The Boy In My Room

My house is an old farm house, built around the 1890’s to the early 1900’s. I’m not really sure, but it was one of the first farm houses in the town. My family (my dad, mom, and myself) moved here about 6 years ago, and ever since I’ve always had a feeling there was something or someone lurking around the house. Previous encounters involve the basement door opening and hearing footsteps coming up and down the stairs to the basement. All the windows in the basement are boarded shut, so it couldn’t have been a draft opening the door. There’s also times when I’m home alone and hear faint footsteps upstairs, or a door creaking open and shut. I’m not the only one in the house that hears these.

One day I was talking to my mom about the things I hear, and she admitted herself that she thought there was something in the house.She told me about a time when she was home alone and thought I was home too. She was working in the kitchen when she heard footsteps coming from the living room, which is right off the kitchen to the left. She looked around the door and didn’t see anything, so she just wrote it off as her imagination. A couple days after that, I was sitting in the computer room, (when I didn’t have my laptop and used the family laptop) and my mother was in the kitchen and we both heard a door slam shut upstairs. She ran into the stairwell and started yelling up the stairs for me to stop slamming doors. There’s a door that leads into the stairwell from the computer room, and I just calmly looked at my mother and said I was in the computer room and thought it was her in her room. Both our eyes got wide, and we decided we would go visit my grandmother for the remainder of the day. This was about 2 years ago.

Recently, since becoming a high school graduate, I would stay up really late just socializing with friends online. Nothing completely strange had happened in years, except for these little things like money appearing where no one would think to put it (i.e. in the freezer, in a shot glass in our big china cabinet) and a few odd things that we’d gotten used to. But one night I was in a Skype call with a friend of mine from a different town, and my bed started to randomly shake. It was like someone had grabbed hold of the end of it and just started moving it from side-to-side. I looked over my laptop and there was nothing there. My friend then asked why the things behind me on the headboard were shaking and I was staying still. I didn’t know what to say so I just picked up the conversation where we left off. For the next few nights, at the same time, around 12:30 am, my bed would shake.

I had kind of gotten used to it until one night after the bed stopped shaking (it would only last about 5-10 seconds) I felt someone tickling my feet through my blanket. I thought it was my mother, trying to scare me because I had told her about my bed shaking. So I turned around and looked down at the foot of my bed. There was nothing there, and my bedroom door was clicked shut, I would have heard it open or close because it has a distinctive squeak. I just brushed it off and fell back asleep. The next night I was wide awake during the time it happened because I had developed a really messed-up sleep schedule. I quickly pulled my feet up closer to my body after the shaking but my feet started slowly moving back towards the end of the bed like someone had grabbed my ankles and was pulling them there. I tried and tried to pull them back to me but they kept moving towards the end of my bed. As soon as they stopped moving and were at the foot of my bed where they normally would be, I felt someone tickle them, and then a gust of wind blew through my room. That’s when I’d had enough and grabbed up all my blankets and went downstairs and slept on the recliner in the living room. I vowed the next night I would have my friends over to see if it happened to them. And it did.

The next night, after my parents went to bed, I asked one of my friends to sleep in my bed instead and I’d sleep on the floor. We stayed up, talking about random things and soon it was close to 12:30 am. I asked my friend to lie still and not move no matter when happened. She obeyed, and at 12:30 like clockwork my bed started shaking, but nothing tickled her feet. I felt the gust of wind blow over me and then felt someone’s fingers on my toes. Everyone was facing the same way, so it couldn’t have been any one of my friends. We all gathered our blankets and sleeping bags and ran downstairs and slept in the living room. The next morning I said good-bye to my friends and went back upstairs. My mom asked why we were all in the living room and I told her. She laughed and walked away. I walked into my room and sat down on my bed. Sitting on top of the sheet was a piece of ripped magazine paper. I flipped it over and read out "James" ?, it came from one of my magazines, and was from the "How to get a guy, details from guys" ? section. I quickly got up and asked mom for the car, she said sure, and I went to the town library to check out the town history books. I looked through books, and only found one chapter on a teenage boy named James with the same last name as mine. There was a photo of the house with the boy and his father standing in front of it. I read the chapter about the boy, and it was said that James and his father were killed in the house when it caught fire in 1943. It also had a short biography about the two, and in the boy’s it said he was the practical joking kind and was always scaring and playing jokes on the kids around the house.

I have yet to find anything else on the house, but I have been in the attic and it does still have a very light smoky smell in the wood. So I do believe the house did burn, but it wasn’t significant, and the father and son may have just died of smoke inhalation. I’ve gotten used to the bed shaking and my feet being tickled. I even laugh sometimes, and hear an echoing laugh.