Haunted Home

There are two parts to this story so let me start by saying I do not consider myself a sensitive by any means. I've never had precognitive thoughts or dreams, aside from the odd feeling of déjà vu. Most of this story is comprised of things that other members of my family have seen or heard but some of the experiences are mine.

I'm twenty five, and for as long as I can remember I've never been entirely comfortable in my parents' house. It was a new build, terraced house when they bought it about twenty nine years ago. From what we can work out it was built on unused land that was possibly fields or wastelands. It's about two hundred feet from the back door to the local park and looks out over a disused church. There's no evidence or public record of there being a burial site or graveyard where the houses now stand (although a next door neighbour did dig up part of a broken headstone some twenty years ago, but believed it was just brought in with the rubble used to base the gardens.)

Not long after they moved in, when my brother was a year old, my grandfather (an ex- naval officer) passed away after a variety of health complications, including having a leg amputated below the knee, and in the weeks leading up to and after the funeral my Nana came to stay at the house. She stayed in my brother's room, on a fold out bed. About two weeks after my grandfather's passing she woke up, seemingly without reason, in the middle of the night and when she looked towards the window she saw him standing there in full dress uniform. He walked along the side of the bed and around the foot, towards the door. My Nan called out to him and he turned, smiled and walked out. After that happened, my brother started talking to someone in the middle of the night and when I was born, and old enough to talk I did the same.

Also my mum had a few experiences, the two most memorable being 1: the feeling of someone trailing a hand up the bottom of her leg one morning after my dad had left for work and she was sleeping in, and 2: My brother used to get up in the middle of the night and go into to my parents room and sleep on the floor by the bed, and one night the handle to their door went up and down a couple of times without opening. Sometimes, in the summer, the doors would stick so my mum got out of bed thinking that it was my brother trying to get in and he couldn't. She opened the door and he wasn't there, and when she checked him, he was fast asleep. The dog they had at the time would sleep at the top of the stairs and would follow my brother when he got up, but she was still fast asleep.

The older I got, the more uneasy I felt. I never liked going upstairs in the dark and would always walk up them with my back against the wall as the feeling of being watched from both the top and the bottom was so strong.

I never had any profoundly paranormal experiences while I lived at home, just paranoia and one occasion when my bed was shaken, but some family members visited with their young son one day and he came upstairs to play, but later refused to go down the stairs because he didn't like the old man standing at the bottom.

We never really came up with an explanation for the occurrences, but they could all be quite easily put down to imagination. I like to think that when my Nana saw my grandfather he was coming to let her know that he was the strong, healthy and proud man he used to be and was saying goodbye.