My Grandma's Old House

I live in Queensland, Australia in a small suburb about twenty minutes from the ocean. Around eight years ago my grandmother decided that she wanted to live closer to us and bought the house next door. I was around six or seven at the time. The house had four bedrooms. The they were separated by the kitchen and living area. There was a small hallway which the main bedroom and a second bedroom were down and the other two rooms came off the living room.

When my parents went away I would always stay with my Grandma. I never liked staying there and asked if instead of sleeping in the bedroom, could I sleep on the couch. My Grandma used to wait until she thought I was asleep and then move me into the bedroom.

I could never sleep there. No matter how hard I tried I used to end up staying awake the whole night waiting for the sun to come up. One night when I finally did get to sleep, something woke me up. I don't know what it was, but when I looked at the doorway I saw the dark shadow of what looked like a tall, thin man. I pulled the blankets over my head and stayed like that until I finally went back to sleep.

My Grandmother moved out of that house several years later and is now living with us. I had convinced myself that what I had seen was my imagination and had not thought about it for years when my cousin came to stay (she is twenty-seven).

She and I were talking about ghosts and other things when she brought up my Grandmother's old house. She told me the following story:

She had been sleeping in the main bedroom, which for some reason my Grandmother had given her to stay in. My grandmother and aunt (my cousin's mother) were down the other end of the house. My cousin woke up, needing to go to the bathroom. She did not like to use the bathroom that connected to the main bedroom because she found it "creepy" so she walked down to the other end of the house.

When she was walking back from the bathroom she thought she heard shuffling footsteps on the carpet behind her, but when she turned there was no one there. She got back into bed and turned over. She then said that she had a weird feeling so she turned onto her back to find someone standing at the foot of her bed. She could not see them very clearly in the dark and thought she had woken her mother.

"Sorry if I woke you" she said to them. The figure did not reply. My cousin took a closer look at the person and realized that it was not her mother, nor my grandmother. She put the blankets over her head and screamed as loudly as she could.

My grandmother and aunt came running into the bedroom to find it empty. When my cousin told them what happened they thought that there was an intruder in the house. They searched the whole house and checked the doors and windows, but found no one, or any signs of forced entry. Before I told my cousin what I had seen I asked her what this figure looked like. She said it was a tall, thin man.

I told my mother of both my cousin's and my experience and she told me that a man had committed suicide in the garage of the house. I never told my cousin that though, because my mother told me that it would scare her too much.

I don't think the ghost wished us any harm, it was just his way of letting us know that he was there.