Apparitional Experiences Part 3

The top landing of the hallway has a window, and across from it is a door that leads to the attic. On each side of them, there is one door, each leading into a bedroom. The boring, front bedroom is to the right, and what appears to be the master bedroom to the left. The master has a full bathroom, but no shower head. It also has a larger closet, with another closet inside of it. Yeah, we never understood that either. I may have written this before, but when my parents first moved in there, that was where they had their bedroom. My father often worked second or third shift, so my mother had no problem with having her kids in the bed with her until they were grown. The room has reports of dark shadows, something walking across the floor, something bumping into the bed, and the door to the closet opening by itself. Sometimes you could hear the door handles slowly turn in the adjacent room, when you had the door locked on the other side. Currently, the drywall caved in due to rain damage from a leaking roof, so while the roof has been repaired, no one uses that room since it hasn't been fully repaired. That's sad, really, because it's the same size as the living room, and only limited by the additional bathroom and closet.
When we asked the previous resident, one of Gertrude's younger sisters, about deaths in the house, the response was a brief silence, followed by a confirmation and question as to why. Feeling like an ass, my mother moved along and just said she was curious. They then told us how the downstairs bathroom used to be a walk in closet, but that after their sister died, the kids didn't like going into the master bedroom, so they added the bathroom downstairs. As the family grew, they added on a kitchen/dining room and another room to the basement, but the master bedroom went largely unchanged. Aside from the little girl footprint, we never saw anything resembling a little girl. Then one night my nephew, maybe 3 or 4 at the time, was supposed to be asleep but came into my sister's bedroom and told her that there was a girl lying on the floor in a white dress. He thought it was his sister, who was around 9 at the time, but then she turned and looked at him and he realized it wasn't her. I know, children aren't the most reliable witnesses, but it was a rather odd coincidence. Add that to the body of reports that sound like someone sneaking through the house, and it starts to make you question. I looked into the event as best I could.
I gathered that Gertrude was born in 1908, and I believe she died nine years later of scarlet fever, in the house. She may have been the oldest daughter, but I'm not absolutely certain. I can't remember off hand how many siblings there were total. With most of the activity stemming from the master bedroom, it makes me wonder if that was the room she died in, separated from her other siblings.

Apparitional Experiences Part 2

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today,

I wish, I wish he'd go away...

- Hughes Mearns (The Guy With 2 Last Names)

Just a simple set of dark wooden stairs against white risers, they go up to a landing, turn, and go up another shorter set of stairs to the second floor. That’s the first thing you see when you enter the front door. Most people don’t pay attention to the adjacent bathroom not-so-hidden beneath the second set sitting to the right. There’s no window on the landing, so you either get the light from the fixture above, or from the window on the next floor, or none at all towards evening. Regardless, everyone looks up them as soon as they enter. “Sensitives” often inquire about what happened there, and my usual response is, “You tell me.” I don’t know if anything ever actually happened on that landing and probably never will. It appears they may have once been a window there, but it is nefariously sealed up and painted over! Just kidding. The house next door was built up against mine, so I assume that’s why. I’m not going to talk about how we found a footprint in the drywall dust on the upstairs landing, the hallway light being turned off by itself, or about the time something came across and tried to force itself into my sister’s bedroom, since I’ve already covered them. But we have animals getting bent out of shape, pennies being dropped, and full-sized apparitions walking up and down them.

I don’t think it really started or stopped at any given time. I think it had always happened but we just never paid much attention to it. It usually happened at night. You would hear a penny hit the linoleum, as if it had been dropped. Only no one was in the hallway. You would hear that on a regular basis. We always assumed it was the cat, but then she died. It continued, when all of our other animals were accounted for. When I moved back into the house, we swept the stairs and found a few dozen pennies on them. A few nights later we found a few more. I had been living off of credit cards and hadn’t been using money in any physical form, yet they continued to appear. Sure, maybe it is mice with copper fetishes, unaware that pennies don’t contain much copper at all. Stupid mice. The dates on the pennies don’t seem to have any significance.

