Ten Years

REPOSTED DUE TO SERIOUS FORMATTING ISSUES, OOPS

This will be a post of titanic proportions and I'm sorry for the tl;dr. I'm going to be detailing events that happened over the course of several months during Spring of '08 or '09.

Forward (Feel Free to Skip)

I will not be sharing much about where this event takes place, only that it is in Canada, because I still live in this house today. Since these happenings I have experienced no further paranormal activity of note, aside from the occasional item going missing (although I'll readily attribute that to my mother and I misplacing things rather than anything ghostly or supernatural). I should add that I have cut down on unnecessary information as much as I possibly could, but many of these stories require some rambling of inane details to provide additional context.

I have no solid evidence to back up my claims and the other individuals involved seemingly have no recollection of these events, due to circumstances detailed below. Still, I'll stand by these stories as being true recollections from my own perspective, and am sharing them without embellishment. Any speculation is welcome.

I have included a very crudely drawn map with this story, since this house has a weird setup;

https://i.imgur.com/RcDeu3O.png

Yes, our house layout is a big rectangle. Yes, both the front door and back door are on the same side of the house barely ten feet apart from one another. Yes, it's incredibly fucking stupid house design.

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The Wind Chimes (Stories Start Here)

At the time all this began my mother had started dating a guy who I would later come to consider my stepfather, and as such she had been spending a lot of time over at his place. I was used to having the house to myself (I was about 17 or 18 at the time) and spent most of my days skipping class and either on my computer or reading in my room. I was a shut in, and still very much am, but that's besides the point.

Now, we didn't have any security system in our house at the time because we couldn't afford one, and the back door leading out to the porch has a window that, back then, could be easily slid open to allow someone to reach through and unlock the back door.

Our compromise was to hang some wind chimes on the inside of the door in front of the window, so if anybody tried to reach through the window or open the door they would set off the chimes and we (or, well, I) would be alerted to a possible intruder. We live in a very peaceful town but it was still better to have some sort of alarm system, rudimentary as it was.

It was in the early hours of the morning and I had just fallen asleep, two of my cats on the bed with me, when all of a sudden there was this huge jingling crash in the hallway outside my bedroom door. Both of the cats with me jumped up and bolted for the other end of the house from the noise.

My first thought wasn't "intruder" for some reason; I thought that maybe my mom had come home late and had to come through the back door, and that she was pissed at me or at her boyfriend so had slammed it. I didn't hear anybody walking down the hallway or on the outside porch, though, so I rolled out of bed to check.

The wind chimes were lying halfway down the hallway, looking less like they'd been knocked down and fallen and more like something had smacked them or thrown them down the hall. My mother wasn't around, and the automated porch lights hadn't detected any motion so had not turned on, and for a minute I thought that maybe somehow our third cat (who hadn't been with me) had done it. I tracked the other two cats to my mom's bedroom, along with the third who was fast asleep on her bed and didn't seem to have even heard the chimes at all.

The event weirded me out a bit but I put the chimes back up, shrugging it off as "they must've just fallen and maybe one of the cats somehow dragged the chimes down the hall when they ran" and went back to bed. Never mind that the nail that the wind chimes were on was still solidly stuck in the door, or that the thread attaching the chimes to the nail was still very much in tact, and that the window was still shut tight as ever. I just went back to bed and fell asleep.

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The Picture Frame

The second event was pretty similar to the first; I was awake this time as it was earlier in the night, and I had all three cats with me on my bed. I was in my room when I heard a huge clattering racket coming from my bathroom.

I got up, much more cautiously this time than I had with the chimes, and went to investigate; I have this little watercolor painting of some cherubs that my uncle gave me in my bathroom, and it had somehow been dislodged and was now lying akimbo in the sink.

