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This is actually a true story, something that really happened to me and my friends when we were in high school. It was very traumatizing for the four of us, and we each are still affected in some way to this day.
To give some background information, our town is surrounded by old Civil War battlegrounds, and quite a few of the houses are from that time. Some of them were even old hospitals that were used for the soldiers. So clearly the town just naturally has a creepy feel to it and it was common to hear of weird things happening in people’s houses. Like this one guy I went to school with, when he and his family moved in they found an old doll that had been left there. They put it back in a closet but the next day it was sitting at the top of the stairs. This went on for a long time, no matter how they tried to get rid of the doll it would always wind up back up at the top of the stairs so they ended up just leaving it there. I could go on and on with all the stories but I was always indifferent towards them, nothing had ever happened at my house.
My best friends were sisters Amy and Denise and they had grown up in one of the houses that used to be a hospital. When they were kids their dad actually found some old hospital supplies in a basement alcove and made a good bit of money off them. There were times throughout the years that they would mention strange occurrences, but these girls were too logical and hardheaded to believe in anything paranormal. I can think of a few times when I slept over at their house that I would get a bit freaked out, especially in their upstairs bathroom. I would feel like I was being watched and there would be little noises, like someone was in there with me. I told myself every time it was mice.
I was in****ibly surprised when Amy came to me during school one morning and said, “there’s something in my house.” She went on to tell me that the night before she heard knocking on her wall in the corner by the floor, and then it moved to another part of the wall. After a minute it moved again a few feet down the wall and the knocks continued to go around the room, sometimes moving up by the ceiling. She finally got the courage to get out of her room and wake up her parents. They went and sat in her room for a little while but the knocking didn’t come back. They told her it had to have been something outside or a mouse in the wall, not to worry, and they would call an exterminator.
Amy was absolutely not convinced it was the wind or rodents and I could see how terrified she was. This wasn’t like her; she’d lived in that house almost her whole life and this wasn’t the first time something weird had happened, but this was the first time she thought it could be a spirit. She never believed in that stuff, and neither did Denise but about a week later the same thing happened to her. Denise woke up to the same knocking, going all around her room. Again the parents were woken up, and again they gave the same explanation, but Denise accepted the explanation unlike Amy had.
The knocking kept happening over the next couple weeks though, and after an incident in the bathroom Denise became convinced there was something paranormal going on. She was in the shower when the curtain was suddenly jerked open, forcibly pulled all the way over to the side. There was no one in the bathroom when she looked out, and the door had been locked anyway. She came up with some excuse as to why it happened, pulled the curtain closed, and continued her shower. Then it happened again, and this time she completely freaked out and got out of there.
Their parents didn’t really take them seriously, even though they admitted to strange things happening in the house themselves. Amy and Denise became really curious about whether or not their house was haunted so one Friday night when their parents were gone to some event we had the not so brilliant idea to use a Ouija board. Denise’s boyfriend Sam got one from his neighbor and at about 10:00 pm we set up a table in Amy’s room and laid everything out.
The three of them weren’t really serious about it; they didn’t actually think it would work and considered it more as just something fun to do than to prove their house was haunted. I, on the other hand, felt really uneasy about it and believed Ouija boards were not something to play around with. But I was curious too and they kept insisting I join, assuring me that the board was just a harmless kid’s game.
We set the “Ouija board mood” as Denise put it and lit a candle and turned off the lights. We got around the table, put our hands on the planchette, and asked the first question.
“Are there any spirits here with us?”
We waited, completely silent, for about five minutes without any movement at all. Denise asked the question again, and there still was no movement. We kept waiting and I remember Sam making a joke, and we all were giggling when the candle went out.
It was unsettling to suddenly be in complete darkness, and because there was nothing that could have caused it to go out. Nothing we could think of anyway. It was sitting on Amy’s nightstand, nowhere near the closed window and there wasn’t any air coming out of the vent across the room. But candles go out and we just relit it.
Again we got settled at the table and put our hands in position. This time Amy asked the questions.
“If there is a spirit here let us know. Who has been knocking on our walls?”
This time the planchette almost immediately started moving. Of course we all questioned each other, but we all swore we weren’t moving a muscle. I know I definitely wasn’t, and I had no reason to believe the others were either, with how skeptical and serious they all were.
It moved first to the letter ‘H’ and then to the letter ‘I’, then stopped. Hi. It was a response that made sense but it didn’t necessarily mean anything and it could have been one of us that had moved it. Amy continued on.
