Paranormal Story Archives
August 2002 – Page 36

The Haunting
by Kristie B.

I must tell you up front that I am a skeptic – THE skeptic. So by me sharing this experience, know that it is not from a dream, fear or an over-active imagination.

Five months after my husband and I were married, we rented an old house, built in the 1940s. I had no idea of the history of the house, but since living there I would now like to know. I liked the floorplan and the price was right. Somehow, though, it never felt like home. I never unpacked all of the boxes, even though I am usually meticulous about getting things put away. I had felt since the first night we were there a little uneasy feeling that I couldn't explain with words. I guess the closest to it was the feeling of being watched – almost. It was a feeling of not being completely alone. It was a very dark, unwelcoming feeling.

First, the refrigerator (which was probably older than I am) would work intermittently. Not unusual, right? Well, it would only work when the landlord was there or when the repairmen were there. It wouldn’t work at all once they were gone. When they came back, it would work just fine again until they left. Just enough to raise an eyebrow, but not enough of an incident to mention alone.

Then there were the lights. On many occasions, lights would turn off when I left the room when I knew for a fact that I had left them on. The switches were turned off, not just the bulbs burned out. I could turn them right back on, every time. I even decided to test this by going through the house and, one by one, turning every light on. By the time I got through the entire house, I walked back to my starting point, going back through the rooms where the lights were still on. The first light was off at the switch. I could see into the second room where I’d left the light on. It was still on. As I rounded the corner to the third room, I actually heard the click of the switch being turned off. What’s even more unusual about this is the fact that all of the light switches in the house were upside-down. You had to flick them down to turn them on, up for off. It wasn’t just old switches and gravity. Strange, just enough to make your neck hair prickly, but not enough of an incident to mention alone.

Then, an indirect encounter. It was around noon on a sunny, but cold December day. I had come home on my lunch hour to spend it with my husband who had the day off. My daughter was in preschool, we had no pets, so he and I were completely alone, right? When I came in, he was just finishing up a shower in our one bathroom located at the end of the hall. Next to the bathroom was a spare bedroom we were using as a computer room/office. I said hello to him through the bathroom door, he said hello back, and I went into the computer room and waited for him to come out of the bathroom. As I waited, I played solitaire on the computer. I was busy thinking about work, Christmas coming up, and presents to buy when I saw out of the corner of my eye, my husband in a white towel run down the hall toward our bedroom. I couldn’t quite see him from the waist up, but I did see white cloth about waist-high to him as I turned toward the hall, curious as to why he ran. I heard footsteps, too, and directly saw the edge of white cloth disappear out of sight, toward our bedroom. What a silly man, I thought. I got up from the computer chair and stood in the doorway of the room. The bedroom door was still closed, and I hadn’t heard him open and close it again. Plus, the bathroom door was still closed with the light on. It occurred to me that we had no white towels, either. Not frightened, but definitely curious, I turned toward our bedroom, I said, "Honey, why did you just run down the hall?" His voice, coming from the bathroom said, "I’m still in the bathroom. What are you talking about?" Immediately, goosebumps sprang up on my arms and neck. I stared at our bedroom door, getting that vague sense of being watched – almost. He opened the bathroom door to find me half in the hallway, half in the spare bedroom. I turned to him after he called my name. He looked at my face, then a frightened look filled his eyes. "Are you okay? Hey, why is the hallway so cold? Did you turn on the A/C?" All I said was, "No. It’s December. The heat is on." I had no idea what to say next. The rest of the house was a toasty 72, the hallway was not. Before that moment, the hallway was one of the warmest places in the house, as the vent for the heater in the hallway was closest to the furnace. A few minutes passed, and the hallway began to heat up again.

We didn’t talk about it much. I think that my husband thought that either I was under stress and just imagined it, or believed it and didn't want to think about it. I’m not sure. I know he didn’t want to discuss it. I definitely didn’t tell my four-year-old daughter. I sure didn’t want her to be scared.

Two nights later, though, she was scared anyway. At about 2 a.m. I awoke to my daughter screaming and running into my room. My husband was working shift work at the time and was not home. She kept repeating, "She wants me to come with her. She wants me to come with her." I flicked on the light, brought her into my bed, then locked my bedroom door. I could sense that familiar feeling. I even shoved a pair of jeans under the door to block the space between the door and the floor. After calming my daughter down (by holding her and rocking back and forth, assuring her that she was safe, even though I wasn’t so sure), I began to ask her questions until she blurted out the whole story. She woke up a little while ago because she had to go to the bathroom. She went and when she got back to her bed, she began lying down again when she sat back up in bed and noticed something moving near her closet. Her view was obscured a little by the bed covers of her top bunk, so she assumed I was in her room putting clean laundry away in her closet. At that point in her young life, she did not understand time enough to know that I wouldn’t have been in her room at 2 a.m. putting laundry away. Then, she said, she heard talking. Someone whispering. She began wondering why I was talking to myself, but then noticed that the person was a lot shorter than me and coming toward her. She then noticed that it was a girl with long, blonde hair. The girl was dressed in a long white dress. My daughter indicated with her hand how tall the girl was. The top of the white dress would have been about waist-high to my husband. She said that she wasn’t scared at first, just surprised. Then, she said the girl spoke to her, but it was more like "whispers in [her] head." The girl asked my daughter to come with her. My daughter said that she was scared and asked her to go away. When the girl got closer and began insisting that my daughter come with her, my daughter held out her hands to push her, but her hands and body went right through the girl and my daughter fell on her floor. Then, she screamed and ran to me. Okay, kids have bad dreams all of the time, right? She had fallen out of bed and had this dream while falling, right? That’s what I thought until I went into her room later. She had knocked over a plastic cup of water on her dresser in her panic to get to me. There was a small amount of water on the hard-wood floor next to her bed (maybe ¼ cup) with a footprint in it. I put my foot next to it. It was too small to be mine. My daughter put her foot next to it – too big for hers. We went back to my bedroom and spent the rest of the night with the door locked and the lights on. I told her it was for her benefit, so she wouldn’t be so scared. After all, she was depending on me to keep her safe. She wouldn’t feel safe it I told her I was scared. The next morning before my husband came home, I used the bathroom to discover that my daughter had, indeed, used it some time during the night. She was terrible about not flushing. When my husband came home, I asked him if he had mentioned my sighting to her at all. He hadn't.

We moved shortly afterward. I have never felt that strange feeling since.

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