This one I couldn't explain away as well; the nail, like with the chimes, was still stuck firmly to the wall and the back of the frame has a sort of metal toothed thing rather than the standard wire hanger. The little cherub painting is still in my bathroom and hasn't fallen since, and I didn't feel any sort of earthquake or impact at the time that would explain how it just popped off the wall like that. All three of our cats were with me and couldn't have knocked it down, and there was no earthly way my mother could've walked down the hallway, knocked the painting down, and ran away without me seeing or hearing her.

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My Mother's Sleep Experiences

While the above events were going on, my mother was exhibiting some bizarre sleep behavior on the nights she stayed home. As mentioned above at the time she had started dating my stepfather and had been spending a good amount of time sleeping over at his place a couple blocks away for several nights of the week. My relationship with my mother at the time was very strained due to financial issues and, as such, I actually had enjoyed having the house to myself for much of the time.

Now, there are some things you need to know before we get into this section;

1) I do not sleep alone with the lights off. Ever. I get wicked night terrors when I sleep alone in the dark, or even just with the covers over my head. I'm not sure why and I will not include them in this post as they aren't relevant to these stories (but are also fucking scary) and my mother knew that the light in my room being on is not an indicator to whether or not I am awake or asleep. Additionally, I have a habit of sleeping during the day because of this issue, and find sleeping at night even with the lights on extremely difficult. This means that unless I'm utterly exhausted I'll usually be unable to sleep until the crack of dawn.

2) My mother always, and I mean always, wears slippers. We have no carpeting in our house, nor heated flooring, just painted particle board and linoleum meaning that unless you're a freak like me who isn't bothered by having cold feet you'd generally wear slippers or at least socks at all times in our house. My mom prefers the former and the only time she isn't wearing slippers is when she's putting on shoes or took them off to sleep.

3) My mother never bothered to physically come and check in on me when I slept. If she suspected that I was awake too late she might shout down the hall for me to go to sleep, but she generally would not make the effort to go down to my end of the house unless she had to do laundry, and this remains mostly true today.

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The Sleep-Yelling

The first event involving my mother's strange sleeping issues happened shortly after the wind chimes were knocked off the door. My mother had stayed home this particular night and was sleeping in her room, and I had been just falling asleep sometime around 3 or 4am I heard her suddenly shouting from her bedroom, making me bolt up in a panic.

Now, this was the first time this had ever happened with her; typically if she yelled at me to get back to sleep she'd do it from the living room, so I immediately assumed that someone might've gotten into the house via her bedroom window as it's closest to the ground. As I rushed through the house, though, it was clear she wasn't making any coherent sense and I wasn't even really able to recognize anything she was saying as actual words. She quieted down within a few moments and when I peeked into her room I couldn't see anything whatsoever; no intruder, no broken/open window, and my mother was dead asleep.

I figured she must've just had a nightmare and I went back to bed, a little shaken but otherwise fine. The next day I asked her what she'd been dreaming about and told her what happened and she claimed she had been talking with her father in her sleep. She had dreams about him often so I didn't press the issue.

As time went on, this happened several more times over the next few weeks, at random hours of the night, although not frequently enough that it became a pattern recognizable pattern. Our cats started spending time in my room during the nights she'd be home, clearly sick of getting spooked down to my end of the house.

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Standing in the Hall

I had never known my mother to sleepwalk before these happenings, and after these events stopped she hasn't done so again since.

I was up late one night reading in my room hours after she'd gone to bed. The house was very quiet when I heard my mother get up. Her bed has this big wooden headboard that always smacks against the wall whenever anybody sits up or lies down on the mattress, so I at first assumed she was just getting up to get a drink of water or to have a smoke or something. I laid down under the blankets since I wasn't in the mood to get yelled at to go to sleep for the second time that night, and pretended to be asleep with my back to the door.

I heard my mother walk through the house straight from her bedroom through the living room and down my hall only to stop just shy of my bedroom door. Something about her footsteps sounded weird though and it took me a few seconds as she approached to figure out what it was; she was barefoot.

As mentioned above, my mother never walks through the house barefoot. For any reason. Even in high summer. Putting on her slippers is an automatic action for her.

