House Of True Horror

This event took place from 2007 to 2009, when I was living with my boyfriend at the time, let's call him Fred. We rented the most adorable (or so I thought) two story about an hours drive from Portland. It was everything I wanted in a place to put down roots: decent amount of land, nice area, nice layout, probably more space than the 2 of us really needed but seeing as there were talks of marriage, we didn't find it inappropriate to hope that the extra space could come to some use in the future. Add in the fact that there was a beautiful creek running through the backyard, and it was positively perfect.

Fred and I moved in without any hiccups. As he worked steady and I didn't (I am a makeup artist but during the first few weeks of moving in, it was super slow) I was left alone most days to unpack and decorate as I saw fit. I am extremely, extremely visual and didn't want his "crappy boy taste" spoiling the vision I had for this home, so I was really on cloud nine having the place to myself all day. This was our first time living together so I was enjoying playing housewife and having dinner ready for him upon his return. We were the picture perfect relationship. We never fought. Never. Yep, those weeks were pretty blissful. Until they werent.

It started pretty subtly. Hearing footsteps and voices. Feeling cold spots. The hairs on the back of your neck standing right up. I attributed most of this to just us "getting a feel for this house's personality" and left it at that. This level of activity continued, unchanged, for months. Then I began to get the feeling I was being watched. At first I thought I was being stalked (well, in a way I was) or that I had a peeping tom. I routinely scoured my property for any sign that anyone had been there. Footprints in the mud, tiretracks that don't belong, cigarette butts, etc. Every search came back empty handed. Still, the thought of it being paranormal never entered my mind because at the time I didn't believe in it.

Then, I started smelling what smelled like burning hair. When I'd ask Fred about it, he could never smell it. Around this time, I decided to take time off from work because I started having some pretty bad health issues (constant back pain, migraine headaches, and I was frequently nauseated and vomiting) and yes, I had myself completely evaluated by a physician (actually, during this time I was seeing a few drs a month trying to figure this out) and everything came back normal. So I would be home all day and intermittently throughout the day, I smelled this foul burning hair smell. It really started getting to me because I thought maybe some animal or someone kept hurting themselves (I had read a story about some woman repeatedly burning her sons arm with her flatiron. It unrelated, but that's what I thought until I realized that my closest neighbors are at least 50ft away. Then awhile after that, I started smelling rosewater in certain spots in the house. After trying to debunk these smells, and not being able to, I just decided to live with them.

But here is where things begin that I can't quite live with. One night, late at night I was downstairs in the kitchen, and Fred was upstairs in the home office. I was washing dishes in the sink and had the window open so I could listen to the soothing sounds of my beautiful creek. I had my head bowed, looking down at the sink when something from my peripheral vision caught my attention: the motion-censor light from the backyard went on so I looked up and came face to face with a pale, hooded man at my window. I screamed bloody murder, fell to the floor, and dropped the cassarole dish I had been scrubbing which was now a million pieces just beyond my knees. Fred heard and immediately rushed downstairs to find me half screaming/half sobbing and pointing at the backyard. The explanation I gave, I believe, was unintelligible but he must have heard enough of what I said to run out the back door and give chase to whoever it was. It wasn't until he ran off that I realized: not only was what I saw just a head, no body, it was also not opaque. This realization floored me. Up until that point, I didn't believe in ghosts. Well, it wasn't so much that I didn't believe as I had my own share of experiences before this. It was more that I thought, well, maybe these things can be explained by ordinary means. I didn't feel strongly one way or the other. Before this period in my life, I went through periods of strong belief, usually after I experienced something, but nothing resonated with me the way this did. I guess the right thing to say is that this experience is what truly put me in the camp of "believers".

A couple days after seeing the pale face is when the doors started moving on their own (specifically the door to the storage space under the stairs that we converted to pantry). It would open, close, you name it. I tried debunking this but was unable to. It was inconceivable that this could happen. It never happened the entire time we lived there until this point, and it never happened when there were windows open or a draft. A few times, the door would open with such force, it actually left dents in the door to the garage.

I brought up every event to Fred, who hadn't experienced a thing, and he dismissed it as an overactive imagination. We had begun to fight and bicker during this time. Not about the activity, about EVERYTHING. I had known the guy for years and we never fought - it wasn't our style. We were great communicators and were always able to sort out our differences.

