The Man In The Closet And Then Some......

This is a story about a house I used to live in until I was about 5 years old.

It was a two family house with my aunt, uncle, and cousins upstairs, with our family (dad, mom and us four kids) downstairs. Several occurrences happened while we lived there as well as numerous freaky things since then. Some of which I have witnessed, all of which I truly believe.

My first strange recollection was of my cousin and I being about 5 and playing that "pokeno" bingo game with cards in their living room upstairs. Now from the upstairs living room, if you looked straight ahead, you would sees a window, with storage built in cabinets to the right and the entrance to the attic on the left (you couldn't' see it from straight on - but it is on the left).

The stairs had a slight curve to them - going up the curved to the left before you hit the top which was my aunt's front door. While my cousin and I were playing, my parents as well as hers came barreling up the stairs, my uncle being the last - he had a baseball bat in his hand. They all went up into the attic and several minutes later came back down and never said a thing to my cousin and I who at the time thought this a bit odd. I would later find out that my aunt had heard odd noises above her while she was in the kitchen - like furniture being moved. After investigating they found nothing (my mother telling me this years after ther fact) and they came back down.

One of my cousins (her room was above mine and my sister's) would have recurring nightmares about a man coming out of her closet and standing at the foot of her bed. Night after night we heard her screaming and my aunt and uncle always running in to comfort her. After seeing a psychiatrist or two, it was deemed that she was indeed a normal, sane child with no explanations of these episodes.

My brother and I went into the basement one day were pretty freaked out. (the basement had two sections, a smaller room off of the main one had a pool table and a fridge and what he called the boogie man chair). Well, one afternoon we were in the smaller room when the pool balls started to roll around by themselves and then click together. Now, I was young at the time however I knew the difference between balls rolling in one direction due to a crooked table and something else. These clicked together time and time again right in front of us. To this day he will look at me and say "click, click, click" and I know exactly what he means and the hair still stands up on my neck.

In later years the cousin who had experienced those "nightmares" had moved out as we all eventually did. As it turned out her ex-boyfriend had bought the house from my aunt and uncle - little did he know what he was in for. He could not rent that upstairs apartment as people "just didn't like something about it". A friend of mine from work had actually looked at it and was telling me about her apartment hunting and by her explanation of the layout as well as "feeling kind of odd and spooked out in the big front bedroom" I asked her the address - lo and behold it was the house. She passed on that rental.

My mother had called me one day out of the blue and said - hey thought you'd find this interesting Bob (not his real name!) had finally rented out the upstairs and got a call from the new tenants - they had been there about 10 days and had left all of their belongings there - turns out whoever had that front bedroom would swear that a small man was coming out of the closet and standing at the end of the bed.

In later years, Bob would encounter all sorts of things - a broom stick flying across the basement right behind him, small cut-outs in the shades in the house - small footprints on one of those lights with a small round table attached to it, as well as that jinxed apartment. He even had one coworker ask he what the hell he was working on in the attic - he had driven by and the whole place looked like it was lit with a million bulbs. Bob found this funny as there was no electricity in the attic and there was no one in the house at the time.

Bob has since sold the house and it has fallen in to quite a state of disrepair. Two of the last things I found out about the house were this: my two cousins had seen a "psychic sort" and she said (with out having ever met them and before hearing anything from them) that she knew one of my cousins had a rough time in that house - "it was that little man, wasn't it"? she had said. She told my cousins that he had been murdered there and was obviously not willing to leave. The second tidbit was that when my aunt and uncle had bought the house they had found a cot, a bottle of holy water and a bible up in the attic.

click, click, click.