Residual Or Active?

Growing up, my sisters and I spent every other weekend with my father at his girlfriend's house in Hadley, NY. I was about eight years old when we first started staying there. The house was two stories and we slept on a pull out couch right next to the front door facing the only set of stairs. My father would lock the door every night but it always flew open and shut fiercely and then I would hear heavy, almost thundering footsteps going up the stairs. Sometimes the air would get so cold I could see my breath. Other times I could feel someone in the laundry room watching my sisters and me as we lay in bed. I'd shake with fear and pull the blankets over my head. I always chalked these experiences up to dreaming or my active imagination and didn't mention them to anyone. Until I became a teenager...

I was allowed to stay up later, hang out and play cards or watch TV with my stepbrother. Some nights he could guess an entire deck of cards correctly! The air seemed thick those nights and we would hear the door flying open and shut. Shortly thereafter, he was in a car accident. His friend veered off the road and hit a tree trunk doing 65MPH. My stepbrother wasn't wearing a seatbelt and should have flown through the windshield.

He claimed that when his head hit the windshield he felt two strong arms grab him by the shoulders and push him back into the car. He said he knew it was his Uncle who had died tragically young. My stepbrother and his best friend had an experience that I can't substantiate but is interesting. They were playing cards again when they saw this huge ball of blue light in front of the fireplace. They said it whirled around faster and faster and all of the ceiling tiles were slamming up and down. It ended as suddenly as it began.

My own personal validation happened when I was about 15. My stepbrother and I and our two best friends were sitting on the couch watching TV. Back then, at 1 am or so, the cable would go out for the night. Well, just after the TV went to fuzz we all heard the front door fly open and slam shut. The timing was eerie. We all sat there kind of spooked. All you could hear was TV static as the footsteps purposefully thundered up the stairs. We all just sat there staring, not knowing who we would see round the top of the stairs. Was it my dad? Were we in trouble?

What we saw my best friend and I didn't talk about until 6 years later. We were with friends sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories. We just looked at each other and I said, If you remember what happened that night please tell me what you saw. She told me exactly as I remembered it. Even now, I can still distinctly see the man's shoe prints pressed down into the thick carpet. But no one was there!

It was a man's dress shoe. The heel was distinct from the sole. The footprints walked from the top of the stairs until they stood dead center in front of the couch. All four of us screamed at the top of our lungs- whatever it was only inches away! As soon as we screamed the imprints just disappeared. Interestingly enough, our parents didn't wake up when four teenagers howled like bloody murder in the middle of the night. This phenomenon happened to me once before when my friend and I used the Ouija board... But that's another story.