A Personal Experience By Kaitlin

I can still remember that old house. The stupid wooden paneling in the living room and hallways that I always hated, the ugly cream colored carpet that was later replaced with blue, the pink flowers on the wall tiles in the bathroom. It was built in the 50's, and everything in it was original, when we moved into it in 1999.

1999 was a bad year; my uncle died, followed by my cousin. I started having seizures which went away three years later. And moving in that house was by far the worst thing that happened that fateful year.
I'm going to start of by telling you that I'm perfectly normal. No mental illness or anything. Everything I'm about to tell you really happened. I'm not the only one who experienced them, and I certainly wasn't just seeing things.

The first unusual thing that happened was that after we moved in, we decided to take the carpet up. Mom wanted wooden flooring. We started in the hallway. When my dad ripped it up, there was a strange black stain. What was stranger, it was human shaped. The landlord told us that an old woman died there. Since that day, dad always joked about "the granny in the walls", whenever we heard something strange or something happened. None of us ever really believed in the paranormal. We just joked around. Then one night, I started having strange dreams about the house. In all of them, the place was haunted, and there were demons. For some reason, the bathroom was a point of interest in all of these dreams along with my bedroom. In one, there was something demonic in the bedroom that scared me to death. In another, there was something in the shower. Something...dead.

Then, I noticed something strange about the bathroom: it was like the walls tried to close in on you. Literally. I never figured that one out.

One morning, around 5 a.m. when my dad got up and went to work, he accidentally woke me. I couldn't go back to sleep, so I just rolled over. I had a clear view of the hallway, and the bathroom from where I was laying. There was a small closet by the bathroom where we kept our towels. As I was lying there, I saw a lady walk out of either the bathroom or the closet, along with a child. I vaguely remember hearing a woman's voice, but at the time I just took it as my mom’s. The lady said "Is that you?" It was honestly the most horrific thing I've ever experienced!

After my Great Grandma died, we went to a yard sale. By a bizarre coincidence, we found a music box that my aunt had made for her, which my Great Grandma sold to someone who sold it to someone who gave it to someone who sold it at the yard sale. It had been broken and glued, and there was a large, crooked gap. My mom had it beside her bed in a box, and, sometimes, it would just start playing. For no reason. Then a few months later, we noticed that the large crack was completely gone. We have no idea why.

Nothing happened for a while. Just the occasional unexplained noise. Then, even our emotions began to change. My dad went insane (for lack of a better word), my mom was always depressed, and I was always scared. One night, lightening struck. It caught the dryer on fire, and fried pretty much everything that happened to be plugged in at the time. That place had been struck by lightening seven times while we lived there!

Then, my parents finally divorced; I saw my dad every other weekend. When I spent the night there, I never slept. The place had such a bad vibe, it made me an insomniac. On one of those many sleepless nights, I suddenly heard glass breaking in the spare room. Dad was asleep, so he wouldn't have heard anything. I checked in there the next day, and nothing was broken anywhere.

Were these experiences paranormal? Perhaps they were just a figment of the imagination of a family in turmoil.