I don't have an exact date for this next account. I do know it happened late 2008 or early 2009. When I sat down at my computer tonight (April 20, 2016) I had not planned to write this. I am not sure I ever planned to write it. This account lasted or recurred for several weeks.
Shortly after the dog attacked my daughter I started feeling as if someone was always next to me. Sort of just hanging around.
Someone I could not see. This feeling was not warm and caring but dark and mocking. It terrified me but I can't say exactly why. I can't remember it actually ever doing anything.
I had that uneasy feeling as if someone or something was about to grab me. My awareness was always heightened. I was always on guard. I refused to stay in the house alone. I refused to sleep with the bedroom door closed or the light off unless my husband was home in bed with me.
Almost instantly when I would lay my head on my pillow at night, I would hear what sounded like whispers. I would strain my ears as hard as I could but I couldn't make out any words. At first it was just a few but gradually each night there would be more. It sounded as if there was a lot of excitement behind the whispers. An urgency. It sounded as if there were hundreds of people in my bedroom all talking at one time, whispering. They went on for hours until I either fell to sleep or gave up on sleeping and got out of bed. For the next several weeks I was a nervous wreck, day and night.
A few nights I didn't hear the whispering. I think maybe those nights I was just so exhausted I didn't pay attention to them. The nights that I was able to quickly fall to sleep were a whole other story.
When I slept it wasn't unusual to get woken up by someone whispering in my ear. Just a soft whisper. I felt sure it was the whisper of a child. When I would open my eyes of course no one was there. However each time I would smell a lavender scent. A couple of nights I woke my husband up and he too could smell it.
Each day I was like a mad person searching my perfumes, air fresheners, cleaning supplies, everything in my house trying to find something, just one thing that contained lavender. I never found anything containing that scent. I seriously thought I was losing my mind.
My husband never heard the whispers but during this time he was having nightmares. The first one - he was walking near a lake when he suddenly heard a person screaming for help. He realized the person was in the water and they were in trouble. He pulled his shoes off and jumped in, swimming towards them. When he got close enough, he saw that it was me. He tried to save me from drowning but each time he got close enough to touch me, I disappeared under the water. Another nightmare, he being near some form of water with many people. A child was in the water. That's all he remembers of this one. The nightmares shook him up to the point of feeling depressed for days afterwards.
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Forty-Five years earlier...
In 1963, early September, at the age of two and a half, I almost drowned. My family and I had gone for a ride in my father's newly acquired car. The roads were dirt so pretty soon the car was a mess. At one point he drove across the bridge of a small creek. My father, being the lovable lunatic he always was, had this fantastic idea of washing his car in the creek.
The creek was shallow with a rock bottom. So my mother allowed us children (3 of us) to play in it. She sat on the bank with our newborn baby sister. My brother had gotten a beach ball from the car and threw it in the water. He quickly forgot about the ball after discovering a crawfish coming out of its hole. The ball began to float farther out. I followed it. Suddenly I was under water. I could hear my brother behind me saying, "Stand up, Sissy." I remember hearing my mother scream, then my father was plucking me out of the water.
For years I thought this was a false memory. After all I was 2 and a half. And perhaps it could be that I've heard the accounts of that day from a family member. However what I can't shake and has nagged me for a good deal of my life, is what I saw under the water. This is the account I tried to tell my grandmother about when I was four. She told me I was evil and Godly people don't see things such as this.
When I was under the water I saw other kids. Kids just standing around (under the water). Was it a real paranormal experience or just a little kid's imagination? I don't know.
I've told you about the near drowning because I believe it had something to do with the whispers and my husband's nightmares.
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2008/2009
After so many weeks of not getting much sleep I finally had enough. One night my husband was working later than usual. I was in bed alone. That night the whispers sounded more urgent as if they badly wanted my attention. I sat up in bed and screamed, "Go away! This is my house. You don't belong here." I remember feeling so hopeless. Shortly after that I cried myself to sleep. The next morning when I awoke I felt as if things had changed. But I wasn't sure until that night when I lay my head on my pillow and I didn't hear the whispers. Nothing woke me that night. The dark thing, I don't know when it left, I think maybe it followed the whisperers. Or maybe Hell finally had enough room for it.