It was during one of our nights at home together that he decided to introduce me to a show on TV that he sometimes watched called Ghost Hunters. Up until he introduced me to it, I'd never heard of it or any show like it. But considering what I had been experiencing, I watched with a particular curiosity. It was here that I picked up techniques for trying to communicate with whatever was in my house. I learned about EVP in particular. I had a lot of the equipment available to me because Fred went to school to learn to make movies so he had all sorts of cameras and sound equipment. While he was at work one day, I decided to whip out the voice recorder and do an EVP session. My very first session I didn't get any responses but the one I did about 2 hours after the first was clear and chilled me to the bone. It said my name, "kill her" and "die, b*tch!" After hearing that, I broke down. I was sitting in my living room sobbing and asking it what the hell it wanted.

Soon after this, Fred began drinking. Heavily. He had never had one sip of alcohol the entire time I knew him because his father's alcoholism ruined his childhood and ultimately killed his father. In fact, I would sometimes have a single glass of wine or a cocktail (its important to note that I only drank a couple times a year, only 1 to 2 drinks a night, and I have never done drugs nor was I on any prescription medication) when we went to a nice restaurant and even then I could never get him to take a single sip. The worst part is, he began drinking, driving home, then belittling me or even going as far as putting his hands on me. He was an evil drunk. And this was so not the Fred I knew. This Fred scared me to the point that I didn't want to be under the same roof with him anymore.

After his drinking was well under way, I started waking up with scratches on my arms, hips, and sometimes my stomach. It was always sets of three. Even with all of the activity going on, I still wondered if I could be doing it in my sleep or even if Fred could be doing it to me while he slept. I set up one of his video cameras on a tripod to film us while we slept to see if these scratches could be explained. What I saw shocked me. Not only did I notice that on the nights I got scratched, neither of us touched me on the affected areas (and in the case of my hips, I find it really hard to believe that either Fred or I stuck hands down my pants or up my shirt in order to scratch the skin as these weren't scrapes, they were deep scratches) but I also noticed that on the nights I was scratched, a dark shadow appeared on camera by my side of the bed. It was slightly bigger than a person would be and the silhouette wasn't quite human. The proportions were a little off but there wasn't much detail aside from that because it was just a black mass. And every night I got scratched, the door to the bedroom would open (it was off camera but in the tape you could see the light from the hall get brighter from the door being opened) and then, after the door opened, you could see the shadow cross to my side of the bed, and some nights the blankets would move on their own and sometimes strands of my hair could be seen moving on their own. My hair would tuck itself behind my ear or peices would defy gravity and lift themselves up and stay that way for a few moments. I showed the tapes to Fred and he refused to acknowledge that something unexplained was happening. I could tell by the look on his face that he was starting to believe me and that he was growing afraid, but for whatever reason he couldn't say the words.

It was at this point that my growing lonliness took over. I felt so alienated from Fred, like he was no longer on my side. Later, I came to the realization that this was exactly what this entity wanted. It wanted us to feel seperate from each other so that we were more vulnerable. I believe now that so much of how Fred and I treated each other was the result of being manipulated by some unseen force (especially considering how out of character some of it was. But at the time, I didn't realize this. The only thing I knew was how alone and hurt I felt. I decided to call my grandmother and invite her to come stay with us for a week or two. She always loved staying with us (she never stayed at this house, but she had visited) because she enjoyed the company and because she was in such poor health, she enjoyed having someone cooking for her. I didn't tell her about any of the activity because I thought if she knew, she wouldn't come stay. But on the phone she said that she would never come stay with us while we lived there. She told me she wasn't comfortable being there and that the house was evil. I decided to call my mom and see if maybe she would stay and she agreed. During her stay, she asked me constantly what was wrong. She noticed both Fred and I weren't our usual selves and we didn't get along. She told me she saw the love leaving the relationship. I never told her about how he started drinking, about him hitting and kicking me occasionally, or about the activity. On one particularly low night during her stay, I confessed everything. The shocking thing was, although she wasn't much of a believer in ghosts, she believed me. She also said she had witnessed shadows, doors opening/closing, and heard voices. She had wanted to bring it up to me but thought it must have been her imagination. Finally, someone took my concerns seriously. I didn't feel quite so isolated.