Anyway, she just stands there in my doorway for what I counted up to be five full minutes. Not saying anything, not moving, just standing there in bare feet staring at me. For the first few seconds she did this I was ready for her to say something but she just didn't. It sounds really silly to write it out like this, but the vibe I got from her there felt extremely wrong. It's a feeling I've experienced only one other time, when I woke up during sleep paralysis at my dad's house two years ago, like there was something behind me and if I moved it would scream or kill me or both. Except I had been wide awake the entire night and I knew it wasn't a nightmare.

After five minutes she turned around and walked back, barefoot, to her room and climbed back into bed. She didn't say anything, she didn't do anything other than walk to my room and stand there and then go back. To this day I have never felt so helpless and vulnerable by something that would otherwise be so innocuous.

I couldn't move even after she left and I eventually fell asleep several hours later after hearing nothing else. The next day she was her usual self and I didn't want to really acknowledge whatever was going on due to how dismissive she'd been about everything else lately, so I didn't ask why she'd gotten up that night or what she was doing.

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Sleeprunning

On another night, about a month after the first sleepwalking incident, I was wide awake and reading in my room. After the last event, I had been closing my door and shoving my dresser in front of it after my mother would go to sleep. I had been keeping my cats in my room at night as well, as by this time I had no idea what might happen to them with all the weird shit that was going on; at the very least her occasional sleep-shouting would freak them out just as much myself, so I kept them with me on the nights she was home.

I don't recall what time it was (I didn't have a clock in my room at the time) but I remember hearing my mother get out of bed, and even through the closed door I could hear that she was walking barefoot from her room again and I immediately got this sensation of dread.

I listened carefully at this point, and could hear her walk down the short little hallway between her bedroom door and the living room and stop for a second just upon entering the living room. As you can see in the map, where she was standing she would've been able to see straight through the living room and down the hall to the other end of the house, where my door was closed.

She stood there for a few seconds and I was almost wondering if maybe I hadn't really heard her get up or that I was just hearing things, when I heard her suddenly start running (not walking, but full-on fucking sprinting) in rapid thundering succession around the living room table. She did this circle about three or four times, not stopping or slowing her pace and I heard her continue her run back down her small hallway into her room and throw herself (not stop and sit down, full on leap) onto her bed.

For the record, my mother was in her mid-50s at this time and I don't think I've ever seen her move faster than a slight jog in my entire life. I was terrified, and spent the rest of the night sitting on the floor unable to sleep with my back pushed against the dresser blocking the door. My cats spent the night under my bed and I remember us looking at one another in silent confusion.

I didn't come out the next morning until well after the sun came up and I heard my mother (wearing her slippers like normal) walk out of her room and start making coffee. As casually as I could, I asked her if she'd gotten up in the middle of the night to smoke a cigarette or get a drink of water, and she just looked at me perplexed and said that she hadn't and asked me why I would've brought it up even if she had. I made an excuse, still not sure how to bring up what had happened, and just said I thought I'd heard something but it could've just been an animal on our porch.

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The Mirror

Several weeks after I heard my mother sleeprunning around our living room, I was home alone again. My mother had gone to her boyfriend's and I had the house to myself. It was a bright, sunny afternoon and I had just gotten up to eat something in between watching some anime on Youtube and I popped open the fridge and was absently looking inside for something when I happened to glance into the living room, in particular at the big mirror beside the TV.

At that exact moment, through the mirror, I saw something big and black and human-shaped stumble out of the office room where I had been watching videos not thirty seconds earlier. It was like a person's shadow, but I couldn't see any details of the person actually casting it. It visibly bumped into the washing machine, and I don't remember if they made a noise but the shadow crumpled momentarily as if it had felt the impact before it stood back up straight and rushed down the hall into my bedroom but I do know I saw the washing machine shake a bit as the thing hit it.