“Um, hi to you too. Are you a spirit? Have you been knocking on our walls?”
After about thirty seconds it started slowly moving. Again we questioned each other, and again we swore we weren’t doing it. This time it spelled S-H-O-W-R-1-5.
We didn’t know what the heck that was supposed to mean. We discussed the possibilities but couldn’t come up with anything that made sense. Then we noticed Denise had gotten quiet and was just staring wide-eyed down at the board. She reminded us, in a frightened voice, about her experience in the shower and told us to look at her shirt. It was a fake jersey with the number 15 on it, which of course we had seen before but didn’t connect it with what was said on the board. And then the S-H-O-W-R, could that have meant shower? Had we actually contacted a spirit and it was telling us it was the one who opened the shower curtain on Denise?
Denise, the most skeptical of us all, didn’t say anything more and just sat very still with her hand on the planchette. I was getting pretty terrified too but I think we were all a bit mesmerized by what was happening. Amy again asked the questions.
“Were you in the bathroom with Denise, is that what you’re saying? Can you tell us who you are, give us a name?”
Again it moved slowly. S-C-A-R. This made us even more creeped out and we asked for a name again. M-I-C-E-L. We thought maybe it was supposed to be ‘Michael’.
“Is your name Michael?” Amy asked. “Ok Michael, why have you been scaring us? Why knock on the walls?”
This was when the first of two horrible things happened that night. The planchette started moving in****ibly fast. Denise actually couldn’t even keep her hands on it and it was too fast to see all the letters being spelled out. Then the table started shaking violently. It was like it was being picked up and slammed back down repeatedly, and we had all been kneeling around it with our hands on the planchette so there was no way one of us could have been moving it. After we realized this we bolted to the door, ran down the stairs, and ended up on the front porch shaking and confused as to what just happened. We tried to make sense of it and tried to come up with something that would logically explain things but we couldn’t. We really made contact with a spirit, and it wasn’t a very nice one.
There was no way we were going back in the house. Sam waited with us on the porch until Amy and Denise’s parents called and told us they were on their way home, and then he left. When the parents got home and found us on the porch we told them everything
and we were so upset that they believed that we legitimately got terrified, but they tried to convince us that we had subconsciously moved the planchette and that it was most likely Sam who was shaking the table. They weren’t there and they didn’t experience it or they would have known that none of us was responsible for any of it.
We followed them inside, well aware that the Ouija board was still in Amy’s room. We made them turn all the lights on, and when we got to Amy’s room they had to go in first. The table was on its side, the board behind it, and the candle blown out. We didn’t remember any of it happening, but it was possible one of us had knocked the table over when we ran out. It didn’t make sense how the board got behind the table though. The parents just kind of laughed it off, and told us it was our own fault that we were so scared because we had the dumb idea to use a Ouija board. They were right, it was really dumb, but they just didn’t understand what actually happened.
There was no way we were keeping that thing in the house, and we took it outside and threw it away in the neighbor’s trash can. We didn’t care that it belonged to Sam’s neighbor; he could explain to them what happened. Denise got grounded for having a guy in the house while her parents weren’t home so she wasn’t going to see him for a while anyway.
We decided to pile up in Denise’s room for the night, and we had all calmed down a good bit. Maybe it was knowing that their parents were home, or that just maybe they were right and we had caused everything to happen ourselves. We were able to eventually fall asleep with the light on.
The second horrible thing to happen that night happened when I got up to pee. It had to have been really late, or really early depending on how you look at it. I laid there for the longest time trying to ignore it and go back to sleep because I didn’t want to go in the bathroom after all that happened. I considered waking up Amy or Denise but I knew I was being ridiculous, it would only take a minute. I got up, thankful that the light was on in the room and went out into the hallway. I turned the hall light on before making my way to the bathroom and when I got to it I reached my hand in first to turn that light on before going in. I was so freaked out that I kept the door halfway open.
The door must have closed while I was washing my hands because I didn’t hear it. I just knew that I hadn’t closed it. It was such a heavy door that it didn’t seem like it could have closed on its own, but I thought maybe the hinges were messed up or something. I would have told myself anything at that point to make myself feel better because when I saw that it was closed I was terrified and had to get out of there.
