My Parent's House

The house my parents and I currently live in was the house I grew up in. We moved there when I was 5. I moved out in my early 20s, but moved back a couple of years ago in a mutual agreement in which they get rent and highspeed internet and I get a place to sleep that didn't have a hole in the roof or outlets that threatened to burn the place down if I tried to charge more than one item at a time.

First a discription of the layout: the house is a single story three bedroom with a decent sized living room, one and a half bathrooms and a kitchen/dining room. We have a front door that faces the road, but we hardly use it. Instead we use the side door that enters into the dining room. When you come in the side door the small kitchen is on the right and the dining room table directly in front. Straight past the table is the hall leading to the living room, bathroom and bedrooms. The first doorway on the right of the hall is a short hall to the front door and living room. On the left is the main bathroom. The second door on the right is my brother's old room, currently my dad's music room. At the end of the hall is my parents room/half bath and off to the right of their doorway is a small offshoot to my room. We have an attic, but it's little more than a crawl space and half of it is inaccessible, the other half is used for storing Christmas decorations.

Now for the weirdness:

When we first moved in almost every night I would hear what sounded like a group of people walking around on the roof, complete with heavy footsteps and the wood creaking with every step. It sounded like one or more people were slowly pacing back and forth. It was always directly over my room. My parents didn't believe me when I told them, saying it was squirrels or the wind, but I knew what I heard.

We would go out for a family night every so often, usually out to eat and then to somewhere like Walmart, which for me and my brother at that time was a big treat. Every time we went out we would turn out all the lights in the house because my parents didn't want to waste electricity on an empty house, but whenever we got home there was always one light on, either in the kitchen or the living room. Even then I was a bit skeptical and blamed my parents for leaving the lights on to try and scare us because they were the ones who would always mention ghosts every time it happened, but they swore it wasn't them.

My room seems to be especially active. Even today I feel like someone is looking over my shoulder or is standing directly behind me when I'm on my computer. I would constantly have vivid, recurring dreams about waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. It would be pitch black and really quiet, which isn't unusual for our neighborhood, but I would get out of bed and go down the hall to the bathroom. Nothing would seem out of the ordinary, until I tried to turn on the bathroom light. Either the light would come on really dim or not at all. At first this would start making me nervous as the darkness would start feeling heavy and oppressive, but before anything could happen I would wake up. Other times I would just get frustrated at the lack of light and even tried to change the bulbs a few times before waking up. After a while it got to the point where, once I realized the light wasn't coming on I knew I was dreaming and woke myself up. I've only had one really terrifying vivid dream when I was around 9. I remember the dream, but not the events after. In the dream I was on my bed, but it was floating on a sea of arms that were reaching up trying to grab me. They were all around my bed. My parents claim that they had to come in there because I was screaming and hitting the edge of my bed with a baseball bat, but I don't remember that part.

I also used to love rearranging my furniture every so often when I was a kid. One night, after a rearranging, I was laying on my bed, which I had moved to where I could sort of see out into the hall, I saw the shadow of a young boy move down the hall from my brother's room. Thinking it was him I waited a few seconds and got up to check and possibly scare him, but when I got halfway down the hall I realized nobody was there. There are some times, even to this day, that I don't like going down the hall late at night.

As I got older and after my brother moved out the events seemed to just stop. Either that or I just wasn't paying much attention due to the usual young adult drama. After moving back in there have been a few incidents.

One night in particular was pretty bad. Not long after I moved back in I bought an old, large metal desk for a computer desk. A couple nights after I was trying to sleep and something just felt off. I kept hearing the metal of the desk ping and pop like it was flexing, only to immediately have my dresser creak like the wood was settling, which it's never done before. This continued back and forth all night, from my desk to the dresser and back and I didn't get to sleep until around 4 am.

There were two other incidences that really made me pause for a good while and think about them: The first happened in January two years ago. My parents went up to Ohio for two weeks to see my mom's family, but I couldn't go because they sprung it on me last minute and I couldn't get time off work. My mom asked me if I would put the Christmas decorations back in the attic while they were gone. Two days after they left I decided to get it over with and pulled down the attic door and folded down the steps. After getting the first few boxes ready to go up, I turned to the steps and right as I put my hand on the steps to start to climb up an image flashed through my mind. If you've ever seen the American version of the movie "The Grudge" there's a scene where a girl peeks into the attic only to be grabbed by the spirit and killed. That entire scene went through my head instantly and in full detail. I hadn't seen or even thought about that movie for years at that time so having that thought, that clear, bothered me. It was enough to make me sit down in the living room for about 30 minutes because my follow up thought immediately after that scene was "this is how I die". Fortunately the perks of being 6' is that afterwards I just stood on the bottom step and pushed the boxes up through the opening without ever having to stick my head up there.

The other event happened a couple months after. Even though I work night shift I would typically stay up during the day and sleep at night on my days off. I woke up really early one morning around 6:30-7 and saw what looked like someone with a pale white face, wearing all black sitting in my computer chair beside my bed watching me. I jumped awake only to find a pile of laundry in the chair, my black jacket hanging on the back and my black hoodie with a round, white logo hanging on the closet door behind that. I will admit that it was still fairly dark and I was half asleep at that time, but every time I run the layout through my head, none of it adds up. The hoodie with the white logo, which could have been the face, was partially blocked from my view by my computer tower at the angle I was laying. That and the fact that it was hanging too high for the logo to be where the 'person's' head was. The back of the chair with the jacket on it was also too narrow and low down to be where the shoulders were. I've accepted my explanation as-is, because it freaks me out too much to think of someone sitting in my computer chair while I'm asleep since it's less than a foot away from the edge of my bed at all times.

Those are all my experiences so far that I can remember. I asked my mom not too long ago if she had any experiences. She didn't tell me about any of her's, but she did say that my dad has seen figures go up and down the hall late at night when he's sitting in the living room alone. I'm not very close to my brother and I wish I could ask him if he ever had anything happen.