It was until I was seven, and we moved out of that house into our current one that my parents revealed to me that strange things would happen in that house...things would up and disappear with virtually no cause. Ironically, they didn't want to tell me or my brother of this phenomena, for fear of scaring the two of us. Little did they know that that kind of information would have made me ecstatic!
Now, here's the kicker...about a year after moving with my family, we happened to pick up a book by local author Al Cobb: Danny's Bed, which is a well-known read around Savannah, as it documents one man's personal experience with ghosts in his family, as well as other haunted locations in Savannah. Guess whose old house made it into one of the chapters? Yup: apparently, the guy who had built the house had died of a massive heart attack in our--err--his kitchen. Creepy.
Anyways, I truly would have not suspected anything weird to happen in my new house, but I was sort of in for an interesting experience. The reason for that was because we actually built that house in a wooded lot, a mere two minutes away from my old house. A gorgeous yellow Georgian styled home, it was the last place I would have expected to deal with paranormal activity, but after researching this city a bit, it seems to me that it would be hard for a place not to be haunted in the city limits...
You see, Savannah, itself, is built wholly on three separate cemeteries. Gettit? On top. That's not even counting the Native Americans who were laid to rest on the land long before James Oglethorpe sailed into the Savannah River, bringing fleets of Englishmen with him.
So, essentially, the whole city has broken every rule of what the movie Poltergeist told us not to do, so, in return, we can't be too shocked when our five year old home starts to experience some poltergeist activity, itself. In reality, it drives me crazy when people say that a young house can't be haunted! Yes, an older house is a more likely candidate, but they're not even putting into consideration the centuries old land that the house was built on top of, or the furniture in the house (unless you exclusively buy everything from Target or Ikea, no exceptions.) But come on! I'd say that, in a country that has experienced so much war, aggression, illness and bloodshed in an attempt to just make it an individual country, the bigger question is: How do you know that your house isn't haunted?
Sorry, I'm done with my rant, for now. Anyways my family moved in '99: my dad, mom, little brother, and me! Shortly thereafter, my mom became pregnant with my youngest brother, and the house was never quiet again. Off the top of my head, I do not remember anything significant happening in the house beyond the usual creaks and noises that at the time, I assumed were just my imagination. Nothing big started happening until I was thirteen, but since that moment on, it has stopped.
My very first memory os this entity happened while I was in the library of my middle school. I will go ahead and say that these hauntings have not at all happened exclusively in my house: they have followed me to school, to other people's houses, and later, to my college dorm room. But the first time it happened, I heard my name being called in the otherwise empty room.
"Amy...!"
Naturally, my first thought was of a guy, who had been there not five minutes before, but a quick search turned up the fact that I was very alone. Naturally, I went with the most obvious assumption: my imagination was playing tricks on me. I didn't feel scared or threatened, just curious. It wasn't big enough, though, for me to claim that it had been a ghost, so I went on my merry way.
This "voice" called to me a few more times, and always, it was so insignificant, that I began to ignore it. I could tell you exactly what it sounded like: it was always of a young girl, not a child, but maybe a teenager. Creepily enough, at the time, when I'd hear it, my first thought would be: "That sounds like my voice!" It didn't scare me, though: it seemed so bizarre and unreal that it would only reinforce the idea that it wasn't real! However, me ignoring it didn't seem to make it happy: form that moment on, this spirit (if that is what it is) found ways to make itself more known by my other family members.
I had a full breakdown during the summer of my thirteenth year. I was in my bathroom, brushing my hair, when suddenly, I heard the voice again, only this time, it was much louder, and more substantial than it had ever sounded before. It was in my room, and my heart nearly stopped in my chest when I heard it!
"AMY!" It was only a hushed toned, but man, I heard it, and my immediate thought was that my brother was trying to play a prank on me. That's what I wanted to believe, anyway.