I turned the knob but it didn’t move. I tried to stay calm, telling myself it was an old door and they get stuck sometimes, but I kept turning and pushing and pulling and the knob wouldn’t even move, like it was locked. It couldn’t have been locked though, because I hadn’t even closed the door when I came in and I could see the lock on the knob and could tell it wasn’t locked. There was no lock on the other side either. It was like someone was holding the knob so I couldn’t turn it. I kept trying to open the door, getting more desperate and frantic with each passing second.
Then there was a knock behind me. It wasn’t loud but I definitely heard it and I began pushing at the door even harder, not caring if I broke the thing. Then there were more knocks, going all around the bathroom and the shower curtain started rattling and I knew there was someone in the bathroom with me. I could even feel that there was a presence and to this day I can remember exactly what it felt like, it was like the air had gotten really thick and darker.
I completely lost it. I threw my body against the door over and over, kicking it and beating on it with all my strength, while crying hysterically and screaming at the top of my lungs. It couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes but it felt like an eternity before I had woken up everyone in the house and they came to my rescue. The dad opened the door. He just turned the knob and pulled and it easily opened. I came sprawling out onto the floor and was too upset and weak to move. My knuckles were bloody and bruises were forming on my arms. Amy and Denise stood back in horror as their mom hugged me against her and rocked me back and forth, trying to calm me down.
When I got a bit calmer they took me downstairs and I told them what had happened. They had never had a problem with the door before. As sympathetic as they were I think they believed I had accidentally locked the door on myself and gave myself a panic attack since I had gotten so frightened earlier that night. If that was the case then why was the dad able to open the door so easily? And I distinctly remember leaving the door open and seeing that it wasn’t locked after it had closed. I heard all the knocks and I saw the shower curtain moving. Amy and Denise completely believed me and they insisted that their parents do something. They promised that they would look into getting the house blessed the next day and drove me home.
They did get the house blessed a few days later, or something similar to it. It was a while before I went back over to the house and it was only after they all assured me that nothing had happened since that night. I only spent the night one other time but that was mostly due to the fact that I grew apart from Amy and Denise as we got older, especially when I switched to another school. We were still friends but we had outgrown the sleepovers.
I still see them, and Sam, sometimes and we talk on Facebook frequently. We all have nightmares about that night sometimes and we are very anti-Ouija boards. Their parents still live in that house and Amy has told me that strange things still happen there, but her parents believe that if it’s a spirit it’s a benevolent one. After my experience I disagree, I don’t think it’s kind it is a kind spirit at all.
To give some background information, our town is surrounded by old Civil War battlegrounds, and quite a few of the houses are from that time. Some of them were even old hospitals that were used for the soldiers. So clearly the town just naturally has a creepy feel to it and it was common to hear of weird things happening in people’s houses. Like this one guy I went to school with, when he and his family moved in they found an old doll that had been left there. They put it back in a closet but the next day it was sitting at the top of the stairs. This went on for a long time, no matter how they tried to get rid of the doll it would always wind up back up at the top of the stairs so they ended up just leaving it there. I could go on and on with all the stories but I was always indifferent towards them, nothing had ever happened at my house.
My best friends were sisters Amy and Denise and they had grown up in one of the houses that used to be a hospital. When they were kids their dad actually found some old hospital supplies in a basement alcove and made a good bit of money off them. There were times throughout the years that they would mention strange occurrences, but these girls were too logical and hardheaded to believe in anything paranormal. I can think of a few times when I slept over at their house that I would get a bit freaked out, especially in their upstairs bathroom. I would feel like I was being watched and there would be little noises, like someone was in there with me. I told myself every time it was mice.
I was in****ibly surprised when Amy came to me during school one morning and said, “there’s something in my house.” She went on to tell me that the night before she heard knocking on her wall in the corner by the floor, and then it moved to another part of the wall. After a minute it moved again a few feet down the wall and the knocks continued to go around the room, sometimes moving up by the ceiling. She finally got the courage to get out of her room and wake up her parents. They went and sat in her room for a little while but the knocking didn’t come back. They told her it had to have been something outside or a mouse in the wall, not to worry, and they would call an exterminator.
Amy was absolutely not convinced it was the wind or rodents and I could see how terrified she was. This wasn’t like her; she’d lived in that house almost her whole life and this wasn’t the first time something weird had happened, but this was the first time she thought it could be a spirit. She never believed in that stuff, and neither did Denise but about a week later the same thing happened to her. Denise woke up to the same knocking, going all around her room. Again the parents were woken up, and again they gave the same explanation, but Denise accepted the explanation unlike Amy had.