When I was younger I saw a bearded man dressed in flannel walk out of the bathroom and up the stairs. He was not accompanied by any sounds and it happened so fast while I was in the living room watching TV, so I assumed I hallucinated. A few months later my mother reported seeing the same man in the kitchen, so I related my story. On more than one occasion, we have all heard someone heavy going up the stairs, all the way to the third floor. The first step to the attic lets out  aloud squeak when you step on it, so we know they made it that far. My mother mistakenly thought it was me, before realizing I walk light. I heard this myself twice, accompanied by an odd jangling noise, which I assumed was my uncle’s biker jacket, but I was of course wrong. It may have been the ghost of Hipster’s past, since we did have a lot of records up there.

But the thing that has always bothered me the most was the feeling that someone is right behind you when you walk down them. I remember as a kid, running as fast as I could downstairs. It may have just been the fear of the unknown at the time, based upon odd experienced I had earlier, but as late as my teen years, I remember being bothered by it. When my nephew lived in the house for a couple of years, he did the same thing, running to get to the bottom because he felt like someone was behind him. We had a poorly engineered two-way lighting circuit, one that you had to turn on wherever you turned it off. When you went to bed late at night, you climbed the stairs to your bedroom, turned the light off, went to bed. In the morning, since there was so much daylight, you forgot the light was off, so didn’t turn it back on. Later that night, you had the unfortunate task of walking up the stairs in darkness. The attic was set up the same way, but it wasn’t creepy. When I moved back in, I noticed I still had that same apprehension when going up them, but coming down, I decided I was too damn old to be worried about some monster getting me and just walked at a regular pace, but on occasion those hairs still stand up on the back of your neck. Of note, it was brought to my attention that improperly installed two-way circuits can give off high EMF readings, which in theory can give you strange feelings. While the EMF reading off the circuit is indeed almost double or triple the normal, the circuit has been turned off for the past month, due to an electrical short, and people still continue to look up the stairs, have weird feelings like someone is behind you, and get attacked by a ghostly lumberjack.

Next we explore Gertrude’s room. 

Apparitional Experiences Part 1

"I'm a scientist; I don't believe in anything." - Michael Persinger

My name is Insanislupus and I have experienced strange things. Why not go over them in more detail?

We had a massive house growing up; it’s the one I’m living in now. Sure, it’s not as massive now that I’m an adult, but large rooms and 12 foot ceilings were something to be envious of when you’re from a working class background. I had good parents, Dad’s drinking aside, and I was close to my older sister, who was only a year and a half older than me. Once she started kindergarten, I was without her for half the day, or about 4 hours. Since we played by ourselves in our upstairs front bedroom, that meant I had to do that by myself now. I remember braving it, going up those long, turning stairs all by myself. We had large windows, so they let plenty of light in. Back then, you didn’t have the awesome assortment of toys the kids did on TV commercials. You had a GI Joe and a Transformer and plenty of knockoff toys you got at the grocery store, or the flea market, but they all played well together. One of my favorite things was laying them out in a semi-circle in front of me. They didn’t have much order in them, just randomly laid across the carpet. I had these two planes, small, made of plastic, about the size of a quarter, years before Micro-Machines came out. I remember picking them out when my grandmother took me shopping with her, but I can’t tell you much more about them aside from one being red and one being blue. They were cool, because they were so small. That made them hard to capture in my mind. In a scenario where they were taking on a GI Joe for whatever reason, he was able to take out the blue one. The red one, however, was better, faster, and I’m sure I made cool noises to go with its imaginary attack on him. But GI Joes were good guys and they always one. The red plane was shot out of the air, where it dropped and landed at the soldier’s feet. When that battle was over, I set them to the side in the start of what normally became a large pile. Then it was on to the next battle for the day.

