The Series of Events that Made Me Believe

Early last year, some friends and I moved from our home city of Melbourne to a country town named Shepparton. I had to move because I had a place in the university there, and as such, we were pressed for time in finding a house to live in before first term started.

It was very difficult for four young people to find a house; no real estate agent seemed to want to deal with us. Eventually, however, we met a young real estate agent named Jessica who seemed sympathetic to our cause. She took us around Shepparton and showed us a few rental houses, and it was with some reserve that she showed us the last house on the tour. We fell in love with it instantly.

It was just so easy to get landlord approval on this house - too easy, considering the difficulty we had previously had. We also found out that it had been on the rental market for months with no interest. We joked about it being haunted, but never actually thought it was.

After moving in, the first thing I noticed about the house was the uneasy feeling I got when I was home alone. I decided to buy a cat. The second occurrence was, by far, the most spooky and confusing. It happened to my housemate, Adam. One night, when Adam was in bed, he woke up to view a glowing figure standing at the end of his bed, just looking at him. I wouldn't have believed this story had it not been for the picture he showed me on his mobile phone. Sure enough, there was the perfect image of girl, in full colour and looking as though she gave off her own light. The only flaw in the photo was a black square which obscured her face. Very strange. We looked at the time on the phone and everyone could be accounted for. We then tried in every possible way imaginable to get another photo like that in Adam's pitch black room, but to no avail. Even when we used a torch to take the photos we produced nothing more than a blur, definitely no definition. But regardless of this, I still wasn't entirely convinced.

Our other housemate, Domi, was home alone one night as we were all in Melbourne, but she had to work the next day. She was lying in bed just listening to her music and trying to sleep when she heard the enormous sound of the toilet door being slammed. This freaked her right out because she had just been to the toilet and ALWAYS closes the door. She lay in bed, terrified with her eyes closed, resigning herself to the fact that she would get no sleep that night (because she was so scared) when from behind her eyelids she saw a massive light which she described to me as "a flash of lightning", in her bedroom and, although she was terrified a moment ago, was filled with a huge sense of calm and fell asleep immediately, for the night.

A couple of weeks after this, Domi and I were watching the video diary of My Chemical Romance, and Henry, the cat, was sitting on my lap. Tony, my boyfriend, had gone to the shops and Adam was at his girlfriend's house for the night. We had the TV turned up very loud, but not loud enough to muffle the sound of the cat food box being shaken in the kitchen. As soon as we heard this, we paused the DVD, looked at each other, looked at the cat, who could also hear it and was trying to go to the noise, and got the hell out of the house. We could still hear the noise as we were running out the front door. As soon as we got to the footpath, Tony's car turned into the far end of the street. This is when I truly started to believe.

Aside from these freaky happenings, there have been countless others. I have seen the ghost of the father (we figure that it is a father and a daughter, the father being malevolent but the daughter harmless), Tony has seen the father and the daughter, and countless noises have been heard. We also did a séance, in which my initials were indicated by the spirit, however, it didn't frighten me; I felt a lot better after this, as though I had been acknowledged.

I now have a much more open mind and thoroughly believe in ghosts and spirits and whatever else lives out there in the spirit world.