The Three

This story follows on from my first submission. After those first brief encounters with the spiritual world, things became a little more tangible. There are lots of little things that happened, and I'll try to present them in a chronological order.

The footsteps in the hallway continued, and only stopped when my father re-carpeted the house, maybe a year or so later. (Dad seems to thrive in an environment of constant disarray). By this stage I was very accustomed to it. But other things were happening as well.

Maybe a month into things, after that seance, I was alone in my room (probably pretending to do homework) when I heard a child's scream come from within the room. The house was silent, with no TV or radio on, and I was the only one home (as I was for most of those years). There was no mistaking it, it was a high pitched scream that seemed to come from beneath my bed.

Now at the time I had a friend who was just as into the supernatural side of life as I am, and we used to ruminate for hours about what was happening in my house. He would see and feel these things just as strongly as I. After watching and waiting and observing over the months, we saw more and more of who we thought it was walking up and down my hallway. We dubed him 'Tall Man', because every time we saw, or felt him, we had a very strong impression of a tall man wearing a top hat, dressed in old English style clothes.

The little girl, we decided to call Rose. We guess that she was the same girl that all the guests in our house had seen over the years.

For so long, we were under the impression that Rose was scared of Tall Man, and that she hid in my room but he could not get past my door (thus the footsteps ending at the end of the hall, as though waiting for something). We were under this impression for about a year, hearing them, seeing shadows, people in mirrors out of the corner of our eyes. Nothing major, but they were definitely there, and we were used to them. By this stage, the friend I had mentioned earlier had moved in with me in my father's house, and I had just finished high school.

Then one night, we were lying out on the trampoline in the dark (I grew up in a rural area, big backyard, lots of trees, hardly any neighbours). We were watching the back window to the spare or 'junk' room, there was light filtering through from the kitchen, and we were watching Tall Man moving around in that room. This wasn't an unusual moment, it was quite commonplace by this stage. Then, at exactly the same time, my friend and I sat upright, chills down our spine, and said, "There's two of them, isn't there."

Before this, we had never seen two of them together. As we were under the impression that Rose was hiding from the Tall Man, it was quite frightening to see two shadows moving about the spare room. The second shadow was also tall, it could not have been Rose. We watched them for some time.

After this, we continued to see Rose and the Tall Man as per usual, but after that night we began to feel a strange presence in the house. There was definitely a third entity there now that we couldn't sense before. The feeling we got from this third source was much more negative, and far more secretive. We got the distinct feeling that he was different from the others, and after more discussion we established that we both felt as though perhaps Rose was not hiding from Tall Man all along, but hiding from this third - one that we appropriately called 'Shadow', as he never revealed himself quite as physically as the others. Perhaps Tall Man was protecting Rose, and standing guard outside my room?

Well, this was all well and good. Three entities in the house, two we were very familiar with, and a third rather unsettling.

And then we began discovering that across the world, there have been reports of this exact trio. Accounts from home owners, their children, their friends, all describing these exact people - the Tall Man with the top hat, the young girl, and the third - one that no one could ever quite figure out, but didn't feel comfortable about.

I haven't thought about this in years, until two nights ago an old friend came for dinner, and she was explaining to me some strange things that were occuring at her elder sister's house... And it was the same Three.

If anyone else has ever heard of this phenomenon, please give me a hoy hoy - I would love to know more about them.