This is probably the first time I suspected my house was haunted, but at that age (3 and a half, almost 4) you don’t have much besides Casper to base your hauntings on. Playing with new toys from the collection, I remember something non-threateningly landing on my head and then bouncing off and landing in front of me. It was the red plane, the same one that was supposed to be in the pile to my side. I remember not taking much time to process what happened. Instead, I stood up and took off running down the stairs. I’m thankful for having any memories from such a long time ago and at such a young age, but I don’t remember anything after that. I couldn’t tell you what I did once I hit the bottom of those stairs. Had I said something to my parents, they would have shot it down like they did until I was a teenager.

Hear about the haunted hallway in the next episode. 

The Owl Hoots Thrice

I'm not one of those dicks to bash superstitions, customs, or anything people want to believe. I find it more interesting to figure out where such beliefs come from. You don't believe in something someone else does? Well, good for you, here's your medal, and a gift certificate to your favorite restaurant, because it's the internet and your opinion counts for something. 
The one I hear in my family rather often is the owl hooting and bringing news of death. It's always news of death, not news that someone is being born, or that the house is on fire, or anything of that nature. Owls don't normally sit outside your house and hoot. If they do, you probably live next to a barn, or practice taxidermy and have stuffed their mate. But when you hear an owl hoot in the middle of the night, it can be rather alarming, because it's loud and very uncommon. 
My mom heard the owl hoot three nights in a row when certain members of her family died. Not sure if it was four nights, but she stopped counting after three, or three and then it stopped. I'm certain the person didn't immediately die, but usually sometime that week. There was that one time when the owl only hooted twice, and then no one died, so he may have had the wrong house, or someone killed him and he couldn't finish his death omen, so they got to live longer. 
Of course, I'm joking, but I don't know for certain where this myth comes from. I can find all kinds of info on an owl hooting and what it means, but not hooting over the course of three days. My mom learned it from her aunt and grandmother, both of which were German, but that's where my search ended. If you have any information, please call my 800 number. 

"I'll tell you one more time, and then I'm leaving."

Dreams Don't Mean Anything

Or so my neuroscience professor told me about five years ago. I hope he's correct, because I had a rather strange and haunting dream last night.

My wife (I'm not married) got off the phone hysterical and told me that my father had killed my mother (they're no longer married.) That was alarming, since my father would never do that, but in the back of my dreaming mind, I knew his mental state was heavily deteriorating (it has been slowly deteriorating for years, but he's not currently bad off.) When I saw my sister, she was also hysterical and all she could tell me was that our dad had killed our mom. Somehow we shifted from her house to the house we grew up in (the one I am currently living in). I lost my sister briefly, but then headed into our parent's old bedroom to ask her exactly what had happened. She told me, speaking in my head as I moved forward, that my dad had shot my mom and that he was laying in bed with her body asking, "Isn't your mother beautiful sleeping like that?" As I finally entered my parent's old bedroom, my sister was laying in bed with my mom, whose eyes were wide open, and it was obvious she was dead because of the empty stare and blood all over the sheets. Luckily, by this time I had figured out I was dreaming, but it was still rather strange.

I don't normally have dreams like this.

Another Look At SP and The McCain House

I’ve covered sleep paralysis recently as nothing more than a sleep condition that more or less scares the shit out of everyone who ever has it and how it’s exploited by paranormal shows and “investigators” who do nothing to help the sufferers but instead pretend it is some sort of otherworldly attack. Let’s entertain that “theory” for a minute.

Sleep Paralysis is possibly, as is everything, something to do with evolution. Perhaps it’s nature testing something out, trying to eliminate part of the sleep process, or kill us off in droves with shortened lifespans due to bad sleep hygiene. We are also pretty certain it’s genetic, as are most sleep disorders and disturbances, and possibly even hereditary (there’s a difference.) But outside of the physical symptoms, and even excluding the fact that most people hallucinate with it, the question needs to be asked, why are the hallucinations so similar, some identical, across people? Is the shadow or even darkness so pervasive in our subconscious as something unknown or maybe even evil that we would all share the same exact hallucination across beliefs, cultures, continents, etc.?

