Name withheld by request.
This happened in the mid -Sixties I believe, and it happened to our family. We moved to a rural stately farmhouse in Waynesville, Ohio. The house was built around the Civil War days, and had been added onto, but any way I was about 11 yrs old, the house had many rooms, attics etc. and about 3 fireplaces.. upstairs next to my bedroom was a playroom, a very large room with side attics on both sides of the room. The only way into the playroom was through my bedroom, which I shared with my sister. I would close the playroom door, because frankly the room gave me the creeps, even though it was decorated very nicely, but every time that I would enter the bedroom the play room door would be wide open. On many a night we would wake up and the door would be wide open. We started blocking the playroom door, like I said no one wanted to go in there.
My father said we were making it up, until one evening, actually the middle of the night I woke up to a heavy and constricting feeling. I remember screaming, as the heavy oak door from the playroom was on top of my sister and I. Well my parents just could not believe how that door (taken from its hinges) made its way on top of us. From then on other things started to happen, noises came from the attic surrounding the playroom. Sometimes it sounded like a small child crying very softly and at that point we started to sleep downstairs. When my father opened the little doors that had been bolted shut to the side attics, he found a few toys and a couple of broken dolls, but more interesting was an old passageway that lead down into a false chimney of some sort. It was a very odd house , oddly built inside, doors everywhere, some sealed and so on.
One night while sleeping downstairs, I thought that I heard piano music, we had no piano. We never seemed to get a good nights rest. My mother kept seeing what she said was someone playing with a flashlight. We finally moved into town (Waynesville). The kids we met there did not think that what we told them was at all unusual, everyone had a ghostly experience in Waynesville. After living there a couple of years we moved to a much less Ghostly town.
The author also had a different encounter when he was younger in Hillsboro, Ohio that is worth mentioning. Here it is in his own words.
Maybe ghosts or spirits haunt certain people, or maybe certain people attract spirits, but I have had my share of it. This is my first ghostly experience. It happened when I was around nine yrs. old. We were living temporarily in my mothers childhood home, it was really old and very damp and creaky. It had originally been an old Hotel in the late 1800's in Hillsboro, Ohio. The house needed to be torn down, but like I said it was just temporary, my grandmother had moved many years before and no one had lived there for some time. There were a number of rooms we kids could have slept in but we decided to double up. The upstairs bedrooms were so dark and there were mice in the attic, so right from the start I heard noises at night like some one banging on the wall next to me. My father said it was from a tree, but I looked the next day and there was no tree was near the house. Every night I would anticipate a noise of some kind, I took to sleeping with the pillow over my head.
Then one night I heard my name called I sat up and looked around, but my sister was asleep and I could hear my parents snoring in the next room. Several nights later, same thing happened, I heard my name called, and no one was there. I fell back on my pillow closed my eyes. I got that strange feeling like someone was watching me, so I opened my eyes. To my dismay standing right over my face and above me was the meanest looking old woman with gray scraggly hair. Her face had a green cast to it, and she appeared to be very angry at me. I swear she said get out, but this was coming from inside my head. No one but me saw her. I let out a big scream and ran into my parents bedroom. My father was very annoyed and told me that I was dreaming.
The next day my mother said describe this old lady, so I did. After a few moments she said that she used to see this old woman when she was very little, and in the same part of the house. She always thought that it had just been a bad dream, but I knew I was not dreaming!
The author of this tale may be correct in that some people seem to natural magnets to hauntings, ghosts, etc. Another view is that they are what provides energy for such phenomena to manifest physically. Both tales are chilling, but the face of an old haggard woman glaring down at you in bed gets my vote for the one I would rather not have happen to me. Also, how many of you have heard someone wisper your name in the night?
This post, including commentary, originally appeared on James A. Sheets' site.
No comments:
Post a Comment