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The Upstairs

Jolie Foelker, Wisconsin, USA
April 1998

This happened to me about thirty years ago, I couldn't explain it then and I still can't explain it to this day, yet it happened and it still brings chills to my very soul.....

It was a lazy weekend afternoon and my two cousins and I had gone upstairs to two private, formerly unused rooms in my aunt and uncles' home to waste time, read old magazines and just kick back for awhile. These were two rooms that had never really been used before but had been cleaned up a little and we were allowed to "fix" them up and make them our private domain. We had black-lights, psychedelic posters, Jim Morrison on one wall, and all the Beatle posters from Life mag on another. There was a papier-mache skeleton sitting on an old toilet in a corner and we always burned alot of sandlewood incense, calling the spirits. We really never really thought that the spirits would actually visit our room but we didn't really think about it seriously enough, I guess.

The fact is is that this particular house had had some very strange occurrences in the recent past and we were very naive or just perhaps very innocent at the time and we were spared. In the recent past, this house had scared my relatives quite a few times. They had smelled an overpowering odor of fresh blood in the middle of the night, unexplained, had had their young son awakened in the middle of the night, being beckoned to follow a mysterious "woman in a white nightgown" as testified by the son and there were so many "bangs and poundings" on the floors and walls that my one cousin would not go into her own home unless her parents were at home! All unexplained!

On this particular evening, as I mentioned, my cousins and I were just kicking back and, did I mention the Attic Room? - I guess it's still hard to talk about. The attic room stretched along the entire length of the house, facing the south and our rooms stretched the north side, with a stairwell in the middle of the hallway between the two sides, steps to climb up or fly DOWN! Well, as we three were just chillin', all of a sudden there was a huge push from INSIDE our closet door, which was closed and locked from the outside. Gotta remember, this is an old house, civil war era and the upstairs is still as it was back then. The closet was on the most north side of our room so it almost had no connection with the rest of the house but as we were trying to ignore the problem, it happened again, harder. As our hair was starting to stand on end and we were about to scream and run from the room, there was this same enormous pushing and also an absolutely silent forcing coming from the ATTIC DOORWAY which was totally unconnected to the closet door and on the opposite side of the room and house! This doorway was between us and escape and as we were making our plans, the lock on the door, which was latched on the outside, was slowly opening up, raising it's latch against all logic and gravity. Needless to say, all three of us bolted to safety, racing past that door, down the stairs and landing at the bottom of the staircase crying and extremely frightened. No explanation. No clue. All I can say is that, and I swear this is true, when the upstairs was finally investigated (with baseball in hand), nothing amiss was found. Except that for some reason, a couple of crucifix's that were stored in the Attic Room were crushed and scattered on the floor...Squirrels? The wind? What do you think?

Jolie Foelker, Wisconsin, USA
00:00 / 01:04
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