As promised, here is my ghost story.
The lights have always flickered in our house. We never thought much of it. It’s an old building constructed in the 50s. Faulty wiring, old cables, anything could explain the flickering. But things took an unnerving turn about a year after we moved in. The flickering continued, but then other strange occurrences began to happen.
The most significant one that happened to me was when I used to be a stay-at-home mom. My then four-year-old daughter had just started kindergarten, and that morning, her daddy went to drop her off on his way to work. At around 10:00 a.m., I was in the kitchen drinking my coffee. I was sitting at the table, and when I got up to head to the kitchen counter, I felt what I thought was my daughter’s tiny arms wrap around my legs. The feeling was so real that I forgot she was at school for a moment, and I looked down, hand extended, ready to caress her head, but no one was there. The reality that I was alone hit me like a ton of bricks, but I didn’t get spooked. I wrote it off as a young mom nervous to have her baby girl alone at school for the first time.
Not long after that, my husband and I started to hear familiar voices calling out our names when it was never the case. I hear my husband and my children calling me. My husband hears me calling him. Up to this day, this still happens, and I cannot tell you the amount of times we have all walked up to a family member asking them if they called us. After a while, it’s disconcerting, to say the least, because the voices are crystal clear and loud.
After my parents moved upstairs (we own a duplex), my father always said he heard a baby crying at night long after my kids were out of the baby stage. And we are friends with our neighbors, and none of them have babies. They have kids, but they are in the double digits now. My husband and I have heard the cries as well. As a mother, I didn’t think this to be unusual. I always thought I heard my children crying at night. Then I went to see them, and they were sound asleep. I never thought much about it. I always thought it was from the lack of sleep.
But recently, my eldest daughter and I heard my youngest crying. He’s a toddler. The sound was so distinct, clear, and piercing as if he had hurt himself, that both my daughter and I rushed to his room to find him in a profound sleep. This incident spooked my daughter as it was the first time she heard the cries at night. That evening, I sprinkled holy water in every room of my house.
What’s interesting about these occurrences is that they also spread to my parent’s apartment upstairs. There is a rocking chair in my parents’ room that rocks by itself. This summer, my father even claims to have heard a child’s mechanical lullaby playing while the chair was rocking.
The other day, I was in the kitchen with my youngest when I heard my mother’s voice coming from our backdoor. But my son heard it too, and we both turned our heads to be greeted by the dark emptiness of our back window. My son even called out for his grandma, but there was no one there.
But out of all of these strange events, the most disturbing that both my husband and I have witnessed together is the sound of someone walking in our bedroom when there was nobody there. What’s unnerving is that our toddler has slept in our room since birth, and to think someone is walking around in our room while he is sleeping is creepy. What’s more peculiar is that it only happens when we are in our basement. The footsteps have sometimes been so noisy they have sent us flying to our bedroom to ensure no one was there. And sure enough, nobody was.
The house was blessed by a priest the year we bought it. I’ve also sprinkled holy water many times. Whatever is causing these disturbances isn’t bothered by the presence of a plethora of crosses and religious items in the house.
My teenage daughter and I have both speculated on who can be causing these disturbances, and we have both agreed that it might be a child. I’ve never felt real fear in my house, spooked perhaps, but nothing that even comes close to a scene from The Conjuring.
Now, there may be a reasonable explanation for all of these strange happenings, but in the meantime, the holy water and oil are at the ready.
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