Something About That Room

It does seem as though only certain people are "sensitive" to paranormal experiences though it is a mystery to me as to how those individuals are selected or by whom or what. I myself am a believer in that another plane or another dimension coexists with this one but do not profess to understand how they connect.

I have had many experiences since this one, but have chosen it because it is one of the most frightening (to me) and it is my first remembered experience. I recall it vividly even though the year was 1965.

When I was in seventh grade we lived in an old farmhouse on a dirt road in middle Georgia. The nearest human resident was a quarter mile away in either direction. Our only other neighbors were cows and woodland wildlife. The front of the house had a long wide porch that wrapped around the left side and met with the back porch. The back porch still had a working well, complete with bucket and rope (though we did have indoor plumbing). This is relevant only to give you an idea of how old the house was. Every room in the house including the kitchen had a working fireplace and these were in fact the only heat sources in the house.

My sister and I shared a bedroom that faced the back porch but there was a door to the side of our room that led into a breezeway. This was simply a long narrow room with doors on both sides that opened on to the front porch and back porch to effectively let air circulate through the house.

As you entered the breezeway from our bedroom, directly in front of you was a door to another room connected to the house only by this breezeway. We used the room only for storage and there were no curtains on the one large window that faced the front yard.

The light switch was a simple light bulb in the ceiling with a long pull chain. (This is very important to the story.) This room was very oppressive and you couldn't stay in it for long, even in the daytime. My sister and I especially hated this room because it was so close to our bedroom. Also, our bedroom was very cold. Granted, those open fireplaces didn't produce a lot of heat, but our room always seemed colder than the others.

Nearly every night my sister would wake up crying because she heard the same noises....The sound of glass breaking and footsteps running across the floor. I never heard these sounds but her fear was real enough to terrorize us both for the remainder of the endless night.

I would hear whisperings at times, not necessarily at night, and they seemed to come from no particular room. They were loud enough to be discernible as voices, but not so as to actually understand what they were saying. My main event, however, came later.

I was outside in the front yard. I don't remember where my sister was but I was alone. Picture a warm, ordinary summer day in the country. I was playing on a huge oak tree that sat squarely in the front yard about ten or twelve feet from the porch. I was drawn for no explainable reason to the window of The Dreaded Room. It was, as I said, a very tall and wide window that allowed a view of the entire room. There, where the pull chain for the light should have been, was a very fat, very long, hangman's noose slowly swinging back and forth, back and forth. Fortunately, there was no body attached to it, but the noose portion of the rope was about six inches in diameter. The room was empty except for the swinging rope, none of our boxes or other stored things were in sight. I froze for a moment, astonished at what I was seeing, particularly since the day gave no provocation for such a thing.

I bolted into the house and nearly tackled my mother in the kitchen. I didn't tell her what I had seen even though I knew it was real. We only lived in the house for about another eight months and our next house was "normal".

I heard many years later that the country house burned to the ground, probably due to the fireplaces, but who knows. I never knew the history behind the house.

My next most extraordinary story came when I was sixteen. It is interesting to note that it also occurred in a most unlikely situation. Due to the length of this story, I will save it for another submission and call it "Big Daddy" because it involves my grandfather.