front of her TV and pointing to the TV with a gun in her hand. I was frightened. I still assumed it must have been a dream. Then my oldest daughter had a story to tell.

One morning my little one woke up screaming and terrified. It was 5 am and I went up to check on her and she was shaking and asking me to put her on the couch downstairs. I did, turning off the bedroom light as I left the room. Soon we feel back asleep. When my oldest daughter woke up she said, "Mom I saw her!" She said, "you know how you turned off the light when you left our room? I went back to sleep for a while and then I woke up and turned over. There she was." She said she was standing in the middle of the room and looking from her bed to my youngest daughters bed, almost as though she was wondering where the little one went. She said she was then just staring at her. My daughter said, "Mom she looks like you!" She described her. She wearing an old-fashioned nightgown with cuffs and having features a lot like me, only longer hair that was turned under. When my daughter became frightened and gasped, the woman disappeared.

I still do not sleep well at night and we have been here for 8 years now. I don't know what the black shadow was that we saw. I don't know whom the man was that I saw. I don't know whom the woman is that my daughters have seen. Is it the activity of the last family and the man who killed himself? Or is it someone from way back, since the house is over 100 years old. I don't know. Things don't happen as often as before, but we know we are not alone. I constantly recite The Lords Prayer in my head at night before bed and ask that He keep us from evil.