Oooh I have a story! Pick me, pick me
When I was 12, my family (mother, father, 9-year-old sister) moved into a new house. It was awesome and had everything we wanted: three floors (including one underground, more on that later), three bathrooms, a fireplace, a massive garden, and I even had my own bedroom. This was the early 2000s and the house was built in the 60s, so it was only about 40 years old and as far as I know nothing bad had happened there. It was beautiful and not creepy at all. Not the best candidate for a haunting, right?
My mother used to teach English classes in our living room, so we often had kids coming to our house after school. They weren't allowed to come upstairs, where the bedrooms were. One day I was sitting in my bedroom with the door open, when I saw a little boy run past. Of course I assumed he was one of my mother's students, so I called after him. He didn't answer so I walked out into the corridor, just in time to see him run into the bathroom. I ran in after him. The bathroom was empty.
I tried to tell my parents but, as you can guess, they didn't believe me. I was a 12-year-old kid with a massive imagination - either my mind was playing tricks on me, or I'd made it up for the attention. I was fairly sure of what I'd seen, but then maybe it was just my imagination. It didn't happen again.
What we all noticed, however, was an intense impression of being watched. At first it wasn't very bad, just a gut feeling that made you glance over your shoulder and feel uneasy that nobody was there. I gradually started to feel uncomfortable whenever I was home alone after dark. In our old house, I sometimes used to get up in the middle of the night to sit in the living room and enjoy the silence; here, even the thought of doing that scared me. Oh, and the lights would flicker for no reason, which was not awesome at all.
The worst was the basement. It had four rooms: a laundry, a wine cellar, a bomb shelter (totally normal for European houses built in the 60s) and an enormous playroom where we kept most of our books, toys and art supplies (paintbrushes, old cardboard, thread and beads, and so on). During the day, my sister and I loved to go down there and read, or play noisy games we couldn't do upstairs. But as soon as it started to get dark, we would leave. There was nothing creepy about the room in itself - the bomb shelter and the wine cellar were way creepier - but whenever I went there after dark, my heart would start beating really fast and I couldn't get out of there too soon. You know when you're terrified out of your mind but you have no idea why? That's what it felt like.
When I was 14, like a lot of teenagers, I became interested in ghosts and the paranormal. I remembered the little boy I'd seen two years ago and decided to investigate. With a couple of friends, we made our own Ouija Board (side note: don't use them, those things are creepy as hell). We got a "spirit" right away, who told us his name was Guillaume and he was nine years old. Bear in mind I hadn't told my friends about the little boy I'd seen.
"Are you the only ghost here?" We asked. The answer was no, so we asked how many others there were.
And Guillaume, super nonchalant as hell, was like:
"Oh, about twenty. Mainly in the basement."
Of course we totally freaked out and didn't touch the Ouija Board ever again.
Now comes the creepiest bit (as if we weren't creeped out already). I started feeling like I was being watched all the time, not only at night but during the day as well. My sister had the same feeling. I asked my mother and though she said she did as well, she pretty much dismissed it. She's always been a skeptic and hairs standing up on her neck whenever she turned around wasn't going to change that. As for my father, by this time he was getting pretty withdrawn and I didn't talk to him much. His relationship with my mother was deteriorating (they divorced when I was 15) and ghosts weren't his top priority just then.
But back to the creepies. I normally sleep very well, but around this time I started to have nightmares. They were all about this girl, about 10 years old, with long dark hair and a dirty white dress (picture the girl from The Ring - which, by the way, I hadn't seen at the time). Here are a few of the dreams to give you an idea:
Dream #1: I get up in the middle of the night to pee. As soon as I step out of my room, I notice The Girl standing in front of my sister's room, at the other end of the corridor. She's just standing there and staring at me. I back against the wall. She takes a step forward, and her eyes start to glow. "It's time for you to come with me", she says. Then her eyes become so bright that everything turns white, and I wake up.
Dream #2: I'm walking through the children's plot in the cemetery. I feel so sad for all the children who are buried here, and I'm putting flowers on their little graves. Then, next to me, The Girl appears. She stretches out her hands and grabs my wrist. "Please come with me", she says. "You need to go where you belong." I try to wrestle away but her grip is too strong. She pulls me towards the corner of the graveyard, which for some reason is the most terrifying corner I've ever seen. I can't resist her. Then, just before we reach the corner, I wake up.
Dream #3: I just got home from school, and the house is eerily empty and dark. I call out to my parents. Thinking I hear a sound upstairs, I walk up the staircase, but it's even darker on the first floor and nobody is there. My parents' bedroom door is closed. I reach out to open it, but just then, somebody grabs me around the neck and starts to strangle me. I fall onto my back, and then I see that the person trying to choke me is The Girl. "Now you're coming with me", she says. Then I wake up.
Every night when I went to bed, it felt like someone was standing in the shadows of my room and watching me sleep. I couldn't sleep with my back to the room, I had to have it against the wall. One time, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like something warm was sitting on my feet. I could move the rest of my body, but nothing below the ankle. It was weird and after a while, the weight shifted and I was able to move again. Several other times, my iPod woke me up by randomly playing music at maximum volume. In the end I disconnected it from the speakers, and it stopped.
One day, my sister came into my room and asked if I was also creeped out by our house. I was like, "OMG TOTALLY". I told her about all the weird things I'd experienced and how I didn't even dare to go into the playroom in the basement anymore. My sister agreed and then said: "Hey, have you seen Samantha?"
I was like… um… who's Samantha?
"Oh, she's this ghost girl who hangs around the house", she said. "She's kind of a demon, I guess. She's got long black hair and she wears a white dress that's dirty at the bottom. She keeps telling me to come with her."
Cue me freaking out.
We ended up moving out of that house just after my 17th birthday, five years after we'd moved in. The first thing I noticed about our next house was that it didn't have an oppressive atmosphere, and that I didn't feel like I was being watched. It was a relief, in a strange way, to be able to come home late and not be terrified of what the shadows might hide. My mother still lives there now. She never mentions the weird things that happened in our old house.
Recently, however, I was visiting my father and the subject of that house came up. Right away, my father declared that it was haunted. He said that he'd felt uncomfortable ever since we moved in. Then, after a pause, he added:
"Hey, you know how it was a relatively new house and nothing bad had happened in it?"
"Yeah?" I said.
"It was built on the site of a battlefield. And the land next door turned out to be a prehistoric burial site."
So, that's my experience with a haunted house! Maybe there's a simple, plausible explanation to it - but in any case, it makes for a good story