Your True
Tales
February 2004
– Page
8
The Tar
Man
by DilleDev
I believe that the house I lived in as a child, and my mother still lives in, is a portal for spirits to pass through. Some stay for a while. There are some "resident spirits," as I like to call them. The house is over 200 years old. Back in it's hayday, it was a fishermen's hotel. When the fishermen would come up the Delaware to dock, they would find shelter, hot food and a bath there. Time passed and a local bought the building closing off the walkway making a closet on either side. He sold them as separate houses.
A year later, my grandmother bought the house. That's when things started happening. My mother was just a teenager then; she's 78 now. She slept in the back bedroom and she was being visited by a human form that looked like it was covered in tar. She called it the tar man. The first few times she saw it, it scared her, but it never hurt her. She would pull the covers over her head until it went away. Then it stopped for a period of time. Mom said she could hear strange noises, sounds of footsteps, and when she'd go to the cellar the light would go off by itself.
Time passed and mom got married and we children came along. Mom and dad slept in the middle room, my brother slept in the back room and my sister and I slept in the front room. One night, a startling scream came from the back bedroom. My older brother's door slammed open and he headed down the stairs and out the front door. When Mom finally got him to stop, he told her he saw a man in the back bedroom that looked like he was covered in tar. Mom never told us about what happened to her because she didn't want to scare us. From that time on, a multitude of things began to happen.
We started hearing a loud cracking noise in the ceiling through out the house upstairs. The front bedroom closet door would open by itself, and my middle sister began having visitations from another man. This man would come to the bedroom at night, pick her arm up and put it back under the covers. She would take it out and he would put it back. She wake us all screaming in sheer horror. This again happened for several nights in a row, then it stopped.
A month went by and it started again. When the weather got cold, it was hard to heat the front bedroom with a coal heater. So dad put the doors back on their hinges and closed off the bedroom. They moved our bed to the hall near the stairs; the heat came up the stairs well to keep us warm. On one of these nights, my sister asked me if I believed what she said was happening as I hadn't seen what she saw. I told her no, even though I had heard things, seen shadows and felt my bed shake. I didn't want to believe her. She asked me to stay awake with her that night and I would see for myself.
Time passed and I got sleepy. About the time I was almost asleep, I felt her elbow nudging me awake. "Look," she whispered. I raised my head slightly and saw the ghostly form of a man, white shirt, suspenders and dark pants, gliding down the hall. He stopped at the door. I saw his hand try the door knob. Then he raised his hand to knock on the door. I froze. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I pushed with all my might and a scream came out of me so loud that it scared my parents to gray hairs. All we saw was a flash of something white go to the back bedroom.
Mom checked the background of the house. She found out that the man who bought the house and separated them - the first owner - had accidentally fallen through the trap attic and hung himself in the back bedroom. Mom had a priest from our church come to bless the house and told him what took place and what she found out. So the priest went to the heart of the house (what he called it) and called out the man's name. He told him to go toward the light, that he was dead and wasn't welcome there. He then blessed the house and left. That man has not been seen since and the cracking in the ceiling has stopped. But it seems other doors have been opened from the other side to here, some sort of portal, activity has in creased not an everyday, but increased - and sometimes mean.
< Previous story | Next story >
|
Do you
have a paranormal tale to tell? |
