It all started with an eerie, cold feeling that instantaneously came over me the moment that first stepped foot in that house.
It was a very old house, probably the oldest on the street, in a very old town. The house itself would have been quite a gem of it's time. With timber panelling and fancy hand plastered cornice. The beauty it would have held in it's prime had diminished some, but a keen eye could see how some TLC, could return it to it's former glory.
I played down the fear I felt as anxiety that had triggered from moving into my very first own home, so far away from the life I had always known. I was a little scared, but also overwhelmingly excited and proud. At just 20, I was still learning the ways of the world and I was working my arse off, to live week to week. That's what I put the stress down to, but mostly I only remember not wanting to be left alone in that house. I especially didn't like to be alone in certain rooms. It wasn't because I was afraid of someone breaking in, more like I felt that someone or something was already inside.
From the very first day, I couldn't bring myself to be alone in the front room. I was in there unpacking boxes, when I got chills down my spine and an overwhelming urge to leave. I felt like I shouldn't be in that room, kind of like when you're a kid staying at a friend's house and they want you to follow them into their parents room, but that's a room that you're just not supposed to enter.
This room was one of the original rooms of the house. The heritage features were breathtaking and included a bay window with a seat, original fireplace and cloak cupboards. I remember it always being so cold in there. It wasn't located in a particularly cool place of the world. During summer, it's dry and scorthing hot, yet during the winter it's the polar opposite. I always found that odd. It wasn't even a natural kind of cool feeling, more like one that sends ice-cold shivers through your body.
It didn't take too long for my dog 'Red' to start acting strange either. Especially when we were home alone together. Pacing outside of empty rooms and sitting alert and awake on the end of my bed while I slept became a new normal. She is a loyal cattle dog, that never left my side from the day I rescued her. I imagined it to be because this was the first time that she had lived in town, since we had been out of town before that, I thought that the new noises might have had her on edge, but she wasn't this way when we had trips back to my hometown to see family.
On one night in particular. Red was posed in a sternal position at the end of my bed, ears erect, staring intently at the set of double sliding doors in front of her. It was a tiny odd room, just off my bedroom that also had an adjoining door to go out to the back verandah. Oddly enough when I first moved in, it locked from the outside, but my Dad had added a lock for me to keep it locked from the inside too. There were a few doors in this house that locked from the outside, which was very strange. This tiny room, held my chest of drawers and my dressing table. It wasn't big enough to hold my free standing wardrobe, so that was stored in another odd pentagon shaped room off the other side of my bedroom, that had a double set of wooden doors with glass panels, I suppose it had once been a lovely sunroom.
Red's intense staring, became head tilts, as her ears listened harder and harder. Then she let out a low growl, before she jumped off my bed and went straight at the glass sliding doors. She wanted to get inside my makeshift wardrobe. I stood up, but felt frozen with fear. What was in there, I thought. I forced my feet to move me there and opened the door for Red to check it out. Red ran in with no hesitation and looked up at me with a confused face that reminded me of the "where's the ball face" when I pretend to throw one, and hide it behind my back. I reached for the string that pulls on the light in this strange room and I looked around to inspect it myself. It was empty, apart from my draws and dressing table, nothing out of place and a peek out the window, indicated nothing but an empty backyard. I checked the lock on the back-door while I was there and tugged the string to turn off the light. I slid the doors shut, Red jumped back on my bed, so I got in too. But then she was up again, watching those doors, tilting her head, listening. I hid under my blankets until the sun came up. And Red protected me all night.
Another night, while I was sleeping, I felt someone hop in and lay down in my bed beside me. I was still half asleep, when I remembered I was home alone. I was completely paralysed with fear but I could feel their weight on the bed beside me. I squeezed my eyes tighter together and didn't move a muscle.
There were nights when things in the house were being thrown around and those cloak cupboards in the front room being slammed open and shut over and over. Items being moved around in the house and even disappearing all together.
When I'd leave for work in the mornings, I'd be sure the doors to every room were shut and in the Winter, I left as many lights on as possible, so I wouldn't have to come home later in the complete darkness of that house. Yet each day, I'd come home to a completly black house and most of the doors inside spontaneously open again.
Day after day, night after night I was going without sleep. And the more frightened I was, the worse it would get. It was feeding off me. It loved negative energy.
I came home one afternoon to find Red missing. I searched everywhere, calling out her name. I drove all around town, yelling out to her. Only when it got dark, I came home to get a torch from my shed, I unlocked the door and Red came running out, terrified with her tail between her legs. How does a dog, lock herself in a already locked shed?
After my family started to think I was losing my mind, being in a new house on my own, my Mum decided to come and stay for a little while to try and help me settle in.
Though she didn't tell me at the time, Mum soon realised, I wasn't crazy at all.
Some very odd and unexplainable things happened to her, even when she wasn't alone in the house and even during the day, while I was at work.
On one night in particular, I was sitting up with Mum late at night, after I hadn't slept in days.
Mum said to me "you should go to bed, get some sleep". I told her that I couldn't sleep. As soon as I go to sleep, it will disturb me. I would stay up until my eyes couldn't stay open anymore with hopes to sleep until my alarm would sound.
So Mum thought she'd be comical, to make me feel better, she stood up and said "Court, there's no ghost here, look" and with that she started to shout to the air "C'MON, big scary ghost, where are ya, c'mon." It was met with silence. "See, Court. Go get some sleep". I went off and had the most peaceful sleep I'd had in a long while.
Meanwhile, my Mum lay freezing in the other room, after the bedspread had been ripped from her bed that she was sleeping in. After I moved away, she finally told me some of the things she had experienced in my house, but none as scary as that night. She saw the bedspread slowly slide down the wall. Then with only the sheet over her eyes, she didn't dare move before morning. Mind you, it was the middle of winter.
Mum wasn't the only one who was taunted, while staying over, my Aunty and my Pop's girlfriend both at different times, had strange things happen to them. Ofcourse no one wanted to tell me, before I moved out, too afraid of scaring me more. So I lived in a sleepless world, thinking that I had lost my mind. I thought no one else could see or feel the horror I was experiencing.
Finally the time came that I had the option to move away. I was so scared that whatever entity had been toying with me so much, would pack itself and come too, but thankfully it never did.
I don't think you could even pay me, to spend another night in that house now. I'm a person that has seen ghosts before, but I have never felt what I felt there, anywhere else. I honestly think that this was something more entirely.
It's pretty clear that I was more than unwelcome to stay.
I want to know, are you a believer? Have you had any paranormal or unexplainable occurrences? Seen people who aren't alive? Lived with a ghost? I'd love to hear about it; comment below.
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