Is It Haunted?

I have lived in the same house my entire life and during this time I have had 1 concrete paranormal experience and a chain of other strange but possibly explainable experiences, I will share them now and look forward to reading through everyone's comments!

I will start by mentioning that although I strongly believe in the paranormal I do believe that in a lot of cases there is a reasonable non-paranormal explanation. The first experience I will share I have never been able to debunk, no matter how hard I have tried I have never been able to find any non-paranormal explanation. So with that in mind I will share my first encounter.

I was about 6 or 7 at the time and was awoken in the early hours of the morning by a huge thunderstorm. I was a bit scared of sleeping on my own so after a few minutes I ended up running into my parent's room at the opposite end of the house. I will mention that after running through the house to my parent's room I was definitely wide awake and very aware. I woke up my mum and convinced her to come and sleep with me in my bed, at least until the storm had passed. She happily agreed and we began walking back to my bedroom when she decided she needed to use the toilet. Being a little spooked by the storm I decided to wait outside the toilet with my back facing the door so I could still feel close to my mum. After a few moments I noticed a black 'thing' move past my left hand side and move to directly in front of me. Now the best way to describe this thing is that it looked exactly like a person in the dark. It had the exact shape and movements of person and seemed quite solid; it was not at all transparent. Just imagine when you come home at night and all the lights are off, and there is someone standing in front of you, that is exactly what this thing looked like.

Anyway as I said this thing resembled a person so I immediately thought it was my mum but though it strange that she did not flush the toilet or make any noise leaving the toilet. Before I had the chance to think about it too much about it the 'thing' that I thought was my mother began moving forward at walking pace. I began to follow it as it moved towards the kitchen. As I was following it I definitely had a strange feeling, a sense that something was off, similar to the feeling you get when you are walking home late a night and pass a shifty alley way. I initially attributed this feeling to being riled up from the storm that was still raging outside.

I continued to follow this thing into the kitchen, expecting it to stop at the fridge and get a drink (my mum often wakes up at night and gets a drink of water) but it didn't stop it continued through the kitchen and into the laundry where it suddenly disappeared. I stood at the doorway of the laundry squinting into the darkness trying to find where the thing went, that was when I hard the toilet flush... Terrified I sprinted back to my mum and immediately told her what had happened. She woke my dad up who did a check of the house and found nothing. Putting it down to a wild imagination she put me back to sleep.

Since then I have had a string of smaller experiences that are worth mentioning. When I was in high school I would often stay up until 3 and 4am in the morning and I would often hear the toilet paper roll in the toilet being used but no one was ever in the toilet. There would also sometimes be the sound of a light switch turning on but no actual light would ever come on or turn off. I also had a couple of experiences where I had lost something and it would suddenly turn up again. I had lost my hockey socks and was searching my sock draw for them, I pulled every pair of socks out of my draw and put them all back in, no hockey socks to be found. I left my room and immediately came back only to find the socks sitting in the draw in plain sight.

I also went through a period of time where I was terrified to be in the house alone. If I ever was in the house alone I would usually end up sitting in the driveway just so I didn't have to be in the house. Off course this could have been put down to my own imagination scaring myself!

Once I was in college my sister moved into the bedroom that was opposite mine. We both had Macintosh computers and when you turn the volume up or down it would make a very distinctive popping noise. I would often hear the pooping noise and angrily go into my sister's room and tell her to stop fiddling with the volume, she was always either sound asleep or wide awake claiming that she hasn't touched the volume controls but heard the noise and assumed it was me.

The last strange occurrence was one night when I was home alone I walked though the house and noticed that the laundry door leading to the garage was open (I was sure it had been closed only minutes before). Now the door itself is a bit tricky and hard to close, but I can't recall it ever opening on its own, in saying that it is likely that nothing paranormal opened the door. I walked to the door to close it and as I approached I noticed my dog was standing just outside the door, with an arched back staring into the garage. I have never seen her like this she looked terrified and was definitely focusing on something. I quickly called her into the house and closed and locked the door. The two weird things about that experience was my dogs behaviour and the fact that I had this strange sense of calm, usually in that situation I would have armed myself with a knife or hockey stick and ran terrified to my grandma's house who lives on the same street as us. But for some reason something told me I didn't need to be afraid.

The only other thing I can share about my house is that my sister was once doing her foundation in her room and she dropped the bottle of foundation on the floor and it rolled under the lounge. She immediately looked under the lounge but couldn't find the foundation despite seeing it roll under. She went to the bathroom to get a different foundation and on her return found the foundation that she had dropped sitting on a shelf in her room.

My sister and I are the only ones who have ever experienced anything in the house, which is also strange because there are 3 other family members currently living there. If anyone has any ideas as to what could be going on that would be amazing! As I said I try to always remain sceptical so with the exception of the first experience I am sure all the other ones could have a reasonable explanation. I look forward to your comments!

Thanks J