That’s a serious question. I have no answer. It could be anything, such as global consciousness, or inherited memories. But since I don’t know the answers, I’d like to go ahead and tell a ghost story I heard as a teen. We all know that some people have wild imaginations. Nothing wrong with that, and to be honest, their accounts of the paranormal tend to be more interesting and entertaining than what really happened, so I’ll retell the tale as I remember it being told.

The McCain house, as it was called when I was younger, was obviously inhabited by the McCain family. They were working class people, and since I didn’t change their last name, I guess I’ll be somewhat vague and not describe them individually aside from saying one of their children, Troy, was around the same age as us and that we hung out regularly. In traditional fashion, their house sat adjacent to a cemetery. Personally, I’ve always wanted to live next to one, or even in one, not because it’s cool, or out of morbid curiosity, but because it would be exceptionally quiet, especially in the city. And there house was.

They were cool parents, the kinds that let kids make their own decisions, so long as it didn’t hurt anybody, had no problem with us hanging out there on occasion, and even cooked us dinner a handful of times. Despite that, and what, by all appearances, seemed to be a healthy familial relationship among them, there was a certain gloom that hung around the house. We all have intuition and gut feelings. No one can really explain them, but some have them when around perceived haunted locations. It seemed like lot of people had them around this house. One of them was Amanda.

She didn’t believe in any of that, but she did. We were all hanging out in the living room after school one day, watching taped episodes of Headbanger’s Ball. Outside of a handful of us, only one of the McCains, our friend, was home. Within a few hours, we heard what sounded like someone walking heavily up the stairs. They were carpeted, but that didn’t stop what sounded like boots walking on wood. Everyone described them as the sound of hooves, attaching a demonic, or Satanic, image to them. Their dogs went nuts, barking at the stairs, looking at us, as if we didn’t hear it, too, but too afraid to go up the stairs. Amanda sank into the couch.

As usual, we thought Troy was messing with us, but when he looked at us, acknowledging that we did indeed hear something, he tried to change the subject by turning up the TV and talking about the video that was on. A few hours later, I walked Amanda home, just a few blocks down the street, to her grandmother’s house, where she lived. I asked her along the way if I was the only one that heard something going up the stairs. She said no, and that she hated hanging out there because they would hear that, and other strange rapping on  the walls, more or less typical “poltergeist” activity. That was the only thing I ever experienced there. But Amanda later told me a rather strange story involving the dogs.

The McCain family finally moved but couldn’t take their dogs with them at first because they had to get their yard fenced in, which required building permits and other crap they were waiting on, but expected to have completed by the end of the month. In the meantime, their dogs were left unattended during the day, watched occasionally by neighbors. In the morning, they would go and let them out, feed and water them, and then Troy would come down after school to check on them, and play with them, and have an entire house to himself, before putting them up for the night. When the new yard was completed, and it was safe enough to bring the dogs to their new home, and the McCains went to get them at the old house, the dogs were gone.

When I asked what she meant, she told me that the parents had put the dogs up the night before the fence was going up, and then the following day they returned to bring the dogs with them, but they were gone. There were no signs of a break in, but supposedly the police were called to investigate. Now while a more plausible story is that the dogs were rescued by someone else, or that even the parents gave the dogs to someone else, but with no signs of a break in, and the fact that the parents put up a fence in order to bring the dogs to the new home, it makes it a rather mysterious disappearance.

Why Do I Still See Orbs?

Orbs in photographs and videos are still making the rounds on websites and TV shows. Unless they're performing tricks like spelling things out in the air, I think it's safe to accept that they have been dismissed as nothing more than dust, insects, rain, etc. Just because an orb is apparently following someone or moving past them at lightning speed, doesn't give them any more credibility. Sure, you captured something, and sure, unseen forces are possibly controlling them, but it's more than likely something like gravity, or static. In short, stop with the orbs. While I'm at it, stop with all camera artifacts that are not clear and visible. 

