Strange House

This is my first time telling this story to anyone except close friends and family.

My father was in the military and we were living in a small town in France. I was 12 years old at the time of these happenings. We had moved into a large two story house which had been built on the site of a castle, which most of was gone at this time.
Part of the castle was still there and two elderly ladies lived in this part. At the back of where they lived was a part of the dungeon of the old castle. We were told prisoners of war were kept there during WWI and WWII.
I have a younger brother and an older sister who witnessed some of the strange occurrences also.

The house had a basement which none of our family would go into, not even our dog. When we first moved into the house we explored and the first thing my mother said was the basement felt evil and she did not want any of us in it. It had a dark, almost demonic feel to it and she did not have to tell us more than once to stay out of it.

The first strange thing that happened was my father woke up one night to see a man standing at the foot of his bed. The man was dark and he did not move, just stood there and looked at my father. My father said he was not really frightened, but he did not want to get up either. Maybe a week later my mother woke up screaming that there was a cat on her face. My father looked over in time to see a dark shape go out the closed window, which was probably four feet off of the floor. My mother said she felt the fur of the cat as it brushed her face.

The house had an attic in it, on one side it was open and my mother used this for hanging clothes to dry. Up above the closed in side was a small window, maybe one foot square. You could never be in the room without feeling as if something was watching. My entire family felt this.

One night I was upstairs, all of us children slept upstairs. My sister and I in one large room and my brother across the hall in a smaller room. Anyway, I was upstairs and all the lights went out. I was standing at the top of the stairs and I would feel something, or someone was up there with me. Then I heard footsteps coming from the attic room toward me. My mother, who started up the stairs, said: "Do not walk, you will fall down the stairs." I screamed back that I wasn't walking. My mother became frantic and the lights came back on just as the footsteps were right beside me. My mother said she thought she saw something standing beside me just as the lights came on.

One night my sister and I had just gone to bed when we saw a light start at the door, which was closed, then travel around the room about three feet off of the floor. It went all around the walls of the room and back out the door. The room had two windows in it, but we always closed the wooden shutters at night. The light was yellowish, white and about six inches around. We screamed for our father who rushed up the stairs and then went outside to see if anyone was outside. But there was no way a light could have come in from outside.
Our bedroom was on the second floor with the shutters closed. I would have thought it was an over active imagination, but my sister saw it too. I am very imaginative, but my sister is very grounded in reality. Often at night we would hear singing and the song was always the same, "Ava Maria".

We moved out of the house soon after this and have lived many other places, but nothing like this has ever happened again.

That was over 35 years ago and I can still feel like it all happened yesterday.