The Followers

Have you ever heard of spirits attaching themselves to furniture or something that used to belong to them? I am a true believer that they do. Allow me to explain.

My mother started collecting antiques about ten years ago. She started off with small pieces, like vases and glass figurines, and moved on to larger ones, like beds and bookshelves. Most of the furniture in her house now is antique. Ever since she started collecting we've experienced paranormal activity.

We moved to South Carolina when I was in 8th grade. This is when most of the events started taking place.
My mother's antique dining table and chairs were placed in the formal dining room of our home. At random times during the night everybody in the house would be startled awake by a big bang noise. We'd all rush out to the dining room to where the noise was coming from to find that all of the chairs around the table had been pushed over. All of the chairs had to have fallen at once because it was just one big noise we all heard. My bedroom in that house was always colder than the rest of the house. Sometimes I would wake up at night to somebody calling my name. The voice was that of a young child. I could never determine where in the room the voice was coming from. It seemed to come from a different part of the room each time my name was called. I eventually started sleeping on the couch.

The summer of my sophomore year of high school my family moved to a different neighborhood. We took with us the antique dining room table and chairs. We started having experiences two days after we moved into our new home. The exact same scenario that I mentioned before would happen with the chairs in the middle of the night.

We'd all run into the dining room to find all of the chairs knocked over.

Other things happened in our new house too. My mother started hearing a little boy cry for his mother in the middle of the day. Our laundry room is a den type room that you have to go down a couple of steps to get down in to. Once while I was home alone doing the laundry, I heard someone coming down the steps into the room. When I spun around thinking it was my sister trying to scare me, nobody was there. My husband was doing laundry last night and he saw a shadow cross the wall in front of him and he was the only person in the room and he was standing still.

Our shih-tzu loves to play fetch. She and I were in the hallway playing fetch one day. I threw her ball down the hallway into the bathroom, which is at the end of the hall, for her to go fetch it. She would not go in the bathroom. She just stood at the doorway and barked. About a minute went by and she still wouldn't budge. Just as I was about to give up and retrieve her ball for her, the ball came rolling at a face pace out of the bathroom. I was the only one home that day.

Another strange thing that happened was that my mother and I were sitting in the living room working on a puzzle when we heard somebody sneeze in the kitchen. We were the only ones home and the dog was in the living room with us.

These spirits residing with us do not frighten me. I'm just curious about them. I wonder if they did follow us from the house that we lived in before. I also wonder if they are connected to the table and chairs that my mother got from an antique auction. I wonder what the deal is with the chairs in the middle of the night. I also wonder why the little boy cries for his mother. It almost makes me sad.

If anybody has ever had an experience like this, please feel free to contact me.