This experience is not mine, it is my mother's. However, I did play an indirect part in this. Everything I say is true and, as far as I know, accurate. My mother gave me permission to tell this story. Here we go.
My family is originally from eastern Virginia, in and around the historic area of the Middle Peninsula and the Northern Neck. When I was eighteen months to two years old, my mother and father rented a very old home in King William County in a tiny, unincorporated area called Mangohick. My parents did not really have a good marriage to say the least and, according to the both of them, were constantly fighting with each other over anything and nothing in particular. What happened next, I think, set the wheels in motion for a lot of negative activity in and around the house.
My father started to not come home for weeks on end, presumably getting boozed up and having affairs with several women. It was all over town. Of course, I was blissfully ignorant of this because of my age but it obviously hit Mom pretty hard. The fact is my father was never there to witness these things, so it was just me and Mom. What's more, on the rare occasion that he was there and she told him about it, he scoffed at her. So consequently, this is our story.
My mother loved to watch her soap operas everyday as she folded and ironed clothes. The washer and dryer were located in the basement of the house, so she would haul them upstairs to the first floor where the television was and would start to go to work, with me nearby. Well one day, at 3:05 in the afternoon to be exact, she heard something above her on the second floor. Years later she told me it sounded like heavy boots marching in place on the hardwood. Marching, not walking. She said it distinctly sounded like someone was performing a military drill of some sort because of the deliberate steps and uninterrupted tempo that was created. That day, my mother went upstairs to investigate and found nothing out of the ordinary. The next day she went through the same routine: dry the clothes, take them upstairs and go to work. At 3:05, she heard it again. It sounded like someone marching! Again, a quick investigation revealed nothing and so Mom gave up on it and went on to more important matters. Yet it happened every day that she and I were home. After a while, she told me she got used to it. There were, however, some things she never got used to.
Sometimes, usually when it was storming outside, she would hear what sounded like a window pane falling out of its casing and crash onto the floor. Of course, when she checked there was no scattered glass to speak of. She told me this would happen quite a lot, though not as regular as the marching sounds upstairs. Mom never understood why all this was going on; all the while my father was absolutely nonexistent. Other things, like the smell of freshly baked bread and honeysuckle would pervade the house. Yet my mother does not bake and, according to her, there were no honeysuckle bushes nearby. It was just weird things that, on the surface, seemed harmless and even inviting, but still did not feel quite right. She even went so far as to tell me that she always felt a negative vibe while in the home.
One day we were having lunch in the kitchen. I was sitting in my high-chair eating when, all of a sudden, I just started talking. Thinking I was talking to her, she turned around to address me and noticed that I wasn't even looking at her but was looking towards the pantry, which was apparently just behind my shoulder. I was speaking to something behind me. She told me the hair on the back of her neck started to rise as she calmly asked me who I was talking to. I told her "I'm talking to the lady in the green dress." She said that was the first time she felt really afraid in the house.
Fast-forward several months and life has been getting progressively worse for her. My father had left for good and the business she ran was not doing so well. In addition, things around the house had taken a turn for the nasty. The cat that we owned just gave birth to a litter of kittens in one of the outbuildings surrounding the house. Mom said their innocent faces, with eyes not yet open, were giving her a bit of a respite from all of the problems in her life, domestic and otherwise. She told me that both she and I would walk outside every day to spend a little time with them, just playing. One morning, weeks later, she went outside to feed the mother cat when she noticed a chilling silence upon entering the building. As she turned the corner, she saw a grisly scene. One by one, the mother cat ate her offspring. She was actually in the process of eating her last kitten when mom screamed for it to stop. Obviously, she kept this from me until years later. I have heard of this happening before, cats devouring their newborn kittens, but not at this late stage. These kittens were at least a month old. Maybe that's nature, I don't know.
The straw that broke the camel's back, however, came one night when Mom and I were sleeping in the same bed. She told me she had me sleep beside her because she didn't want me in a crib alone. I also guess she either forgave the infanticidal feline or she wanted her to hang around for protection, but either way, the cat was in bed with us as well. At around 4:00 in the morning she just woke up. She remembered thinking it was rather strange to awaken at that hour without any kind of outside stimulus, but that's what happened. As she gathered her senses, she noticed the cat at the foot of the bed start to raise her hackles and hiss at something in the corner of the room. Feeling like something negative was happening, she told me that she looked to her immediate left and saw that the bedroom wall was full of these tiny pinpoints of multicolored lights. She ruled out any outside traffic because of how the room was situated and so she stared at these lights just dancing all around the wall. She mentioned that it was kind of like if one poked a bunch of holes in a paper cup and fitted it over a flashlight and then started spinning it. These little lights were just moving on the wall. Getting angrier and more exasperated by the minute, she finally started screaming: "Get the **** out of my ******** house right now!" and "I can't take this **** anymore, why the **** are you pickin' on me and my boy!?" After several more seconds of this diatribe, it stopped. We were out of that house the next morning.
The really unbelievable part of this story happened years later, when Mom was with my new step-dad and the both of them were visiting her relatives at her parent's house in Tappahannock. A first cousin of my mother, whom she had not seen for years, was down and they were catching up on old times, when the conversation switched to the paranormal. My mother was talking about her horrible experiences in her previous home and she was describing the things that happened there when she observed her cousin looking at her in a peculiar way. She asked him if everything was alright and he affirmed that he, too, lived in a haunted house in Virginia. But he was strangely curious about what Mom had to say and he insisted that she continue. My mother resumed with her accounts and as she talked she kept noticing him out of the corner of her eye. She told me that as she recalled the events, his eyes continued to get bigger and bigger. Finally, he interrupted and asked my mother where all this took place. My Mom told him "Mangohick." Her cousin shook his head in disbelief, "Yeah, I used to live there too." My mother's jaw dropped to the floor. He said that every day, at 3:00 p.m., he would hear marching sounds coming from the second floor.
If anybody who reads this knows this house and has an idea of what happened there, please get in touch with me. I've actually did a little research on the place and I know who the current owners are, but obviously I cannot just call them up and ask them if their house is haunted. This has been on my mind for years. Thank you.
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