I Lived in a Haunted House

Ghostly Happenings

Image by liz west at Flickr through Creative Commons licensing.

Things that go bump in the night. Disembodied limbs. Catching someone out of the corner of your eye, but no one is there. These are some of the things my family experienced when we lived in a haunted house.

Did I know it was haunted when we moved in? Not a clue. All I knew was that I thought I had found the perfect house for our family in northern California. In the beginning it was perfect, but then slowly, strange things began to happen.

Now, before I go any further, I want to say that it was nothing like you see in the movies. There were no bloody handprints, no distorted faces, and no flying weapons. However, we did have our share of strange and creepy things happen.

How many spirits haunted the house, I really don’t know. Although there was one main spirit who hung out in the lower level of the house, others tended to come and go.

I understand that sometimes, when someone passes away in their home, their spirit can linger. However, only two other families had lived in the house before we moved in, and from the information I was able to gather, no one had ever died in the house. Before the house was built, it was just open land. So as for who these spirits were, I have no clue.

I was actually told by a psychic that there was a spirit portal on the property next door that backed up to the front area of our house. I hadn’t heard of this before, but upon doing a bit of research, it turned out some paranormal investigators believe these kinds of portals exist as well.

Allegedly, they’re like doors where spirits can easily come and go between our world and theirs. I will say it certainly could explain why spirits seemed to pop in and out.

As far as anything truly scary happening, there were only two main incidents that occurred. One afternoon I had sat down in the kitchen to watch a little TV. My kids were in school, the pets were napping, and I had finished my housework and laundry for the day.

I was pretty tired, and being that I didn’t get much time just to myself, I was looking forward to the break. I had only been relaxing for a few minutes when I heard a voice say, “I’m right behind you.”

I know most people would have totally freaked out at that point and maybe under different circumstances I would have, too, but on this particular day I was really in need of some “me” time and rather than feel scared, I was more angry at the interruption than anything.

I turned around and in a loud voice started telling the ghost to go away, how this is my house, not his, how rude he is and how I will not tolerate his behavior.

My tirade continued for a couple of minutes until all the anger and frustration was out of my system. Know what happened next? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Never again did I hear that voice.

The other time something extra creepy happened was when two of my kids were downstairs, and they looked upstairs only to see a disembodied arm and hand reach to a doorknob and turn it. Upon seeing that, they both fled the house. Outside of these two incidents, everything else was much more subtle.

One of the most common occurrences was seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turned to look, nothing was there. This happened to every member of my family, and although most were of human beings, there were a couple of cats that people saw.

It was pretty common to hear rapping on the bedroom walls downstairs. At first, my kids thought it was each other playing a joke, and they used to get into fights over this. Then, it would happen when no one else was downstairs, and we finally figured out it was a ghost. It didn’t scare them, though. They would simply tell it to be quiet, and the rapping would stop.

The incidents weren’t constant. They were more of an every now and then kind of thing and after awhile, we all just got used to them. It seemed we had all learned to coexist.

Things got a little busier when we were packing to sell the house. The downstairs ghost kept locking my daughter out of her room. Apparently, he didn’t want to see her go.

I could try to chalk this up to active imaginations, mass hysteria, or some kind of strange environmental issues, but we weren’t the only people who experienced strange phenomena at the house. Things would also happen when we had guests over.

In addition, one afternoon, not too long before we moved out of the house a few years ago, a couple of people dropped by the house who used to know the previous owners. They talked about how all sorts of weird and creepy things happened in the house. OK. Validation! We weren’t all crazy!

We have since moved into a different house, and all is quiet here. No more strange sights and sounds, which is fine with me. I will always wonder who the different spirits were who haunted the last house we lived in and if they’re still there.

Have you ever lived in a haunted house? Would you want to? Do you even believe in ghosts? (Don’t worry if you don’t. One of my kids still doesn’t believe in them even though he experienced quite a few weird things in the house.) Please share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.