Haunted Townhouses At Lacey

When I left the Army, I tried to make a go of it in the state I got out in (Washington) but I soon realized that this was a mistake.

This was a very expensive place to live in and the only property I could afford to rent that would allow me to keep my dog was in the town of Lacey (effectively a suburb of Olympia) where my family moved into a townhouse.

The property itself wasn't particularly historical. Nothing had been built on it before the townhouses and prior to Lacey's founding, it'd been owned by a Catholic monastery which now doubles as a Catholic college.

The townhouses were all duplexes, set very close together, with an alley about eight feet wide between each townhouse, and a very small front yard. Most of the neighbors didn't talk to each other, though my younger daughter did make a few friends. One of the things that I noticed in the three years that I lived there (only because I couldn't afford to move) was the rate at which people would move. Next door went through three tenants. That's three people moving in and out on the house to my left and three to the right. Two families moved in and out across the street and the rest of the town was very much following the same patterns. One day while one of my former neighbors was dropping off her daughter to spend the night with my daughter, she described having heard disembodied footsteps along the stairs and voices.

In my own house things were unfortunately more interesting.

It started with footsteps, and creaks not explainable by the house settling.

Then boxes stacked very stably in the garage would suddenly fall over. It went on like that for around two years, with just little things here and there. A missing item would turn up, an item would go missing, something would tip or someone would hear something, but then it got worse, during the last year.

My oldest daughter was physically chased out of our house by an unseen force throwing books, while home alone. I know she didn't make this up.

My youngest daughter was slapped, also by an unseen force.

Doors would occasionally close, albeit not particularly dramatically.

The big one that finally sealed the deal for me, though, was the shadow man.

I awoke one night and saw the figure standing in my bedroom doorway. The door was open, despite my having closed it before I went to bed. This thing was literally darker than the darkness around it. It was like a complete absence of light in the shape of a man. There were no facial features at all. No eyes, no ears, nothing. Just perfect smooth darkness. I was completely paralyzed and unable to even make a sound and then the thing moved.

I've read other shadow man accounts since this happened, and they never seem to do the experience justice. These things seem like they are walking at a leisurely pace, and yet the way they move is impossible to describe. It's fast and very, very fluid. Nothing physical seems to obstruct them; one moment this thing was in my doorway and in another second it was next to me, with its hands around my throat, throttling me in my own bed; I could feel it, but not so much as a physical touch as a physical pressure. I have seen, done and been through some horrible things in my time and I promise you that I had no idea how afraid I could become until this particular moment. That fear seemed to boil into anger, though. I don't know if the sudden burst of outrage changed something for the shadow man but as soon as I became angry it vanished and I could move again. As strange as this sounds, I think it was a little afraid of me at that second.

About four months later my income tax came in, and I wisely used that money to move my family to our new home in Tennessee to be closer to our family. I definitely get the sense that things had been escalating and would have gotten worse if we had not moved.