(Something I didn't really think of at the time, or really in all the times I've spoken of this event but has just hit me while writing this; there is no feasible way the shadow should've been visible. Even if there had been someone physically there in that hallway, the shadow looked like it was being cast from a light-source on the right in order to show up on the left side wall, but there is no light there. Only a light above (which was off since it was bright outside) and a light to the left via the window on the back door. The office light on the right side was on, but it would've only illuminated the shadow when it first exited my office, not when it ran down the hallway into my room.)

To say that I was stunned would've been an understatement. It was the middle of a sunny day in late Spring and I had been feeling pretty upbeat for the last week since nothing weird had happened in a while. Seeing a random shadow inhabiting the room I had been in all day run out of there into my own bedroom was more than I could really process, but when I did my response was sort of... extreme.

Now, a little bit about me; growing up, I was sometimes told by family members and friends that I'm 'quiet type' when it comes to approaching confrontation. Essentially what this means is I'm the sort of person who can put up with bullshit for an extended period of time (usually years) but if the individual bothering me goes too far I will snap and go ballistic and that usually ends in the person never trying to pull that shit again.

I'm not including this to make myself seem like a badass; if anything I'm somewhat embarrassed by this trait because I pride myself on being level-headed in most situations so to go from "minor long-term irritation" to "full on gorilla bitch rage" out of seemingly nowhere is not, you know, a good response to have to anything. I'm only including it to sort of explain what happened in a way that makes sense to someone else who might not respond to long-term harassment (supernatural or otherwise) in this manner.

I guess the weird events had been bothering me even more than I'd thought they were, because before I could really tale stock of what I was doing I'd seized the broom in the coat cubby by the door and had gone barreling down the hallway, screeching and roaring obscenities that really just boiled down to "get the fuck out of my house". In retrospect I'm very glad this happened in the middle of the day, when all my neighbors were at work or at school, rather than in the middle of the night. I'm sure someone would've called the cops, assuming there was a burglar or a domestic dispute or something. I am well aware that I sounded utterly deranged.

Nobody was in my room. I checked the window (closed and still fifteen feet off the ground to a gravel drop below), under the bed, in my closet, and so forth. Absolutely no sign that anybody was in there, and I even checked my bathroom and the back door (even though I know for sure I didn't see the thing go through either). At this point my anger sharply waned as I realized that whatever I was pissed at had disappeared (or maybe I was just crazy, that was definitely a thought I had while winding down) and I rounded up my cats and grabbed the phone, calling my mother and demanding she get home immediately.

She showed up and by that point I'd started to second-guess myself about what I'd seen; maybe it was a hallucination or something. I just said I thought I saw someone else in the house and despite her being pissed that I'd dragged her away from her date she didn't seem to wholly disregard the idea. My mother stayed until the next day (no sleep shouting or weird stuff thank God) and then went back out to her boyfriend's again, but I'd called a friend of mine to come stay with me the next night.

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The Mirror, Part Two (Or Maybe Just An Epilogue)
The next night, my friend was staying over at my place. I hadn't told him about what was going on, only that I didn't want to leave my cats alone (which was true, I might've been terrified but I didn't want to leave my pets there if something weird was hanging around) and I figured that whatever this thing was it might not show itself if I had company over.

He and I had set up the dining room table to do art and character/story design stuff together, probably for D&D or something. My mother had left money on the table before she'd gone, but I wasn't sure if she'd intended to leave it for us or not so I phoned her up at my stepdad's house and asked whether we could use it to order a pizza. She agreed, and we talked for a few more minutes over the phone.

At this time, my friend was sitting at the dining room table, facing me. I was standing in the living room, with my back to the mirror, and as I talked to my mom I watched my friend's expression go from patiently listening to my conversation, to surprised, to ashen-faced.

I ended the conversation with my mom and hung up. The moment I put the phone down my friend got abruptly to his feet and immediately began saying that we should go to his place. I wanted to argue or ask what was going on but he just kept saying that he'd forgotten something and we needed to go right now and he just kept repeating it over and over and kept looking at the mirror I'd been standing in front of in a really uncomfortable way.

