"From the moment we moved to the house..."

"My house growing up was built in the 1920s. While I can think of several things that can be explained by other things such as sleep paralysis, childlike imagination, creaky pipes, and bad wiring, there's some things that have left me and my family members unsettled. I generally think most hauntings can be explained by natural phenomena and I'm happy to think this could be the case too.

From the moment we moved to the house (I was 6) I absolutely hated my closet. I would cry if my parents didn't close it at night. This fear never went away even when I was a teenager, I always had to have it closed or covered up. I can't explain exactly how genuinely terrifying this feeling was but i always felt watched. My whole family was creeped out by that closet too and generally avoided it.

The upstairs was small and had a landing surrounded by our 3 bedrooms and the bathroom. I would wake up with this oddly unsettled feeling and walk to the landing and stair down into the darkness of the stairs, which was odd as normally if I had to go to the bathroom I would sprint there and back. A few times I would find my brother already standing there but looking up at our attic door instead and I'd have a heart attack.

The weirdest for me was the several times someone in my family heard a voice that sounded like one of us but we weren't there. There were at least two times my dad came into my room annoyed at me for waking him up when I was deep asleep and completely tangled in my bedsheets. He told me that I tapped him hard on the shoulder and very clearly told him to get up and that I needed help but when he opened his eyes I wasn't there and he had to search for me. My brother told me about times he heard me talking in a room but when he checked I wasn't even upstairs. It still gives me chills to think about it.

There were also times I clearly heard the door open and my mom come home and call my brother and me but when we got downstairs no one was home. It would be really odd and we'd both definitely heard it, even with headphones in. Sometimes we'd leave the house because we'd be so freaked out by it.

There are other odd stories of things going completely missing and us finding them odd places months later but I've always just put that down as forgetting where we put it or our cats hiding things. Some of my friends refused to come over after sleeping the night but they wouldn't tell me anything other than the place really creeped them out."

uhhhh234

Your friends refused to sleep over?

Time to exorcise the house.

"I searched that night before bed..."

"I was about 9 years old, playing with some Star Trek action figures in my bedroom (yes, I was a cool kid). My room was positioned directly above a guest room that was almost never used and I almost never entered. The furniture was outdated compared to the rest of the house, and it just had a creepy vibe. This will be relevant later.

I had a Spock action figure which broke apart easily. His shirt would snap into two pieces by pressing on the seam, and then all his limbs would fall off. He was easy to repair, so I took him apart often. He'd be used for body parts if I wanted to pretend someone had been killed by an alien.

One day just as I had set up a decidedly gruesome Star Trek scene, my mom called me down for dinner. When I came back upstairs after eating, I noticed that Spock was gone. Just him, though. All the other action figures were still in a little circle exactly as I left them.

I searched that night before bed, thinking my younger brother (my only sibling, who was 2 years old at the time) may have somehow gotten into my room and moved my stuff. It had never happened before, but it was all I could think of. The whole family was at dinner and there was no chance for anyone to go upstairs and move anything.

The next morning, I searched the house for Spock. Nothing. Not put away, not in my brother's room, not in the living room. It was baffling. As a last-ditch effort, I decided to check the guest room. The room looked untouched, as usual. Except for one thing: a dismantled Spock action figure, in the exact same position as I had left it in my room the night prior, directly below where I had been playing with him in my bedroom.

I asked my mom and dad. They claimed to know nothing about it. My younger brother could not have made it down the stairs, and also would not have been able to make the same Spock pile that I had made the previous night. It was as if my toy had just translated a few feet in the z-direction, right through the floor.

I still don't have an explanation."

RealHot_Steel

And you won't get one.

I feel like this could be a "Monkey's Paw" scenario, and I'm here for it.

"My mother told me to visit her friend..."

"My mother took me to visit her friend when I was 8 years old. This friend lived alone in an old house. I was exploring the house and went up the stairs where all the bedrooms were. As I got to the top of the stairs I looked to the far end of the hall and saw an old man standing there. He saw me but he was looking through me (difficult to describe). I knew instantly that something wasn't right because the lower half of his body was not really defined. I raced down the stairs to tell my mother and the friend told her that yes, this is the ghost of the house and he is harmless. I have never forgotten the creepy feeling that I had."

otoph

Harmless, huh?

Are you sure they weren't just saying that?

"When I was 11..."

