The Beginning Of My Living Nightmare

This is my first story on this site and I apologize if I'm not the greatest storyteller. I just wanted to share what has been going on pretty much my whole life. This may have to be done in multiple stories but I'll get what I can into this...

Just some background info, the house we live in was designed and built by my mother so it's not as if the house is old, it's only about 16 years old. The land was owned by two couples before my parents bought it. The first couple had divorced due to personal issues and the second couple had also divorced and gone through financial hardship.

Previous to the area becoming a residential hotspot it had been rumoured to be a dumping ground for bodies the mob had taken out... Though I never really believed that. The house is a huge Queenslander style house halfway up the street on a hill and at the back of the property there are no fences for the backyard and it backs onto a forest. Now that that's all been explained let me get onto the weirdness...

When we first moved into the house, it was barely developed and I was about 6 years old. My bedroom was upstairs at the end of a long corridor at the back of the house where a view of the creepy forest was always visible from my window. I loved having a room of my own away from my two younger brothers, but before I could relish in my new-found privacy my joy was turned into a fear of the very room I was given to enjoy.

At night it started out as knocking from the roof, which seems simple enough but we didn't have an attic or anything. There was really nothing that could have been in there besides a carpet python (being Australia) but they didn't knock.

After a month or two the knocking stopped but instead every night I would hear footsteps walk down the corridor towards my door, loud footsteps as if someone were wearing work boots. I would hide my head under the covers and occasionally peek out at the empty hallway while still hearing the footsteps that would stop at my open door.

Unfortunately closing the door didn't help block it out, in fact as soon as I did this it got worse. The footsteps came down the hallway as they did every night but I convinced myself not to hide because my door was closed and to me that was equivalent to having a shield. The footsteps stopped at my door and I expected it to disappear the same way the sound had always done but to my absolute horror instead knocks happened on the door. I know what you're thinking, it could have just been my parents. Well my mum was a silent person, gliding about the house quietly and my father barely ever looked at me back in those days, to put it mildly he hated me.

As soon as the knocks sounded I had started shaking uncontrollably. I remember only because I remember thinking that whatever was out there would hear my shaking and find me. Then the door opened. Nothing was there and I started to relax slightly and sat up in my bed only for the door to violently slam itself closed again. I remember screaming and running to my mum who used to sleep on the bottom bunk of my youngest brother's bed because of my father's snoring. She let me sleep there for that night but encouraged me to go back to my bed the night after, telling me it was a night terror like the ones I used to have as an infant. This was how I became a mild insomniac.

The knocks, footsteps and the door opening continued, only occasionally slamming shut. This went on for a while before mum actually witnessed anything weird enough for her to believe me.

In the following months after the accident I had begun seeing these cats around the house, we didn't own them and they weren't exactly 'there'. I had turned 7 by this point and had started getting counselling for the nightmares I had when I did actually sleep.

I was at home with the flu when my mum was cleaning the kitchen and suddenly gasped. I looked up from the couch in the living room, thinking she had nearly dropped something in the kitchen but instead I found her staring at the area beside her foot with a shocked expression. At the time she refused to explain what had startled her but later I had managed to get it out of her that she had seen one of the cats that I had been telling her about for ages. Needless to say she began believing me after that.

I believe it was soon after these incidents that the real twisted stuff started happening to not only me but my mum and youngest brother...

Fast forward to me at 8 years old. My parents had just divorced and I'd received spinal injury from my father on Xmas eve for 'looking for santa' when really I had been following a strange sound in the house. By this point I had become gutsy enough to ignore the simple strange things such as the footsteps, the knocks, the door, the cats and even the added electrical faults that seemed to happen exceedingly often. For instance, the light would turn itself off when I had just turned it on, my fan would turn on and off multiple times a day when I never touched it, preferring to open a window or something and the TV was prone to changing channels by itself. Now though I had a worse problem to deal with; the solid shadows.

They would appear at the end of my bed, in my doorway or occasionally when I wanted to go get a midnight glass of water they would be waiting in the middle of the hall barring my way and causing me to leap back into bed and hide in terror until the morning light could be seen streaming in through my window. I told my mum, but she wasn't living with us at the time and my Dad wasn't someone I could talk to, he would sooner belt me into a coma for 'telling lies'. It didn't help that my nightmares were getting worse, sometimes waking me up gasping for breath, screaming or crying hysterically. And every time I woke from a nightmare there would be a shadow waiting for me like some deviant torturer watching his masterpiece unfold.

During this time the youngest of my brothers (age 4 at the time) had begun nervous twitches whenever something weird happened and would often get caught staring at areas that had nothing in them as though he was watching a spider crawl towards him. It was his bedroom I would hide in on nights I couldn't convince myself to sleep in my own. I told him about the shadows even though he was so young because I wanted someone to tell me they saw them too so I would know I wasn't imagining it all, but as soon as I made mention of them he just stared at me with huge eyes and nodded so I assumed he had seen them too.

Having just spoken to him not long ago now that we are older (him being 18) he has informed me that he experienced a lot of strange things even after I moved out for a bit. I have now moved back in and my mother lives there now and my brother is living with our father. But at the time my guess is that he had been too scared to say anything about the weirdness of our home after seeing how I was dealt with for mentioning it.

In the years that passed a lot more scary stuff happened, way worse than this, but this story is already too long and I'm having trouble tying all my experiences together so they make sense to other people so I'll leave the rest for another entry.

If anyone has experienced anything as hectic as all this in one household please feel free to comment. I am currently living in the same house and weird stuff has just started up again so that's why I'm posting my experiences on here, hoping someone else can explain what is so wrong with my house...

I'd like to get this all sorted out before it affects our new housemates too badly, or my fiancé...