Strange Accounts from My Childhood Home

There is a house that I spent a good portion of my childhood in, and the house that I, to this day, although no longer living in it, will always call my true home. I have many fond childhood memories in that house, and it’s where our family lived the longest.

What I’m about to describe are all real events experienced in this house by me and the rest of my family. These are true accounts, and are not exaggerated in any way.

We’ve always known that house was haunted. Not to the point of being insane and deadly, like you see in the movies, but plenty of unnerving things have happened there. Let me start by telling you a little bit about the house. The first thing you should know is that it’s very old; from the 1800’s. It used to be a hotel. When my family bought it, I, being the youngest, was only a little kid. We remodeled that house, and even extended it a little. It took a very long time, but eventually, that old, rickety house from the 1800’s got a brand new (modern) makeover. However, the things lingering in that house which we couldn’t see, stayed.

At first it started out with smaller things. My older brother would occasionally be falling asleep in his room upstairs (which was always cold), and someone would blow in his ear. He would open his eyes and look, but of course, nobody would be there.

We were told by a few different people that a cranky old woman used to live there, who would sit out rocking in her rocking chair on the balcony (which we removed), yelling at people who would walk by. There was one night during which one of my older sisters was sleeping on the couch in the living room, and she started hearing a creaking sound. She described it as wood, creaking rhythmically, coming from the spot just outside one of the upstairs windows, which used to be a door, that led out to the balcony that no longer exists.

One time when I was little, being all adventurous like I was, I took a digital camera up to the furnished attic at night, where it was quiet and pitch-black. I made my way into the middle of the room, held up the camera and started snapping pictures. I could only see what I was taking pictures of when the camera would flash, and then afterwards when I looked at the taken picture on the digital screen. I eventually saw in one of the pictures I had taken while I was facing a wall, a small, black spot in the middle of the screen. I took another picture, pointing the same way, and saw that the spot was still there, but had grown. To me it looked like some sort of portal to nothingness, a small void of blackness in the room, something that sucked up the light of the flash and didn’t reflect any back. As I took more and more pictures of it, it got bigger and bigger, until it was almost covering the entire camera lens; just blackness. It then occurred to me that rather than growing, this black mass actually seemed to be getting closer and closer to the camera lens. I don’t remember anything past that point. I must’ve ran downstairs.

Things started getting more physical. I was once in the shower when the water suddenly got cold, and I looked back to find that the knob had been turned significantly behind my back. At night when alone, we each began to hear loud footsteps above us in the biggest room on the second floor. You would only ever hear them if you were alone, or were the only one awake. Once they were so heavy, it sounded like there was an elephant or something up there, and the ceiling creaked so loud that I half expected it to cave in on me. My sisters shared that room for a long time. Eventually one of them moved out, only one remained in it. When she was walking around up there you could hear her footsteps clearly. The only problem was, I would also hear those footsteps walking around when she wasn’t home. Sometimes, I was home alone.

My mom was awakened one night when my friend was sleeping over, to LOUD footsteps running up and down the stairs. According to her, it sounded like more than one person, and was practically a stampede. She jumped out of bed, angry at us being up so late causing such a racket, opened her bedroom door into the room where you can see the bottom of the stairs, but there was only dead silence, and darkness. Everything was still. She thought we must’ve run upstairs and she had just missed us, so she went up the stairs and opened the door to the room we were sleeping in (which was my sisters’ old room, now vacant after they had both moved out), but we were sound asleep. She thought maybe we were faking it, and inspected us closer, and realized that no, we were clearly out cold, and had been that way for quite a while. She mentioned all of this to us the next day, maybe still wanting to think that it was us, but we of course had no idea what she was talking about.

One night, I was just about to fall asleep, when I heard a man’s voice, RIGHT in my face, whisper the word “Bang”. It pulled me out of my sleep, making my eyes shoot open and look around the dark room, to find nothing. After a minute, still being tired, I brushed it off and closed my eyes again. I started to drift back to sleep, when the voice once again quietly whispered “Bang” in my face. I opened my eyes again, to once again find nothing. This happened a total of 3 times before I was finally able to fall asleep.

So many things happened in that house, but after so many years of constant activity, you get used to it, and things that used to frighten you begin to simply annoy you. Sometimes, if you were alone and there was a persistent noise being made where no other person was (like the squeezing and popping sound of plastic water bottles in the kitchen), you could simply look in that direction and say “stop it”, and sometimes, it would just stop.

We were eventually able to get the things that were dwelling in that house out, and the activity, after years of persistence, stopped altogether.

As I said earlier, I still consider that house my one and only true home, and I always will. I spent years growing up there as a child with my family and 2 of my close friends (as well as family friends). Despite the occasional paranormal activity, I have many good memories of that place. It is where my mind will always wander back to, whenever I think “home”.