I would like to take this time to attack people who claim orbs are a form of pareidolia. That's when you find some type of special significance in something that's not there, due to the brain trying to recognize patterns. On their own, no, they're not. It's not until people find something significant in them that they can be classified as such. Just saying orbs are paranormal is not enough. If you don't see Jesus in them, it doesn't count. I wait for the day when we realize ghosts are holograms created by aliens to confuse us, but we have nothing in favor or against that hypothesis yet, unlike orbs, which has everything against. 

The Tall Man's orbs are significant.

It Could Just Be An Animal

I don't know how many television shows I've seen that have captured the banshee's wail. It's a horrifying scream heard in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and no immediate location, and worst of all it means you're going to die soon. But in reality it's the red fox, which not only makes a blood curdling cry, but a horrific face to match. I was in my late twenties the first time I heard one, so I don't fault someone for not realizing that a nocturnal mammal in the woods makes the sound of wailing death, especially since most people will never hear it in their lives. Raccoons also make weird noises. Most of them I can't really describe in words, but they also growl, and some even sound like those dwarves off of those Phantasm movies and can scare the crap out of you when they come out of nowhere. When you're in the wilderness, you're in their territory, and most animals will freeze in their tracks as you walk right past them, oblivious they are even there, and especially at night. That's why you never see them, including full-grown deer, or bigfoot, when you're walking a trail after the witching hour. It's unforgivable when people take these sounds to wilderness "experts" who have never heard of it, well, unless it's Sasquatch howls, or some other noise no one knows for sure that they are. 

Some of these noises can invade the home as well. I'm not suggesting that everything you hear in your home is a Mothman, but mice will mimic a lot of things people report. Things being knocked over in the middle of the night, things vanishing, etc. Mice can be very noisy in their hunt for food. If it is light enough, they'll run off with things like candy bars, and often make a lot of noise doing it. Their communication can sound like whispers, because your ears barely hear it and then the brain tries to find some pattern in it, until it convinces you someone was whispering your name. They can be lightning quick, too, so if you see something out of the corner of your eye, chances are, they're the cause. And unless you trained them to not get on furniture, they can climb, too. Luckily, they tend to shit a lot, especially on the floor against the wall which makes them easy to detect. Domestic cats aren't the best at rodent eradication these days, so don't use their presence as your evidence you don't have mice. Of course, it could be other animals in your house as well, so don't forget to rule them out before you assume you have some type of haunting. 

  The fox says you're going to die.

Sleep Demons

You wake up from sleeping and you can't breath. Something is holding you down and you cannot move. There is a great weight on your chest. You hear things, maybe footsteps, or scratching, or buzzing, and maybe you see things, like dark shadows, or figures with menacing, glowing eyes, or aliens. You're scared and you're going to die. 

And then a about a minute later you're fine. It was a dream; or maybe it wasn't a dream? You don't know. You also might not know about a medical condition called sleep paralysis. It often accompanies other sleep disorders, such as narcolepsy, apnea, etc. If you've had an episode anything like any of the events in the top paragraph here, you should consult your physician, who will then refer you to a sleep specialist, who will then probably automatically try and get you diagnosed with sleep apnea, even if you don't have it. That aside, it's bullshit for these paranormal groups and TV shows to try and pass this off as paranormal. I don't know how many times I see people retelling their accounts of nocturnal visitors and attacks, without a single person letting them know it's just sleep paralysis and they may or may not have another health issue causing it. Ratings are more important, I guess.

Go back to sleep.

Ghostly Happenings of the Believed

These three events are true, with only the names of the not-so-innocent changed. I've repeatedly said that the most convincing evidence for "ghosts" (at least to yourself) is when someone else is involved and experiences the same thing. Since returning to the house on Pike, I've had three incidents each involving a different person. They will briefly be outline below, and their authenticity is marked by them not being over-dramatized; they're not really that entertaining. 

