I'm a skeptic, and even though I've had my "experience" I'm still skeptical as to what was going on. My family and I moved into an old
house in New England. New England is full of old houses, by the way. This particular one had been in the town since it had been settled.
When we moved it, the place was a wreck, and as my parents would have it, they began to renovate the place, which is when things
started happening. The day we moved, my sister and I went down to check out the basement, a low ceiling, dimly lit, dirt floor
basement, separated into several sections.
As soon as we were at the bottom of the stairs, we were filled with a sense of uneasiness, we walked back into the next section and the
uneasiness turned into dread. It was cold and lit dimmer than the first area, and then there was the totally pitch black back room,
where the dread was unbearable. It was a sensation that to this day I can't explain. But this is not enough to account for a
ghost story.
My family was out of the house on one particular day. I was there and my father had left for lumber only moments before I laid down to
take a nap. I'm not sure how long I slept, but I was awoken by a deafening banging. As though someone was pounding on the walls with a
hammer. The force of each blow shook the house and shook me out of my bed. I got up and looked out the window to see if my dad had
returned, my car was the only one in the driveway. The banging stopped after a couple of minutes and in a state of grogginess,
I went back to sleep, dismissing the incident.
On another evening, I am alone in the house after dropping my girlfriend off at her
house. I'm upstairs watching a movie in my parents room. The house is old, as I mentioned, and it makes a lot of very distinct noises.
From downstairs, I hear the rusty doorknob leading to the barn turn. The sound is unmistakable, I heard it a thousand times when I
would step out for a smoke. I froze and shut off the TV, listening hard for any other strange sounds. I crept back to the doorway to
my room and from below, in the dining room, I heard the light switch flip on, it makes a loud popping sound when you switch it, again
this is an unmistakable sound.
At this point, I'm not thinking ghosts, I'm thinking burglar. The rest of my family was out of town
and not expected for another day, I'm not even supposed to be in the place. I grab the phone and my knife and climb into my closet.
I know, not the most dignifying thing to do, but when you're this frightened, rational thought does not occur. So, after a while of
hiding, I hear someone in my room. Rustling through papers on my desk, looking through my drawers and other things lying about.
I hold my breath as whatever was in my room was right outside the closet door, right next to it. Finally, after an hour and a half of
hiding out, I decide the coast is clear and make the rounds in the house. Nothing is gone, the doors are still locked and the light
in the dining room is on like I heard it.
A couple of weeks later, 3 am, the family is awoken by every smoke detector going off in the house at once. We did all we could to
stop them, resetting them, but every time we would turn in for bed again, the alarms would sound until we pulled the batteries from
each. It was at this point that I realized something was wrong. I could feel a presence, and that dread from the basement was upon me
again. When I told my family of hiding in the closet, they all laughed at me.
As time passed, a bunch of smaller things happened. Outside, taking in a smoke, I looked up at a window in the barn and felt
something watching me, my sister in my father's office (which was what we turned the barn into) heard papers rustling around in a
cubicle, went to investigate and found the cubicle and found piles of papers strewn around the desk and floor. A strange figure was
spotted outside the house on several nights just looking at it, they were always seen across the street late at night. And the most
extreme experience happened one night when I heard what sounded like a woman being beaten senseless from somewhere in the house but could not find the source.