The knocking kept happening over the next couple weeks though, and after an incident in the bathroom Denise became convinced there was something paranormal going on. She was in the shower when the curtain was suddenly jerked open, forcibly pulled all the way over to the side. There was no one in the bathroom when she looked out, and the door had been locked anyway. She came up with some excuse as to why it happened, pulled the curtain closed, and continued her shower. Then it happened again, and this time she completely freaked out and got out of there.
Their parents didn’t really take them seriously, even though they admitted to strange things happening in the house themselves. Amy and Denise became really curious about whether or not their house was haunted so one Friday night when their parents were gone to some event we had the not so brilliant idea to use a Ouija board. Denise’s boyfriend Sam got one from his neighbor and at about 10:00 pm we set up a table in Amy’s room and laid everything out.
The three of them weren’t really serious about it; they didn’t actually think it would work and considered it more as just something fun to do than to prove their house was haunted. I, on the other hand, felt really uneasy about it and believed Ouija boards were not something to play around with. But I was curious too and they kept insisting I join, assuring me that the board was just a harmless kid’s game.
We set the “Ouija board mood” as Denise put it and lit a candle and turned off the lights. We got around the table, put our hands on the planchette, and asked the first question.
“Are there any spirits here with us?”
We waited, completely silent, for about five minutes without any movement at all. Denise asked the question again, and there still was no movement. We kept waiting and I remember Sam making a joke, and we all were giggling when the candle went out.
It was unsettling to suddenly be in complete darkness, and because there was nothing that could have caused it to go out. Nothing we could think of anyway. It was sitting on Amy’s nightstand, nowhere near the closed window and there wasn’t any air coming out of the vent across the room. But candles go out and we just relit it.
Again we got settled at the table and put our hands in position. This time Amy asked the questions.
“If there is a spirit here let us know. Who has been knocking on our walls?”
This time the planchette almost immediately started moving. Of course we all questioned each other, but we all swore we weren’t moving a muscle. I know I definitely wasn’t, and I had no reason to believe the others were either, with how skeptical and serious they all were.
It moved first to the letter ‘H’ and then to the letter ‘I’, then stopped. Hi. It was a response that made sense but it didn’t necessarily mean anything and it could have been one of us that had moved it. Amy continued on.
“Um, hi to you too. Are you a spirit? Have you been knocking on our walls?”
After about thirty seconds it started slowly moving. Again we questioned each other, and again we swore we weren’t doing it. This time it spelled S-H-O-W-R-1-5.
We didn’t know what the heck that was supposed to mean. We discussed the possibilities but couldn’t come up with anything that made sense. Then we noticed Denise had gotten quiet and was just staring wide-eyed down at the board. She reminded us, in a frightened voice, about her experience in the shower and told us to look at her shirt. It was a fake jersey with the number 15 on it, which of course we had seen before but didn’t connect it with what was said on the board. And then the S-H-O-W-R, could that have meant shower? Had we actually contacted a spirit and it was telling us it was the one who opened the shower curtain on Denise?
Denise, the most skeptical of us all, didn’t say anything more and just sat very still with her hand on the planchette. I was getting pretty terrified too but I think we were all a bit mesmerized by what was happening. Amy again asked the questions.
“Were you in the bathroom with Denise, is that what you’re saying? Can you tell us who you are, give us a name?”
Again it moved slowly. S-C-A-R. This made us even more creeped out and we asked for a name again. M-I-C-E-L. We thought maybe it was supposed to be ‘Michael’.
“Is your name Michael?” Amy asked. “Ok Michael, why have you been scaring us? Why knock on the walls?”
This was when the first of two horrible things happened that night. The planchette started moving in****ibly fast. Denise actually couldn’t even keep her hands on it and it was too fast to see all the letters being spelled out. Then the table started shaking violently. It was like it was being picked up and slammed back down repeatedly, and we had all been kneeling around it with our hands on the planchette so there was no way one of us could have been moving it. After we realized this we bolted to the door, ran down the stairs, and ended up on the front porch shaking and confused as to what just happened. We tried to make sense of it and tried to come up with something that would logically explain things but we couldn’t. We really made contact with a spirit, and it wasn’t a very nice one.
There was no way we were going back in the house. Sam waited with us on the porch until Amy and Denise’s parents called and told us they were on their way home, and then he left. When the parents got home and found us on the porch we told them everything
and we were so upset that they believed that we legitimately got terrified, but they tried to convince us that we had subconsciously moved the planchette and that it was most likely Sam who was shaking the table. They weren’t there and they didn’t experience it or they would have known that none of us was responsible for any of it.