Two days later, my mom and I were in my bathroom (which along with my bedroom, coincidentally sits right above the pantry, where most of the activity centered around). I was giving her a facial and planning to do her makeup because she insisted on getting me out of the house (catching a movie and going to an early dinner) to lift my spirits. She and I were doing the whole girl-talk thing: laughing, gossiping about her jerk of a boss and idiot coworkers. For the first time in a while, I felt some of the tension ease. And right when I let my guard down, it got me. A heavy bottle of hair conditioner flew out of my shower and hit me at the base of the skull. It struck with enough force to knock me off my feet (and while I am 5'7, I am fairly thin, with delicate bones, so I guess it wouldn't take a ton of effort to knock me over. But still, it did hit pretty hard.) I fell onto my mom but the only thing I remember is lying on the floor just outside the bathroom, with my mom screaming my name. I had never seen that amount of fear in her eyes before. When I felt okay to walk, she hurried me out of the house, into the car, then ran back inside to collect our purses and odds and ends. A few minutes later, we arrived at the Emergency Room, with me confused in the passenger seat because I still didn't entirely know what had happened to me. My mother gave the ER doctor some story about how I fell, which I went along with because I couldn't recall what really happened. I doubt the doctor believed her story at first, but he certainly didn't when he lifted my gown and saw the 3 deep gashes in my shoulder blade that looked like claw marks. I didn't know they were there before he noticed them and after he did, he kept asking, "are you sure you fell?" What was I going to say, "no, doc, I was attacked by a ghost"? He found that, in addition to the scratches, I had a concussion. He told me everything I needed to do like rest/relax but not go to sleep for a few hours, etc. And when he left the room, I asked my mom what happened. She asked me what I remembered and I told her I just remembered feeling this incredible pain at the back of my neck and then the next thing I remembered was being on the floor, my mom cradling my head in her hands, and yelling my name. It was at this point that she told me I was hit in the back of the head by a bottle that flew out of my shower. She said she saw the whole thing, from the moment it flew out of the shower until it hit me. She said it was like it was slow motion. She said she tried to warn me or move me out of the way but it was like she was paralyzed. I just sat mute in that ER gurney as, understandably, it was a lot to take in. After I was discharged, my mom brought me back to her place, she thought it would be wise for me to recoup in a less stressful environment. However, later that evening, Fred called me yelling that the bathroom was trashed. He thought I had done it and called me a "crazy b*tch". My mom drove me over immediately to assess the damage. The place was a wreck. There were products strewn about (like makeup, toothpaste, etc.) And most were open and the products inside were spilled. There was broken eyeshadow and lipstick ground into the rug. The shower curtain was torn down. There wasn't an inch of bare floor except in the middle of the floor, the same bottle of conditioner that I had been hit with stood upright and there was probably about 6 inches of bare floor all around it. Everything else was ruined. My mom pulled Fred aside and told him everything that had happened that day and how the place was spotless when we left except the bottle I was hit with was left on its side a few feet from where it now stood. He calmed down a bit when he realized I wasn't responsible and the three of us eventually got the mess cleaned up. Mom left shortly after and invited me to come with, but I felt my place was with Fred trying to repair our relationship.

Shortly after, I found out Fred had been cheating on me for a couple of months. While I do believe a lot of it was due to the influence the entity had over our lives (because if you knew this guy, you would know that its so not like him to do something like that) I still refuse to tolerate infidelity. I didn't suspect it, though I should have because over time he became so closed off and guarded and dishonest. He changed all the passwords to his email, facebook, he put a password on his phone. We had always been so open and honest towards each other prior to this (we thought nothin of it to share our passwords, use each others phone or email) so it was such a shock to me. I kicked him out of the house, put all of his belongings on the lawn, and had the locks changed. I also took enjoyment from the fact that it rained that day and ruined his xbox and other things.

I finished out the lease (which luckily was up only a couple of weeks after that) but usually stayed at my moms house. I only really went back there to pack but was still tormented by voices, laughter, things moving, and shadows. I got this feeling of accomplishment from it, like it had won somehow. When my lease was about to be up, however, mom came by to help me move my stuff to storage. Not having found a place yet, we decided I would just stay with her until I found one.

The very last night I set foot in that house, it was the end of moving day. We had been seeing shadows following us around all day but were just trying to ignore it. When the place was almost empty, we started hearing sobs. It sounded like sobs from a small child. We ignored it and got the last of my stuff into the truck. Then, my mom and I went back inside for a final look around to make sure we didn't forget anything. As we were coming down the stairs we heard the sobs again and then heard the voice of what sounded like a little girl say ever so faintly, "please don't go". I asked my mom if she heard it and she nodded. Then the same voice said, "please save me from the dark man" (at least we are pretty sure that's what it said. The voice was so faint that I can't be positive). After we heard that, we booked it out of the house. I had never heard anything that resembled the voice of a small child until that point. Part of me believes it was that other being instead.

So we left that house and haven't been back since. Part of me feels that if I didn't leave then, I never would have. I've had many experiences since then and done a lot of research and I now know how to protect myself and handle those situations better. But I will never forget the time spent in that house.

Side note: I ran into a lady that was one of my neighbors when I lived in that house. She told me that the people across the cul-de-sac from me had been participating in summoning and devil worship practices. I will always wonder if this had any influence on the things I experienced in that house.

I have left the house (and the state, actually) so I don't need advice on how to deal with it. I am just curious if anyone knows what this is.