My Imagination?

My experience occurred in the early 1990's, when my family and I moved to Riverside. I was entering my junior year of high school at the time, when my parents had purchased a brand-new house that was built on a hill overlooking the 91 freeway and Corona, Riverside's neighboring city.

Per Catholic tradition, we had the house blessed, and just like most Catholic families, we went to church every Sunday, prayed the rosary, and adorned our altar with statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. At first, the vibes in the house were positive - sun shining through the many windows, cool breeze wafting in and rustling the horizontal blinds, and the smell of plugged-in Glade scent dispensers filling your nose as you walked upstairs.

As time passed, the atmosphere in the house got negative, as we would constantly argue and get into physical altercations, mostly between me and my brother, who I'll call "Leo". It got so bad that I threatened to kill Leo if he didn't stop hitting me. Tempers flared, and we (the family) were almost always angry with each other on a daily basis.

This may have started the weird things that happened in the house. Though I never saw or witnessed anything, I did hear something that scared me during the daytime. I was home alone after school, and I remember sitting by the living room window and looking outside, waiting for my parents to come home from work. Suddenly, I heard my parents' bedroom door that was closed, banging softly at first (their room was upstairs, directly in view of the living room), then a "boom BOOM BOOM!" Mind you, the windows in their room and throughout the house were all shut. The AC was not on at the time. It's as if whatever was in there was trying to get out. This was the only time I heard and experienced this.

Some of my family members have also had their experiences as well. My youngest brother felt as if something was staring at him while he was running on the treadmill at night, then follow him wherever he went through the house. A cousin of mine was staying over one summer while my brothers and I were in summer school. She got up one morning, went downstairs to watch TV, and heard the sound of footsteps in my parents' room (the family room was directly below my parents' room). She peeked through the blinds and didn't see any evidence of someone trying to break in the house. For five minutes, she said, the footsteps continued as if someone was pacing back and forth. She was waiting for the bedroom door to open, but it didn't. She and her brother were the only ones in the house at the time, and he was fast asleep in Leo's room downstairs.

It wasn't until we moved out that we stopped being angry with each other. These were the only experiences we've had in the house. I've heard rumors from the neighborhood kids that little children were murdered and eaten by coyotes on the hill, and that the land the houses was built on was once a Native American burial ground. I'm not sure if that's true, but I do know that down the hill along Indiana Avenue, there is an Indian cemetery... I've also heard stories from classmates who live down the hill about their own experiences in their houses, but that will be a story for another time.