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April 22, 2016
When I quit writing this story two nights ago, I thought that was the end of it. But apparently writing all of this down jogged my memory.
My oldest daughter came to visit today. We had a lazy day just lying around (literally). I had a headache due to allergies the past few days so I lay on my bed while she sat on the other side. We talked about the story I had just finished writing. She's the first person I've ever told this story to in its entirety. We talked about some amazing photos she had taken. I drifted off to sleep.
I slept for about 20 minutes. I'm always saying, I do my best thinking while I'm asleep, yet again this has proved true. I woke up shaking barely able to speak. My daughter kept asking if I was ok. What came to me while I was asleep was that my grandmother had lived in this very house, my house, for a short time.
I know it sounds crazy that I would have never thought about it all these years and I can't even began to explain why I didn't. Maybe in some twisted way I wasn't suppose to until now.
Years ago I had a cousin who owned this house. She and her husband bought it around 1988. They only lived here for 3 years if that before they lost the house to foreclosure. Our grandmother lived with them for about 6 months.
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And now about my grandmother. She was a cold person. And she could be down right mean. That's not to say I never saw her be sort of nice but mostly she was just mean. When I was 6, my mother delivered a stillborn baby boy. Grandmother came to take care of us kids while mother was in the hospital. She insisted on washing my hair. I was screaming, I was still terrified of water from the near drowning. She in her hatefulness decided to teach me a lesson, I guess. She filled the sink full of water and held my head under. My older sister who was 12 at that time, screamed for her to stop. She let go of my head and walked out of the bathroom.
Later that evening when our father came home we all wanted nothing more than to run to him and tell him what his mother had done. We didn't because when he walked into the door we could see something was wrong.
I remember hearing my grandmother ask him why he was so upset, then saying he had enough kids to feed already. It was years later before I understood what she had meant.
My grandmother died September 2, 1996. Fifteen days before my family and I moved into this house. I did not attend her funeral. As horribly as I hate to admit it I remember thinking, I hope she rots in hell.
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I know it's going to take some time for me to sort all of this out, I've already got a pretty good idea but I welcome all thoughts and opinions.
I'm so thankful that I found this site. Without it I would have never sat down and wrote this story. I'm on the fence to whether submitting it to total strangers is a good idea; however, my daughter says she thinks it will finally bring closure.
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My thoughts regarding the bad dog and your experiences after - perhaps the dog took the brunt of the whispers, noises, strange touches and became a mean, nervous wreck because of the constant attention.
(Afterthought: Could it have been the blue eyed boy playing with an unwilling participant?)
Once the dog was put down, the whispers, etc refocused on you, causing your anxiety, frustration with the lavender, falling asleep only when you were completely exhausted and so on. Had you not been able to yell knock it off, you may have become as irritable as the dog before he was put down.
(Maybe someone was upset the dog was gone? You put the dog down.)
I agree with the comment regarding your husband's Freudian dream of saving you from drowning. There may be another layer there too, like an actual drowning, but it seems like your anxiety was fueling his and it emerged this way.
Maybe the events don't pick up because you are talking about them, but instead you're switching your denial lens to observing lens and noticing more. Same with the memory recall, the more you remember the more you remember. One memory tends to lead to more.
Seems like some spirits are passing through, like grandma the bad word stopping in to trigger some memories, while the other half seem stuck in the house, like the blue eyed boy or the man in the corner of the kitchen.
The trick is sorting out who is passing through and who is staying. Grandma was clearly passing through. The man in the kitchen corner seems to be staying and he seems to not like dogs. One went feral for whatever reason, the other are both terrified of their own shadows, and him.
Sorry to focus so much on the dogs - just seems like the situation was tolerable until the catalyst of the bite changed everything.
Back to thinking about the ice cream truck. Oh hey - what if the blue eyed boy was mad about the dog and the ice cream truck (which I find totally creepy) was designed to be intentionally upsetting because he was mad? Wake up the entire house with 'turkey in the hay,' a song from the 1800's which would fit with him - the era, the annoyance, the ice cream, etc. - and terrify everyone. Seems like reasonable 'revenge' of a 4 year old.