I ran through the house, looking for him, finding him on the playroom, playing a game (there was no way he would have gotten there that fast), and I sort of exploded, yelling at him to stop scaring me, and he began to cry, because I was yelling, and he really didn't know why. I knew it hadn't been him...it was wishful thinking, because the voice had absolutely terrified me, and I really didn't know what I'd do if it hadn't been Jeremy...I wasn't five, anymore: ghosts scared me, and I'd seen enough movies to know that they weren't all Casper the Friendly Ghost. My mom, hearing me yelling at my poor brother, intervened, and calmed us both down, but still, the experience stayed with me after all of these years.
After that, weird things began to happen to other people. My best friend told me that she saw a figure standing in me bedroom window when we were outside in the backyard. My brother said that he had seen the same thing, and at the time, I had still somehow managed to convince myself that they were both just seeing things, and that there was nothing in the damned house. The first time that anything happened to all of us was about a year later, when, around eleven thirty at night, a vase in our foyer fell and smashed in the ground. Everyone showed up to find the source of the noise, but what we found was that the vase hadn't just fell...it was a good few feet away from the table, as though it had been pushed. I'm still willing to believe that it wasn't anything supernatural, but hey, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing to have happened.
I also made the mistake of playing with a ouija board with a friend after everything started happening. It wasn't at my house, but we specifically tried to talk to the spirit that appeared to be following me. I made a huge mistake that night: the spirit asked us, via the board, if it could "use my energy" to manifest, and I said yes. It seemed harmless enough, and about a minute afterwards, loud footsteps started to echo around my friend's bedroom, inside of the bedroom. It was bizarre, and neither of us had ever heard those kind of sounds at her house, before. A few minutes after that, I began to get a head ache. At first, it was a small-scale one, but it rapidly turned into a full-fledged migraine. I felt sick, and we stopped, but the occurrences didn't.
The weird thing was that the activity would get quiet for months at a time, and I'd always think that it had stopped. The one thing that would remain constant were the footsteps that my mom and I heard. I always heard them specifically in mine and brother's room, and most predominantly, I'd hear them in my walking closet when I was below it, in my parent's bathroom. That's when they're the loudest. For reasons I cannot explain, I have always been...nervous around my closet. It's very large for a closet, sort of making it its own room, and I don't feel comfortable in it. I can't just be in the room unless the door to the closet is closed, and if I just see it open, I immediately close it. It's truly the only spot of my house where I don't feel comfortable being, and I really, truly, can't explain it.
Ok, flash forward a few years, past the weird footsteps. I was a junior in high school, and it was Thanksgiving break, meaning that my house was filled with family members. However, it was a rare moment in the house where everyone, sans my mom, had left to get into some sort of shenanigans. According to her, while we were gone, a foil pan in the kitchen suddenly, and strangely, flew off a shelf, onto the floor. If that hadn't been weird enough, she also watched as a figure's reflection walked in front of the flatscreen TV in our living room. The TV was off, and no one else was around to have had their image reflected in the surface other than my mom, who watched it happen well across the room..
At those times, things had happened to other people, and I had not even been present. Things became quiet again, for a while. I went off to college, and came back home two months later my freshman year for fall break. I got a call from my mom during the drive, where she relayed something odd that had just happened in the house.
She and my youngest brother had been in the kitchen, scrambling eggs, when the front door of the house opened, on its own. Now, each door in my house that leads to the outside triggers an alarm when it's open a certain amount: two, short beeps go off, and they can only go off if the door has been shut completely, and then opened at least a few inches. When my mom and brother went to go see why the door had opened, it stood completely ajar. They shut it--and locked it--but had a repeat performance a few minutes later. Somehow, the lock had remained intact, but the door had still managed to open up. It has not happened since.
Also, a few days later, on the night before I was supposed to return to school, I was watching TV with my mom in her room around eleven at night. No one else was downstairs. Suddenly, the door to her bathroom, which stood open, slammed shut with a force that was so strong, that it clicked into place. Both my mom and I silently turned to give one another a look, acknowledged what had happened, and went back to watching TV. In a strange way, it was hilarious. At this point, the strange phenomena in my house had just become routine.
