A Big Family Holiday

I went on holiday a few months ago. Some pretty weird stuff happened, but after talking to the rest of my family and friends, I realised I wasn't the only one to notice.

I went to a house near Devon. It was quite big and had a lot of rooms to accommodate all of us. There was 8 of us. Mum, dad, my sister, Skylar, my boyfriend Carlos, The cousins-Casey and Oceana and 2 friends- Eddison and Maci.

It was nice, nothing strange from the outside. We picked our rooms, unpacked our stuff and then went to explore the rest of the house. We realised that there were 10 rooms and 3 of them would be empty because we didn't have that many people. Eddison bagged one of them to practise his dancing but the other two were left.

Nothing else happened on that day. We all sat down and made plans for the following days and then went to bed. I slept in the same room as my boyfriend and he went to sleep pretty quick. I couldn't sleep because Eddison and Oceana were talking next door. Eventually, I got so annoyed that I wrapped a blanket around me and went to tell them to shut up.

To my surprise, they met me halfway between the rooms. Apparently, they heard me and Carlos (my boyfriend) talking and were coming to tell me to shut up. We were all pretty puzzled but went back to our rooms and I went to sleep.

The next day, we had just come back from a walk and my mum was absolutely adamant she'd seen someone in one of the bedroom windows. She point blank refused to go in the house for fear of getting clobbered by a burglar (Her words not mine) We searched the house and it was empty (As I expected.) We put it down to a trick of the light and said no more about it.

It was evening and I was in the bath. Carlos was sitting opposite on the floor and we were just talking about things when we heard the shower come on in the bathroom down the hallway. The owners had told us not to use that shower because of a drainage problem and we would have to pay extra if we did. Carlos got up and went to tell whoever it was to stop. He told me that Casey told him that he was brushing his teeth and the shower turned on all by itself.

We brushed it off as faulty pipes and waterworks and settled down to watch Tv before heading to bed. I kept hearing bangs and thumps coming from the room that Eddison was using for his dancing and swore to myself that was going to suffer the next day for disrupting my sleep.

At breakfast the next morning, Eddison was interrogating everyone about who was using his dance room. Everyone had alibis. That was when I started thinking that something paranormal was going on. I didn't tell anyone else, because I know how some members of the group felt about ghosts and I didn't want to freak them out.

It was raining so our plans were cancelled, and we went exploring the house. Casey suggested we should see what was in the loft. All we found was a dusty monopoly box and a tennis set. Apart from that, it was just boxes and personal stuff we figured we shouldn't go through.

In the middle of the game, Eddison came in, really angry and demanded to know who had pushed him in the middle of his seven-spin pirouette. Everyone was either playing the game or watching reruns of the tennis on Tv. This prompted another search of the house. Mum was sure the non- existent intruder was still in the house. Oceana was thinking the same as me at this point, that it was a ghost. Carlos wanted to see it with his own eyes to believe it and Casey reckoned that Eddison was making it up.

I went with Oceana and Eddison to the library to see if the house had a history and if anything happened there. That's when we realised that we didn't know the name of the house. It didn't have a number either. Just a random house in the countryside. We abandoned the plan and went back to get ready for dinner. I then had the brilliant plan of phoning the owners to see if they had had any weird experiences. They hadn't. I told her what had happened and she just laughed it off.

The odd things happened everyday. My mum kept seeing someone upstairs and we all heard the talking at night. The shower kept turning on and off and Eddison wasn't stepping foot in that room again.

On the last night, Carlos was finishing a painting, so I stayed up with him. I sat in front of the TV (Which was off) and drank my tea. In the reflection, there was a youngish boy sitting next to me. I wanted to run, but it was not my first ghost encounter so I forced myself to stay. I just started at the reflection for a few seconds and then the boy spoke. It was a whisper and he said, "I miss my mummy and daddy."

I wanted to respond with something, but he went. I didn't tell Carlos or anyone until we got home.