The following accounts were submitted several years ago by blog readers:
Hauntings...or Haunted?
"I have had a number of weird experiences in my life, in different places. I don't know if I just happen to have lived in several "haunted" places or if I'm the one that's haunted. My Mom thinks I have a haunting that follows me around, but I don't have experiences everyplace I've lived. My kids have had a couple sightings too, once with a friend over and they all saw it. I'll include those, but neither of those experiences were in places where I had experiences. Weird."
"My first experience was in 1987, I lived in a basement apartment in Indianapolis, IN. I was in bed and woke up cold, there was a black mass shaped like a man at the end of my bed facing me, he stood there for about 10 seconds then turned and walked around the bed and through the wall that the bed was against. I had another experience in that apartment during the day, I saw a black form the size and shape of a spider kind of glide from the top of my bed, down the side, across the floor and into the closet. I was extremely arachnophobic back then and made my boyfriend tear apart the closet looking for a large spider, even though I knew it hadn't moved like one."
"In 2000 I lived in a trailer park in Lafayette,IN. My kids and their friend saw a ball of light manifest in the living room, then go down the hallway into my bedroom, then it turned left into my bathroom and disappeared by the time the kids followed it there."
"In 2003 I lived in an apartment in Salt Lake City,UT. My kids both apparently saw a girl standing in the kitchen doorway dressed in white and kind of glowing. I never saw anything there but it was a very old house built into the mountain and our apartment was underground in the back but ground level in the front."
"In 2004 I lived in a house in Adelanto, CA. The kids room was upstairs; me and the kids were up there talking, we were standing together at the foot of one of the beds and there's a dresser against the wall at the foot of the bed as well. Suddenly a glass music box sitting on the dresser slides forward off the dresser toward us, hits an open drawer and shatters. There was a sound that went with that, like something hit the dresser before it fell. Nothing else was disturbed. I thought mouse or lizard maybe, but it would have had to be big enough to see to move that music box, it was actually a glass water globe music box, kind of heavy."
"In 2005 I lived in the house around the corner from where I live now in Opelika, AL. Similar to my first experience in 87 I wake up cold, there's a blacker than the dark shape of a man, only this time he's standing a couple feet away from me next to the bed and it appears that he is moving closer to me. I yelled, and it went away. There was no furniture in that area of the room to be mistaken for a person, only a space to walk around the bed, then the wall. I had another experience in that house, this actually happened a few times there. I would be laying down in my bed and feel something sit on the bed next to me, one time there was an indentation in the bed about the size of a cat, but deeper I think than what a cat would make, and I say cat because there was a cat or two in the house at the time, there was no cat there, or even in the room."
"In 2008 I was a truck driver. I was in my truck in a truck stop in WV, somewhere along the 81 freeway I think. I was in the bunk reading, the light was on but I think I had fallen asleep for a minute. I'm fully awake though when I see a man's arm, in full color, Caucasian with a light blue tee shirt sleeve coming through my curtain. At first I thought I saw a head to go with it but the longer I looked, hoping it would go away, I realized the head was not a head but something I had on a cabinet there. The arm slowly retreated through the curtain, the curtain is not moving at all, I didn't want to move because I didn't want to get its attention. I thought if it knew I was awake it would come back instead of leave. I didn't go back to sleep that night til daylight was shining through my windows."
"I don't remember this experience, my mom told me about it, but I my first paranormal experience apparently happened when I was a kid, sometime between 1977 and probably 82. I told her there was a lady in white standing at the end of my bed."
"So, am I nuts? Or haunted? Or have a paranormal fan club? Or just sensitive to the presence of the paranormal? I know nowadays there are a lot of reports of seeing a "man shadow" apparition, but I had never heard about those kinds of sightings before I had mine. I wouldn't even want to be a ghost hunter, the experiences I've had in that area were terrifying. It's only a relief to know that this stuff is fairly common place and I may not be nuts after all."
Laura B.
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The Amulet
When I was nine or ten years old, my mother and her husband bought a huge house near Anderson, Indiana. It was built in the 1870's on an area said to be sacred to the former Native people who had formerly lived there. It had a pool, tennis court and a small grove of trees, but it had been vacant for several years and was in need of repair.
Through research, I discovered that the house had been owned by a very old women and her husband. Previous to them, it was owned by the woman's family who had been wealthy. The woman had died in the house in the large master bedroom and her husband had died in an unknown accident. There were old servant quarters which was now an apartment and had been occupied by a man by the name of Sam. He informed us that the couple was buried in the grove because they loved it there while they were alive.
After we moved in, my mom and I would sit in the sun room. At times, we would smell the strong scent of sickening perfume. We looked all around but couldn't tell where it was coming from. A few weeks later, I began to notice more strange activity.
My room was on the end of a long hallway in which you had to cross through another room to get to. The rooms were separated by large French doors. My bed was facing towards the door so I could look into the other room. At night, I would hear heavy footsteps walking up and down the stairs and through the hallway. One night, I heard the footsteps coming in my direction from the other room and suddenly stop. I could hear a faint and steady breathing noise. I hid under my covers and cried myself to sleep. I told my mother but she simply told me I was imaging it, even though she later admitted that she had heard footsteps.
A year or so later, I was on summer vacation from school. My mother would leave me home alone sometimes so she could go and run errands. Occasionally, I witnessed black shadows out of the corner of my eye when I was watching TV in the living room, but when I would turn to look it would be gone. Once, when I was completely alone in the house, I heard something moving around upstairs. I muted the TV and heard a loud heavy thumping and then footsteps moving quickly back and forth through the hallway and the master bedroom.
Later, just before my mother and her husband divorced and we moved out, I had a few friends over. We went into the basement which had an old coal furnace and several other large rooms. My friends and I were pretty curious about the coal furnace, so we opened it up and found a bunch of old newspapers, chicken bones and a vintage amulet. It was obvious that it was made of sterling silver and had a large amethyst mounted on it. I removed it from the furnace, cleaned it up and took it to my room and laid it on my nightstand. Later, I told my mother what I had found and she said that I could keep it.
That night, I again heard footsteps coming into my room. But this time, there was distinct crying and sobbing sounds. I was terrified and covered my head with the quilt. After a few minutes, the crying stopped and I pull back the covers. Then I noticed that the amulet was gone. I looked all over, but never found the amulet.
Several years later, I was working on a school project that involved local history. My mother and I still lived in the same area though we now lived in a new smaller house. I was in the library looking through old photographs when I stumbled onto several old postmortem images. Immediately, I recognized the name of the woman who had lived in the old house previous to us who was buried in the grove. The photo was of her during the wake and around her neck was the exact same amulet I had found in the furnace.
I never have understood how the amulet got into the furnace, though I'm willing to bet it eventually found it's way back to her.
Marcy
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