We followed them inside, well aware that the Ouija board was still in Amy’s room. We made them turn all the lights on, and when we got to Amy’s room they had to go in first. The table was on its side, the board behind it, and the candle blown out. We didn’t remember any of it happening, but it was possible one of us had knocked the table over when we ran out. It didn’t make sense how the board got behind the table though. The parents just kind of laughed it off, and told us it was our own fault that we were so scared because we had the dumb idea to use a Ouija board. They were right, it was really dumb, but they just didn’t understand what actually happened.
There was no way we were keeping that thing in the house, and we took it outside and threw it away in the neighbor’s trash can. We didn’t care that it belonged to Sam’s neighbor; he could explain to them what happened. Denise got grounded for having a guy in the house while her parents weren’t home so she wasn’t going to see him for a while anyway.
We decided to pile up in Denise’s room for the night, and we had all calmed down a good bit. Maybe it was knowing that their parents were home, or that just maybe they were right and we had caused everything to happen ourselves. We were able to eventually fall asleep with the light on.
The second horrible thing to happen that night happened when I got up to pee. It had to have been really late, or really early depending on how you look at it. I laid there for the longest time trying to ignore it and go back to sleep because I didn’t want to go in the bathroom after all that happened. I considered waking up Amy or Denise but I knew I was being ridiculous, it would only take a minute. I got up, thankful that the light was on in the room and went out into the hallway. I turned the hall light on before making my way to the bathroom and when I got to it I reached my hand in first to turn that light on before going in. I was so freaked out that I kept the door halfway open.
The door must have closed while I was washing my hands because I didn’t hear it. I just knew that I hadn’t closed it. It was such a heavy door that it didn’t seem like it could have closed on its own, but I thought maybe the hinges were messed up or something. I would have told myself anything at that point to make myself feel better because when I saw that it was closed I was terrified and had to get out of there.
I turned the knob but it didn’t move. I tried to stay calm, telling myself it was an old door and they get stuck sometimes, but I kept turning and pushing and pulling and the knob wouldn’t even move, like it was locked. It couldn’t have been locked though, because I hadn’t even closed the door when I came in and I could see the lock on the knob and could tell it wasn’t locked. There was no lock on the other side either. It was like someone was holding the knob so I couldn’t turn it. I kept trying to open the door, getting more desperate and frantic with each passing second.
Then there was a knock behind me. It wasn’t loud but I definitely heard it and I began pushing at the door even harder, not caring if I broke the thing. Then there were more knocks, going all around the bathroom and the shower curtain started rattling and I knew there was someone in the bathroom with me. I could even feel that there was a presence and to this day I can remember exactly what it felt like, it was like the air had gotten really thick and darker.
I completely lost it. I threw my body against the door over and over, kicking it and beating on it with all my strength, while crying hysterically and screaming at the top of my lungs. It couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes but it felt like an eternity before I had woken up everyone in the house and they came to my rescue. The dad opened the door. He just turned the knob and pulled and it easily opened. I came sprawling out onto the floor and was too upset and weak to move. My knuckles were bloody and bruises were forming on my arms. Amy and Denise stood back in horror as their mom hugged me against her and rocked me back and forth, trying to calm me down.
When I got a bit calmer they took me downstairs and I told them what had happened. They had never had a problem with the door before. As sympathetic as they were I think they believed I had accidentally locked the door on myself and gave myself a panic attack since I had gotten so frightened earlier that night. If that was the case then why was the dad able to open the door so easily? And I distinctly remember leaving the door open and seeing that it wasn’t locked after it had closed. I heard all the knocks and I saw the shower curtain moving. Amy and Denise completely believed me and they insisted that their parents do something. They promised that they would look into getting the house blessed the next day and drove me home.
They did get the house blessed a few days later, or something similar to it. It was a while before I went back over to the house and it was only after they all assured me that nothing had happened since that night. I only spent the night one other time but that was mostly due to the fact that I grew apart from Amy and Denise as we got older, especially when I switched to another school. We were still friends but we had outgrown the sleepovers.
I still see them, and Sam, sometimes and we talk on Facebook frequently. We all have nightmares about that night sometimes and we are very anti-Ouija boards. Their parents still live in that house and Amy has told me that strange things still happen there, but her parents believe that if it’s a spirit it’s a benevolent one. After my experience I disagree, I don’t think it’s kind it is a kind spirit at all.