"When I was 11, I was staying with some friends at their cabin deep in the woods (in the middle of rural NOWHERE, like literally not another house for miles). We were playing soccer and my friend yelled and pointed to the trees behind the yard, and we all saw a man standing there in a dirty brown shirt and jeans, who walked towards us and vanished behind a tree. We screamed for their dad and he came running out to see what was wrong and told us to go inside while he looked around.

He found nothing, but we didn't wanna go outside and play again. Later that night we had pretty much calmed down and were watching TV in their living room (which had big glass sliding doors facing the forest) when their dog started growling and barking at something outside the glass doors. He hadn't acted like this before, so we called their dad again and he went outside through the doors and found nothing again, but the dog wouldn't stop barking until a few minutes later."

Philosapphical

You see?

This is why I won't go into the woods.

I've seen enough horror films to know that's a terrible idea.

"I woke up..."

"I woke up and saw a shadow man run then jump at me while I was in bed. I was so struck with fear I was unable to move but he disappeared right before he landed. The memory was so terrifying I still remember it nearly 30 years later."

BW_Bird

I think that's what some people might call a sleep paralysis demon.

Have seen a couple myself. It's not fun.

"But for whatever reason..."

"My great-aunt had a house that was built in 1792. There was an upstairs room that had been made into a sort of playroom for us kids. It was very small, with a sloping ceiling.

Now, this could just have been a kiddo's imagination or a bad dream I had as a child, but I remember before it being a playroom that it was a dying man's room. I remember where his bed was and what he looked like. He was suffering. I could never get comfortable in that room, and I couldn't tolerate more than a few minutes in there alone.

I should add that I'm not a person who believes in the supernatural. I'm open to the possibility, but I've never encountered definitive proof. My husband, who has had paranormal experiences, has had to take me out of places that he thinks are haunted, that's how immune I am to that sort of thing. In supposedly haunted hotels, I sometimes wander the hallways late at night hoping I'll find something to make me believe.

But for whatever reason, I felt something was deeply wrong about that room in my great-aunt's house, and I avoided it unless there was something specific I could duck in quickly and get."

nakedonmygoat

"When I was growing up..."

"When I was growing up I lived in a century home, it was about 115 years old at the time. The house many years back was a funeral showing home, they would hold ceremonies and their viewings. This always creeped me out and may have gotten my imagination running but sometimes I still wonder.

There were a servant's quarters with a separate staircase to the kitchen, oftentimes we would hear footsteps and go check to find nothing there.

Multiple times we would hear the tv upstairs in the servant bedroom connected to the stairs turn on and then off if we went up to the room. It became my parent's room/the master bedroom when we lived there.

A few of my mom's friends told us stories of seeing an old lady in the closet of my sister's room (next to mine) when they stayed over and slept in that bedroom.

My youngest sister would frequently have night terrors and sit up eyes wide open screaming or sulking. Freaked me out big time.

My personal worst experience was what I now believe to have been sleep paralysis. I always slept with a hall light on and my bedroom door open. One night I "woke" up and saw my bedroom door shut slowly as my closet door opened. As this happened a figure of a woman walked to me and sat on my chest staring at me. I tried screaming/calling for my mom but I couldn't get words to vocalize, felt like a whisper/pressure. Eventually, I was able to turn over, and immediately when I did I woke up again and was not rolled over but on my back. The door to the closet was shut and my bedroom door open.

Overall I am personally a nonbeliever and could probably rationalize these experiences/chalk it up to being an imaginative kid. But they still stick with me and make me curious. I haven't experienced anything like this since moving from there. The bottom line is old houses with history are creepy, especially for a child!"

techtonic69

"I saw her when I opened my eyes..."

"The three-headed shadow at the foot of my bed that would move to tuck me in. I saw her when I opened my eyes some nights. It shouldn't have been, I called it a "shouldn't be," but I was never really in danger. I also knew each head was meant to represent my grandmother and two grand aunts but they were not them. They were something else."

mercuryxwaxing

It's funny how our dreams can tell us things without explciitly voicing them out loud.

"I have always insisted..."

"I have always insisted that the house I lived in until I was 8 is creepy. It was only a year or two ago that my family casually mentioned that it was built where a Victorian maternity ward used to be. So, it's mildly possible that ghost babies haunted me."

NiamhHA

So... still want to purchase that creepy house that the locals say was built atop an old Native American burial ground? Still want to go spend time in that cabin in the woods near the site of all those murders?

You're braver than I. But if you do survive a night (or two) be sure to report back. You're bound to have seen something.

Have some stories of your own? Feel free to tell us about them in the comments below!