I have always considered myself lucky to have grown up in a true haunted house. My grandparents have lived in a 200-year-old New England style Cape house for over fifty years. This house, which I considered my nana’s house, is located where I grew up in central New Hampshire. The house was built in the late 1700s and has been everything from a farm to a restaurant and speakeasy.
Alice, the “imaginary” friend
Throughout my lifetime (I'm now 28), I have lived there myself, off and on. From a very early age, both my sister and I knew that there was something just not right around the place.
I remember being around three years old, and I was standing in my crib crying for my mother, thinking that something was in the room with me, watching me. At the time there was only one bathroom in the house, located at the top of the stairs on the second floor. There are also four bedrooms upstairs. Two on either side of the hallway and a door leading to another staircase that leads to the attic. Both my sister and I refused to go upstairs alone, and up until the age of ten or so we always made somebody stand at the bottom of the stairs to watch us while we went to the bathroom – with the door open, of course.
My mother also said that when I was two or three I had an imaginary friend named Alice. I was constantly playing with Alice and talking about her. Well, suddenly I stopped talking about Alice and my mother asked me why. I replied, "She died." Now we both wonder weather "Alice" was really imaginary or was a ghost.
I also remember playing outside on my swing set and staring upstairs at the attic window. I could swear that somebody was up there watching me. When I was nine I began to read ghost stories and was completely enthralled by them. So I wasn't surprised when my mother told me that Nana's house was haunted. She began to tell me all kinds of stories about things that she and my uncles experienced growing up there. She told me about seeing a man in her mirror once when she was little. He had a moustache and those old-fashioned arm band garters holding up his sleeves.
The ghosts’ pranks
My grandmother never has had a driver’s license and was a stay-at-home homemaker. My mother had a horse growing up, and when she and her brothers were at school my nana would go out to water the horse and put it out to pasture. She was returning to the house after doing this and found that she couldn't open the door to get in. She ended up going through a window and found that "something" had locked the deadbolt!
She was a bit spooked, but by this time everybody in the house had experienced some kind of weird happening.
The next nana she went out to take care of the horse again. She returned to the house, turned the door knob, but the door wouldn't budge. She again climbed through the window and found that "something" had taken the old heating vent out of the floor in the living room, moved it across the house and set it in front of the door in the kitchen. Well, you can imagine that she was pretty freaked out and she called her neighbor to come get her until my grandpa got home.
Another incident took place when my grandpa was in the barn skinning a deer. He took his best hunting knife and stuck it into the wall. He reached down to grab something, then reached to retrieve his knife – and it was gone! He searched that barn up and down and to this day he has never found it!
The bearded old man
My parents got divorced when I was fourteen and my mother, sister and baby brother moved into my grandparents’ haunted house. I had always spent a lot of time with my nana and grandpa anyway, being their first born grandchild, but when the three of us children moved into the house, boy, did the spooks start acting up!
I have always heard that spirits feed off energy from children. It was during this time that I saw my first apparition.
I was fast asleep in my bed when I woke suddenly. I heard the chimes of the clock downstairs and looked at my alarm clock. It was exactly midnight. I had this strange feeling of being watched. I looked to the foot of my bed, and there was this white mist. It was shaped like a person, but I couldn't make out any features. In my head I knew that it was an old man with a white beard. I was quite scared. I flipped onto my stomach and put my pillow over my head. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night!
Many things have happened over the years. The usual haunting stuff. Things disappearing and then reappearing in a place that you had already looked one thousand times. Strange whiffs of old-fashioned perfume. A music box playing in the middle of the night.
Next page: Evil clowns, the psychic and more
