Aaron R. was just nine years old when he experienced the intrusion of such spirits firsthand. In 1992, Aaron, his mother and three younger sisters moved into a small two-story house in Greenville, a borough of Smithfield, Rhode Island. The family lived there from 1992 until 1995, and during that time, each one of them experienced several strange, unnerving events.
The haunting began almost immediately, in the second week that the family occupied the house. It was late at night and Aaron was lying in bed trying to fall asleep. But he had an intangible, uneasy feeling that someone was watching him. The feeling was strong enough to compel the young boy to pull the sheets over his head and squeeze his eyes shut. He then heard a faint whispering that seemed to be right next to him. The words were too faint and Aaron could not make them out. Eventually, the whispering stopped and Aaron was able to fall asleep.
There were only two rooms on the second floor, separated by a hallway running the length of the house. This was originally an attic that had been converted for living space. One of the rooms was Aaron's bedroom. In his bedroom was a small wooden door with a latch that provided access to a crawlspace that ran behind the two bedrooms and the hallway. When Aaron's mother and her boyfriend first looked at the house with the landlord, they inspected this crawlspace. She said that she had a feeling of dread when she was back there, and that she never wanted to go in there again.
Perhaps there was good reason. Some mornings Aaron would wake up to find the crawlspace door wide open, even though it had been latched and locked. "The carpet came up over the bottom of the door, so it was pretty difficult to open it in the first place," says Aaron. "There was no way it could have blown open by a draft."
This was just the beginning.
Next page > The moaning man