The first one involved the remote keypad for my automobile. While watching a film in the front room downstairs with my girlfriend at the time, Nina. Don't remember the film, but it was boring and we started fooling around. It was nighttime, and in mid-action a long, yellow light went across the ceiling. She, being on her back, noticed it first. She brought it to my attention, and then I noticed it as well. I eventually realized it was a yellow light coming in from the tops of the curtains. They were closed, but they stuck out about three inches from the windows around the curtain rods. I got up, went to look out the window, and noticed it was my car lights flashing, just like when someone locks them from the remote keypad. My neighbor, Jorge, was outside and kept staring at my car, probably assuming someone was sitting on the keypad. However, it was sitting on the table and I assume maybe the button was stuck. I went to check it, but the keys were find. The lights stopped. It freaked Nina out a great deal, but I assured her, someone else in the neighborhood had a similar car and it could potentially be them having the same code programmed. I called the dealership where I purchased my vehicle and they informed me that the keypads were programmed at a separate facility and that it would be impossible for someone to have the same code as me, since it's deleted out of the database upon being programmed in order to eliminate duplicates, and even if that step had been skipped, it would still be extremely unlikely, since the cars go all over the country from the same facility. He suggested it might be an electrical short somewhere and that I should bring the vehicle in. Being as I wasn't about to waste money for them to pretend they found something, I didn't. The incident never happened again, so I chalked it up to solar flares. 

The second one involved the hallway light. It's a two-way switch, nothing fancy, but it's wired wrong and when you turn it off upstairs, you can't turn it on downstairs, and vice-versa. This time we were upstairs in the front bedroom, Pinta and I. The lights were out, except for the one in the hall, and we were laying in bed, ironically watching a film with ghosts as a plot. About midway through, I decided it was time to fool around. The film was not boring, but I'm a man with priorities. We heard a clicking noise in the hallway and the light went out. She looked at me and I gave her a spooked look, before smiling and telling her the hallway light had blown and that I would change it after the film. After the film, I walked in the hallway and for once remembered to flick the light switch to the off position in order to not be blinded when I changed the bulb. Only problem was the light came on instead, which means it had to have been turned off at that switch. Apparently that wasn't the first time that had happened. Years earlier when my sister moved in with my parents there, the light in the bedroom we were in at the time apparently was turned off at the switch. Still, that was a first time for me and it has since not happened again, so I chalked it up to escape convicts breaking in the house, silently climbing the stairs, and turning the light off, only to escape back down the steps quietly and go back to their cells before being reported. 

The third involved a mysterious alarm that filled the entire house. I have a confession to make; the only alarm I use is a .38 Special revolver. It works by knocking you to the ground in agonizing pain upon illegal entry into my home. Well, one evening we were in the front bedroom again. This time it was me and Santa Maria. She had a long day at work and I convinced her to take her shirt off and let me give her a back rub. Mid-rub, this loud, constant, and annoying ringing noise lets out. Having recently installed a water heater, I assumed maybe something was on fire and I better investigate. I ran into the living room, where the noise was loud, but can't find anything. The kitchen was not as loud, but I decided to go downstairs and check the hot water heater and see if maybe something in the house has an alarm that I'm not aware of. Nothing. Back upstairs into the living room, where I was almost certain the noise was coming from, I wondered if it wasn't actually coming from next door and Jorge's new alarm was bad ass, but then the noise started to die down some and in the corner, amidst a bunch of my nephew's old toys was this small, kid-friendly metal-detector. I picked it up and sure enough, that's what was making the noise.  I turned it off. Here's where it's weird. I was shocked the batteries in the damn thing even still worked, since no one had lived in the house for a few years and who knew how long ti had been used before then? What was peculiar, was that when you turn the switch all the way up, it basically is so sensitive it detects itself. That's the setting it was on. What was stranger was that in order to get the settings that high, you had to flick the switch three times. Plain and simple, the thing was turned on, by something. 

