Things That Go Bump In The Night (2)

I was never one to believe any of the ghost stories I'd heard as a kid. However, my mind was quickly changed after what happened to me in the late 1980's. I was seventeen when the disturbances began. Incidentally, it was a time in my life when I was going through some emotional upheaval. Conversations with a friend versed in the "paranormal" and my own research revealed to me that poltergeist incidents often occur with a young person as the focus of it.

My bedroom was on the far corner of the house; in the back. The window of my bedroom led out to a tiny strip of land between my house and the neighbor's. (It was a typical residential neighborhood) The neighbor's enclosed brick garage was directly across from my bedroom window, so I didn't think it was just noise from the neighbors.

The first time I heard the noises, I jerked awake, startled. At first I thought some hooligans might be outside throwing rocks at the window for kicks. When I got my nerve up, I walked to my window and flung the blinds up. The noises immediately stopped, and there was no one outside. Terrified, I went to my brother's room and slept on the floor. I didn't hear any more noises that night. The next morning, I told my mother what I'd heard. She said she hadn't heard anything; she'd been sound asleep. My brother had also not awakened. I told them I'd wake them up if I heard the noises again so that they could hear for themselves.

Two nights later, I was awakened by the sound of pings, thuds and thumps on the walls and my window. I scurried across the house, terrified, to my mother's room and frantically shook her awake. Groggily, she followed me to my bedroom. There was silence. All of a sudden, we heard an enormous thud on the roof, as if something had landed on it. Moments later my brother came running out of his bedroom, shouting, "What the hell was that?" No one was willing to go outside to see what it was.

For three more months, the bumps, thuds and pings on the walls, roof and my window continued. Oddly enough, it was only my bedroom window on which we heard the sounds of pebbles being thrown, but the noises weren't confined to just the walls of my room - we heard them throughout the house and sometimes on the roof. Sometimes we heard "crashing" noises in the dining room at night, but found nothing upon investigating. I took to sleeping in my mother's room, but that didn't stop the disturbances. There really wasn't anything significant or unusual about our house, and to my knowledge we were the first to live there.

The "crashing" noises we sometimes heard always came from the dining room and sounded like metal tables tipping over and crashing into the linoleum. But anytime we got up to take a look, the noises stopped.

Around mid-January of the next year, the noises abruptly stopped and nothing of this nature has happened in our house again. I've never been able to find a good explanation for what happened.