Things got really weird my sophomore year of college, when the dorm room I moved into with my roommate (a complete skeptic) experienced some activity of its own...for a period of about a week and a half.
The first thing to happen (which was something similar that had happened to me in my house in Savannah, as well, and always seemed to be the first sign that the activity would start up again), were tings disappearing, and reappearing right under my nose. It's only happened a few times in my life, but I'll lose something important to me, and it will reappear shortly thereafter in plain sight, in an area I've searched a hundred times, with no cause. At my house, the object had been my beloved, childhood blanket, at school, it had been my ID card, which I needed vitally to get into the cafeteria, dorm, and my dorm room. It disappeared one weekend when my roommate went out of town, and after cleaning the whole room out and going to bed, it reappeared on my desk, sitting right next to my half-functioning, back up card. Seriously, I had been doing work at that desk the night before, and I swear it hadn't been there.
The next three things to happen did not happen exclusively to me. I was walking with a friend back to my room to watch a movie, when, upon arriving to the door, he informed me that someone else was already in there. I heard it, too: a woman's voice, talking, non of my neighbors. I opened the door, and as I cracked it open to go inside, the voice drifted out, clear as day, and my friend and I exchanged uneasy glances. However, as soon as the door opened fully, it was gone, and did not come back. We had both heard it.
Two days later, another friend and I were watching TV (The Big Bang Theory), when suddenly, the screen went to complete static, which it had never done before. I stood up and crossed the room to fix it (Although, I had no idea of what I planned on doing. Hitting it, maybe?) when suddenly, the absolute most terrifying thing happened in my life. You may not believe. I'm not sure that I believe myself.
A woman appeared, through the static, not apart of the show at all. She was there for only a minute, but she was clearly reaching out towards me, and suddenly, she was gone, and the show came back on the TV. My initial thought was: "I've been watching too many horror movies.", fully thinking that it hadn't just happened, but when I turned around and saw my friend, she was staring at the screen with a wide-eyed expression of pure fear. Her face had drained of color. We made eye contact, and finally, I broke the silence.
"Ok...did you see that?" I demanded, my voice cracking a little as the realization hit me that it hadn't been my imagination.
She looked down, and nodded, slowly.
"Ok, ok...just tell me what you saw! I'll tell you if I saw the same thing!"
She seemed to think about it, and then responded. "I saw a woman..."
"Was she...reaching out towards us?"
Again, another nod. We were both a little speechless, and could not explain what had happened. That sort of thing did not make a repeat performance, and I cannot say that I'm unhappy about it. That experience, more than anything else, seemed to have materialized out of a horror movie, and scared me the most.
The next morning, I beat my roommate up (as usual), and headed out of the room to grab some breakfast. I ended up staying out for two hours (10 to 12) talking to classmates, and returned to the room a while later to find that my roommate was just getting out of the shower. I greeted her, and she said good morning, but had a slight furrow in her brow.
"You weren't here, like, an hour ago, were you?"
I glanced at the clock. "No. I've been gone since ten." I paused. "Why?"
I could tell that she was a little discomfited. "I woke up about an hour ago, and went to use the restroom, and while I was in there, I heard someone in the room, going through drawers. I thought it was you, so I went out to say "good morning", but no one was here..."
Creeeeeeeepy! As mentioned before: she does NOT believe in ghosts, but she also won't say that it wasn't a weird experience. That seemed to be the last of it, though. It stopped.
Since then, I've come home, and have only heard the weird footsteps in my house. I don't know what it is I've been experiencing for the past some odd years, only that it's never consistent, and gets a little more prevalent each time. I am now a mere twenty four hours away from moving into a townhouse of my own, and had to admit that I'm curious as to what will follow into a space that I move myself into, completely. Am I being followed? Or do I just keep going to places that are more haunted than usual?
If you've had any experiences similar to these, I'd love to hear, but in the meanwhile, I probably need to pack! Have a wonderful week, everyone!
Amy
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