Those were the three events that made me throw my hands up in the air and give up skepticism. As a learned man, I can no longer pretend I have the answers if things like that will keep happening. Notice the events I have reported do not have talking spirits, or some strange quest to find buried treasure in my back yard?

Ghosts

"Holy Jesus, what is that? What the f#ck is that?" -Gny. Sgt. Hartman

About a year ago (or was that two?) I promised to have a clearer focus with my blog and write about specific subjects regularly. I've been doing it off and on now for... a few weeks, maybe. Since I ramble so much about random topics, I doubt people have noticed. I have no desire to stop the randomness, but today marks the inaugural Supernatural Saturday. This could be short like normal, or very long. I'm tired, so you could get lucky. But I want to talk about ghosts. 

What exactly is a ghost? Most people probably don't have a real answer for that. They think they do, but seriously ask yourself about the nature of hauntings. For one they vary. A lot. Maybe you heard something, smelled something, felt something, or saw something. I imagine ghost tasting possibly occurs as well. But my point is we have a large selection when it comes to hauntings, yet when it comes to ghosts, it's the soul or spirit of the dead, and they're responsible for the aforementioned. But what brought you to that conclusion? 

Say you build a house, brand new, no one has ever lived in it, and then all the sudden it is haunted, you'll blame the land, or maybe something you recently brought in the house, all of which are haunted apparently. As an example, we'll say you keep hearing footsteps. In reality, you know very little about what you just experienced. You heard footsteps and they obviously have to be from a ghost. But what if they were actually from the future? Now you can't tell me that's ridiculous, because it's technically more scientifically sound than saying it's the spirit of the dead. 

You see, I've experienced things all my life. I was that kid who was afraid to go to sleep at night because something would bump my bed, or the closet door would open, or something could be heard out in the hallway, or the room would get dark. I was born Catholic. Never went to church much, but with what little religion I was given, ghosts weren't real, and instead we had demons. Yet, for whatever reason, my family clung to the term ghost, at least after I was a teenager and my mother confessed that she believed our house was haunted. So I genuinely believe people experience things that science cannot explain. I've experienced them myself. After growing up, moving out and on with my life, getting educated, and reducing all of my past experiences to environmental, or even psychological, causes, the house I grew up in sat empty, so I moved back into it to help my family out. Night one, and I was welcomed home by the sounds of someone moving around upstairs. Obviously noises coming from outside. Night two, noises of someone trying to get in the back door. Obviously noises coming from outside. Night three, something walking up the stairs. Okay, I give up, the house is haunted. 

Trying to rationalize the slightest creak or crack is what most people do. Door slams shut, sure, it's just air pressure. Window shuts by itself, maybe the pulley's are going bad? Don't be an idiot and think most people don't think of this first. Most hauntings you hear about include a visual component and that's what gets them reported. But this shit happens at random. I can guess a few things that set it off, such as emotional turmoil, which personally makes me think it could be something entirely different from a haunting. Not wanting to dwell on that, moving things in and out of the rooms of the house, doing repairs or upgrades, having a lot of people over, especially late, getting your groove on with someone new, things like that, all tend to increase the amount of activity that goes on. But I don't pretend I can get a performance on command. The overwhelming majority of the time, nothing goes on. The house is completely silent and nothing strange occurs at all. I can remember, even growing up, several months with nothing strange at all.

What makes me believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is when it's witnessed by multiple people. Sure, seeing an old man in a friend of your's kitchen around the same time someone else reported the same thing is rather suspicious, but having the hallway light turn off by itself when two people are there, or being woke up at the same time by the footsteps in the room above, events like these, and I'll cover them later, are what make me actually believe. Of course, I could never blame someone, who hasn't experienced anything, for not believing. I'm tired.