Scratch Scratch Tap

This story is true, this has been happening to me for a while now and although it scares me, I decided you might as well know whats going on, just know I'm not crazy, or at least that's what my psychiatrist says.

For a while I've been living in an old house, no one's died here, in fact my grandfather built it when he first got married, we used this house as a camp that we rented out in the summer, until recently. We started having financial troubles and we put our nice house in town up for sale and moved down here. I can't really complain, its lonely sure but I love the woods around us.

At first everything was fine, I had the upstairs bedroom facing the woods, it was small and cozy and I quickly made it mine, posters and pictures went up, awards and badges hung on the walls and I was happy. My mom got me zebra print sheets and lamps and it looked like a typical teenage girl room. For the first three years we lived there, only noticing little things, my books being moved around subtly, the cats staring and chasing invisible things (we passed that off as them chasing bugs), bumps in the night and the dog growling at the large wood stove we had in the living room. The fourth year started to get weird.

It started off with two. There was a man in a red shirt and a woman in a blue dress. I saw the man more. The woman always seemed sad, and sometimes like she was crying, the man was more aggressive, actually slamming car doors and breaking lights in the kitchen. I saw them for only three months. I was starting to hope that was it, that I had bought something they were attached to but sold it in one of the local community yard sales, I hoped they wouldn't come back, and they didn't.

For the next nine months I lived happily, without anything weird happening. By this time I was in eighth grade, I was an honor roll student and I had a strange group of friends but I was happy. In our school we had a program called MLTI, if you asked me what it meant I wouldn't be able to tell you, I couldn't remember if my life depended on it, but the program gave seventh and eighth graders in Maine laptops witch were to be used for academic purposes, we got them for a year, able to take them home, but we had to return them before summer started. I often used my laptop late into the night, writing stories and chatting with friends on Facebook or email, or even just watching a movie. I started noticing that I would take a break, to use the rest room, get a drink or eat supper and come back and either whole sections of my story were deleted or my movie was moved to show a somewhat disturbing image on the screen, I even once walked in to see the brightness level being played with, actually witnessing the buttons being pressed. I got a cold and worried feeling that something was in my room and didn't plan on going anywhere. I found out that this was a little girl, I never found out what her name was but she scared me, I once woke up to see her staring at me, she was sitting above my window and I saw her face, that was the only time I saw her though. Eventually it got to me and I couldn't sleep, I moved my sleeping quarters into my office, it was smaller but it had a futon couch that I could easily sleep on.

Now I am in high school and strange things again have been happening. I hear scratching noises from the wall that my "bed" is pressed up against. I told my mom about it: "It's just squirrels and birds, don't worry about it." I asked my dad about it: "Probably just some damned rodents, shoot 'em, haha!" So that's what I passed it off as, squirrels, birds and rodents, and I could sleep. About halfway through my freshman year the scratching became violent and louder. Late at night there was tapping on the window, it wasn't just tapping it was rattling, even when there was no wind out, it would rattle and rattle. Now call me a baby but to calm my nerves about the rattling I went out and bought myself a teddy bear. I cuddled it tight every night. I've been really freaking out about the rattling, and I wish it would stop. It got to the point where it didn't sound like scratching anymore, it was more like a gnawing, like someone was trying to eat there way through the solid wood walls. Sometimes I dare myself to look out the window by my head and each time I regret it, i don't see the stars or the moon, I see black blurs, but look out the window by my feet I see the stars and moon. This in itself scares me, I don't know what's going scratch, scratch tap tap rattle, but I want it to go away. Maybe I'll get a priest over here to bless the house, if that would help at all.