It's true. It was amazing. This is before Ghost Hunters and all that. It was in the late 90's and we were living in an older house. It was built in the 40s and it used to be the greens keepers house on a golf course. It's now a neighborhood in Des Moines but for years it was a golf course. We all experienced different things at different times. Let's start at the beginning:
When we looked at the house, there was a hutch in the basement and my sister, my mom, and myself all pointed to it and said it needed to go. No reason, it just gave us a bad feeling.
It was an old house with an incinerator, seperate servers quarter complete with stairs, a bedroom, and bathroom. In fact, there were 2 sets of stairs going to the basement and another 2 sets of stairs going to the upstairs. In the basement, which had never been added on, there was a bathroom. It had small white tile and it had a window that opened to the rest of the basement for some reason. It looked and felt like a gas chamber or something of that nature. I could not stay in the room for more than a few minutes. I used to challenge friends to do the same, they couldn't make it either.
Then, things started happening. I had a room in the corner of the house. It had two big windows to the outside. Shadows would race around the entire perimeter of the ceiling of the room. Every square inch of the ceiling. There is no way that light or anything could come in through the windows and reach every part of the ceiling. I would also see a shadow of hand on the ceiling that would just rotate above my bed. You've seen the behind the scenes of a Pixar movie when they render a character and the character is 3D and just kinda rotates in free space, this is what it did. But it was a shadow. I had seen it for a while then I had a buddy sleep over one night. It appeared. I said nothing and played dumb the next day. My buddy gets up and goes "What the hell was that?" What do you mean?" "Umm...it was a shadow of a hand but it was 3D and it was just rotating"
I had a fish tank too. I would hear a splash and the fish would be on the carpet. There is no way they could have hopped out and ended up where they did. I had to grab them, throw them back in. Not a single fish died but the ghost liked to play games.
I was on the phone with a friend and my sister walked past in her Culver sweatshirt and gave me a funny face. Thing was, she wasn't home that night. She wasn't even in the state. She was actually at camp at the time.
The family room was 2 steps below the rest of the house. I was in the family room watching TV and I look up and there is a guy with black pants, a dark gray shirt, and long hair over his eyes. He looked like the Undertaker if he wasn't nearly 7 foot tall. I stared at it and thought "Yup, this is happening. But if you blink, it's gone." I stared at it for several seconds. Blinked, GONE.
That's when I talked to my family and found out we had all been experiencing things.
My sister's light used to flicker. She would say "Knock it off, I know you're here." And it would stop. We also had one time where bloody finger prints showed up in her bathroom.
My dad would hear screens tearing or noises like someone trying to break in. He'd get out of bed, nothing there.
I was in the basement watching TV and had JUST made fresh popcorn. I eat a couple of bites then look down and millipede crawled out of the popcorn. I HATE HATE HATE millipedes. There is no way that it would have survived the microwave and there was no millipede when I put the popcorn in the bowl. There was an entertainment center that was only about an inch off the floor. Then something came running out of it, towards me. It was a cross between a crab you see in a fish aquarium with one claw bigger than the other and Thing from the Adams Family. It scared the crap out of me and I never watched TV in the basement ever again. In fact, it became my dad's room for model trains.
The most memorable thing. This is the days of VHS tapes. You used to have to rewind it before you took it back to Blockbuster. We watched a movie as a family and set it by the backdoor so we could take it back after church to Blockbuster and not have to pay the late charges. We get up the next day and the case is in the dinning room and the tape is in the family room, in the VCR, halfway through the movie. Nobody got up that night. The house was old and the stairs were loud. We all slept with box fans but you could hear someone going down the stairs.
We ended up moving out in high school and the people buying it from us were assholes. They would show up randomly, even while we're eating dinner, with a contractor talking about how they were going to "modernize" the house, even though it had a lot of charm from it's age. We hated them, so we didn't tell them about the haunting of it. Because, well fuck them, that's why. But I ended up going to college, coming back, and working with a ghost hunting group. This was at the height of Ghost Hunters popularity. One of the investigators worked as a greater at local grocery store. I had told her my story. One of her friends had purchased a house and had a bunch of odd things happening. She asked for the address and I gave it to her. It was the same house. Weird stuff was still happening almost a decade later. Sadly, that family had no interest in an investigation.
I loved the house. It was a great old well built house in a great location. I never wanted to move out of it. And having the paranormal stuff happen was a bonus for me. I grew up watching the X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries. Despite all the activity, we never felt threatened. I think it was the soul of an adolecent or teenager. It liked to play pranks. It did actually leave the house once and rode with my mom and I. We're driving somewhere and all of a sudden the door locks start locking and unlocking rapidly. Like a machine gun. Then, nothing. We never had another issue with the locks with the car. We had it for almost 100,000 miles after that happened.
So yeah, I lived in a haunted house and lived every minute of it.