Edmonds Haunted Rental Home

In 2007, our family moved into a small rental home in Edmonds, WA. It was in a 4-plex building, and we rented the upper right, top unit. The rental had 2 bedrooms/1 bathroom, and was approximately 750 sq ft. It was a very small place for our family of 4 - Me, my husband, our 7 year old son, and our 2 month old son. We let our 7 year old have his own bedroom, and kept our 2 month old son in a crib in our room. Immediately after moving in, I had the feeling of being constantly watched... Especially when I was in the shower. It literally felt like someone was standing in the shower with me, watching me bathe. It freaked me out so bad sometimes, that I would cut my showers short.

The small hallway area in the rental had an access panel for the attic, and I always got bad vibes from it. One evening, I was putting laundry into the stack-able washer/dryer, which was located in a closet in the hallway (right below the attic access), when I saw a dark shadow moving across the wall from our living room towards the hallway. It was the perfect outline of a man, so I assumed my husband was walking over to tell me something... I turned around to see what he needed, and no one was there. I then quickly looked around the wall, out into the kitchen/living room area, and found my husband seated at our computer desk, using the computer. I asked him if he had just gotten up to come over to tell me something, and he looked at me like I was crazy and said, "No...I've been sitting here the whole time".

As my youngest son grew, we graduated him to a toddler bed, and he began waking up from naps, screaming at the top of his lungs. I figured he was just having bad dreams, but there were a few times he would say "Oww!" and would pull up his shirt, where there were red, raised scratches on his back. I also found scratches on his arms and legs. They looked like cat scratches, and were definitely not made by my son, whose fingernails I always kept shortly clipped. One day, my son woke up screaming as though he was dying. I went running into the bedroom, and found him on the floor, next to his bed. When I asked him what happened, he told me his bed lifted up and then turned sideways quickly, so that he was thrown out of the bed. He said he knew someone "bad" had done that to him, which made me very concerned... My husband and I never talked about anything paranormal around the kids, as we weren't ready to accept that as truth yet.

My older son was so scared of the hallway at night, that he refused to use the bathroom. He would pee in his garbage can instead - which I was NOT happy about. We even tried putting a night light in the living room, to shine light into the hallway, but I would often find that the light wasn't working when I went to use the bathroom at night.

One day I returned from the grocery store, and I unlocked our front door so that I could throw my purse, and a couple bags, inside the house real quick. My youngest was still sleeping in his car seat in our vehicle, which was parked right in front of our living room window - even though it was a "top unit", we were at street level, with the lower unit being like a daylight basement. I had thrown my purse and a couple of bags down, and went back out to the car to grab a few more bags of groceries. When I came back inside, the hallway light was turned on. And I had gone nowhere near the hallway when I had first entered! I freaked out, thinking someone was in the house... Messing with me. I called my husband, who was at work, and he stayed on the phone with me while I searched the house and the bedrooms. I had the most terrified feeling, and just KNEW that something was not right.

My step-daughter came over to stay the night, one weekend. She was about 13 years old, at that time, and she slept on the top bunk in our oldest son's room. That night, I was woken up in the early morning hours, by the sound of footsteps walking back and forth across our ceiling. I tried to imagine what it could be... The roof was pitched, so there was no way someone could be walking so steadily, back and forth across our roof. No animals could make solid footstep sounds like that. I could even hear the footsteps walking right above our bed, and then out from our room into the rest of the house! I was very scared, but tried to think there must be a reasonable explanation for it. Eventually the footsteps stopped, after about an hour or so, and I fell back asleep. In the morning, I asked my step-daughter how she slept, to which she replied, "Crappy". I told her that I "didn't sleep well either because I kept hearing"... And then I hesitated telling her about the footsteps, not wanting to scare her... To which she then replied, "Footsteps on the ceiling?" I was shocked she had heard them too! I asked her more about it, and she explained that she heard them going back and forth across all the ceilings in the house for quite a while. She also told me she heard someone whisper her name, which had really scared her.

The final straw was when my husband and I finally had a conversation about the fact something paranormal was happening in the house... He was a definite non-believer. We were talking about it, in our living room, when the sound machine that we used for our son during his naps, suddenly turned on. It was blaring music loudly, as it had a radio function also (that we never used). We both got up to walk into our room to see why it was on, and when my husband stepped in the room, it turned off. He turned around and looked at me strangely, and then went to walk toward it again... To which the radio turned back on! He stopped abruptly, looked at me, and then went to go to the radio again... And it turned back off! We both ran out of the room, totally freaked out. After a while, we went back into the room and found that the sound machine was actually unplugged from the wall!

Our family moved out fairly quickly, after that, and my step-daughter and I had a bit of a seance before we left... Where we told the spirit it could not follow us to where we were moving, and that it needed to "go to the light". We had lived there for 4 years, by that time. The next house we moved into still had bad vibes, in certain areas, but we did not experience the level of haunting as we did in the Edmonds house. I often wonder if the new tenants experienced anything, after we left.