New Bedroom With An Old House Guest

When I was 5 we moved interstate. After spending some time living at my Grandma's we moved into our own house when I was 6, going on 7. The house was spacious and on a decent sized block of land. It backed onto bushland and the street was a cul-de-sac, which Mum and Dad felt it was ideal for 3 children to play and feel safe. Which it was. There was a number of other children that lived on the street. They used to ride past when my brother and I were playing out the front and tell us our house was haunted. It was a fair cop. We had just moved in and they were just hazing the new kids. We had seen enough TV to not take them seriously.

Even though the house was quite spacious Mum and Dad really wanted to do renovations and extensions. My sister got her own room, but my older brother and I shared a room. Which was fine while we were 6 and 9 years old, but as we got older we would need our own space. So Mum and Dad went about knocking through the end of the hallway and converting the double port garage into one large room, in hopes of turning into 2 smaller rooms with a dividing wall; one for each of us. Renovations being what they are; it was a very long process. The dividing wall never came. So my brother and I continued to share a room. A room the size of a double port garage at the end of the house. It doesn't sound so bad, probably even ideal for 2 brothers of such a close age; but this is when the problems started.

I am the youngest of our family, the baby if you will. I always played up to that. I was a little sooky, very imaginative and the darling center of attention. Despite this I was never really scared of the dark, or a fraidy cat. If I was it was an act to be cute. I always knew I was safe with my faith, my big brother, my even bigger sister and my parents. Monsters were the stuff of stories, there was nothing under my bed and nightmares were just bad dreams... Until I moved into that bigger room.

By the time we moved into the room I must have been 8. Too old to start being scared of the dark, and too old to start having nightmares. But going to sleep in that room gave me a sense of dread. I was even uncomfortable being alone in there. I began having very intense, demonic nightmares. When I awoke, screaming from these nightmares the experience would continue. Visions, hallucinations, voices and feelings of dread and discomfort. I would for weeks and months at a time refuse to sleep in the room. I would move into the living room where I would sleep just fine. Mum and Dad would pray in the room, and slowly coax me back in there, but it would start again. It continued long into my mid-teens. Bless my brother for his patience.

I don't know how to explain it yet, but the cause of my distress didn't always seem to come from the same source. As if there were multiple entities that occupied the space. 2 specific encounters I can tell you about will definitely help explain one aspect of that was going on. One night I awoke from a nightmare in which I was being dragged to hell from my bedroom, and down the hallway. I was screaming for help from my family but they couldn't see or hear me. When I awoke, I didn't start screaming straight away. I felt odd and surreal. I looked down the end of my bed and saw a figure crouched in front of my wardrobe. I reasoned that this was my mother putting socks away in my drawer. She often did the laundry after the kids had gone to bed. But why was she doing it so late at night? I called out to the figure, "Mum?". The figure stood and turned around and walked to the end of my bed, and looked at me with a featureless face. It then turned around and walked through the door.

The second encounter that I feel was related to this one happened some time later, and more around the time when the experiences stopped. I was about 14. I awoke, not for any reason in particular, but I awoke. Laying on my back, looking up at the ceiling. I could clearly see a figure floating above me. It's head was above my chest, and his body was perpendicular to me, a 90 degree angle off the side of the bed. Now, the figure wasn't facing me. He was facing the ceiling, and he had his arms in the air, waving slowly in front of him. I burst out of my bed and the apparition disappeared.

My parents never gave into my experiences, they didn't want to feed my imagination. Same with my brother. The neighborhood kids, once we got to know them, never denied our house was haunted. Even friends that my parents made in the area had heard stories of our house. 'A house painter that was paid to paint the house before it was put on the market had quit because his equipment kept moving.' Things like that.

I was old enough to start collecting information myself. As it turns out one of the previous tenants of the house died in the garage. The garage that was now my room. He died working on his car when the jack failed and his car crushed him. Where my bed was situated in the room was where a car would have been parked had it still been a garage. To add a little poetry to the story - my bed was a car bed...