I of course looked but couldn't see anything there, and he practically dragged me out of the house down to his place. Whenever I asked him what was going on or if he saw something he just kept saying "we gotta go, we gotta go" and wouldn't give me a straight answer.

The rest of my visit at his place for that night was strange. I wanted to go back home to keep an eye on my cats but every time I'd start making moves to get organized or suggest we should go back to get the materials we'd left behind he'd change the subject and suggest we play video games or see if one of our other friends would come over or make something to eat and it felt very much like he was trying to distract me from going home that night.

In the early hours of the following morning I managed to convince him to walk me back up the road to my place and we parted; I went inside and nothing was changed, the cats were fine and I never really got out of my friend what he saw or experienced that made him panic like that.

The End

And that's honestly it. Nothing weird has happened in our house since. We didn't do anything to get rid of whatever was there, no sage or candles or whatever; my mother continued dating her boyfriend until he moved in with us, and nothing notably supernatural ever happened here again. I stopped pushing my dresser in front of my door after a while, my cats were fine until they died of old age or misfortune and things have been more calm and normal than they'd ever been. It all just stopped.

Something that does still bother me about this event, though, is that my friend apparently has no memory of what happened that last night. He has been a heavy user of pot over the years so that could be impacting his memory, but it does make me question whether he saw anything at all, or if I somehow grossly misunderstood the situation.

Alternatively, whatever he saw could've freaked him out so bad he just doesn't want to remember it. He told me once when we were younger that he believed that negative spirits get drawn by people giving them attention.

Either way, he has been to my place a few times since without any issue, and I've told this story to other friends in his presence several times. However, each time I tell it he seems perplexed when we get to the part that involves him, and doesn't seem to even remember me telling him about it during previous retelling.

It does make me second-guess things. That said, he doesn't outright deny these events either so I really don't know what to feel.

At the end of the day, I have no evidence of these events beyond my (probably not very reliable) word. These happenings could've been the result of hallucinations caused by stress, or a genuine haunting, or bad infra-sound or something. Personally, I'd much prefer the "hallucinations" and "infra-sound" explanations over "ghosts and demons". Still, I thought it might help to share my experiences here. If you guys have feedback or discussion about this or similar events I'd be glad to hear it.

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To get a laundry list of possible speculation out of the way (feel free to skip, this is mostly just so I don't get a lot of "maybe you were just X" responses);

-I have no substance abuse issues. I do not smoke weed (despite literally everyone around me doing so on a near constant basis, because Canada) nor do any hard drugs. The strongest medication I take is anti-anxiety and a cup of coffee every other day. I drink maybe once or twice a year and never to excess.

-While I have had an anxiety condition my entire life, it's caused by social interaction with strangers and situations where I'm unwillingly placed in the center of attention. When I am alone, or with close family and/or friends, my anxiety is virtually non-existent. This is admittedly another reason for not wanting to give out personal info.

-I have had intermittent and very rare instances of what I would consider to be auditory hallucinations (hearing someone whistle at me in the shower once when I was a teen, hearing a man calling my name while I slept on the couch as a kid despite only my mother and I being in the house, etc.) and visual hallucinations (eg: seeing a dog running at me out of the corner of my eye once, or glancing out the window and seeing an extra tree in the yard only to look back and there isn't one) but they were never as prolonged nor as "solid" as these events and were immediately disregarded by me as hallucinations. Pretty much just your standard "I saw something for a second but I know it wasn't real" kinda stuff that everybody seems to get once in a blue moon.

-Despite having a moderate interest in the supernatural as a little kid, I do not automatically believe in ghost stories or the supernatural on principle. This might be somewhat hypocritical given the stories I presented above are purely anecdotal evidence, but I will say that if I hadn't lived these experiences I probably would not believe in their credibility.

Submitted April 30, 2019 at 09:56AM by willow_wound http://bit.ly/2XUeWSz