Paranoia Or Paranormal?

I'm glad that I got so many responses to my previous few stories and so many people were helpful with their opinions and insight. With that said, I wanted to ask everyone what they think about a few things that have started occurring around my house. Am I just suffering from some kind of paranoia, or is something else going on?

My family bought and moved into a new house at the end of August this year. I really like the house we live in and up to this point, I've never really felt any presence or anything as I have in my past several residences. When we moved in, the house had a comfortable, inviting aura and I was sure that I could just relax.

Let me give you a brief description of where I live. I live in a rural part of Corona, California. Corona, if you don't know already, has its own paranormal investigation society and I've heard of a few really active spots in my area including Horse Thieves Canyon Road, where a lot of people have had an array of different experiences. Fortunately, I live a distance from there, in a small but comfortable community. Our house was built in 2000 and the previous owners lived there until they were forced into foreclosure. The bank owned the house and it sat unoccupied for two years, collecting dust, overgrown weeds, and graffiti on the walls and cabinets from a few kids who had broken in to have a safe place to smoke. We know this because when we were first looking through the house, we noticed a few miniscule cigarette burns in the carpet along with all the graffiti, which was painted over. Also, rocks had been thrown at the windows, leaving little holes in the outer panes of the upstairs game room windows overlooking the street and it looks like someone shot the guest bedroom window downstairs with a pellet gun. Other than those minor things, the house is in great shape with properly working plumbing, electricity and ventilation. When we moved in, there was always a lot of movement going on with us moving furniture, unpacking boxes, etc. Now that things have calmed down quite a bit, it seems that whatever strange events go on in my house are either amplified by the calmness or otherwise didn't start happening until our family calmed down.

One thing we noticed right away was that all of our cell phones seem to lose signal as soon as we entered the first street of our community and connections are inconsistent between that spot and the cow farm behind us. That, in and of itself, isn't too terribly strange. We've gotten to know the spots well and we don't use our phones in those areas because we know they usually drop the call.

I'm a pretty observant person. I noticed right away that the cupboard doors seemed to open on their own rather often, though I had never actually witnessed it. I would wake up in the morning to get ready for work and several of them would be wide open. They are new cupboards and they were constructed very well, and we've checked that they all close and hinge properly. There's even a little weight to the doors so that they close partially on their own. They're all just fine, so something had to open them. I thought this might have been the cats playing in them and exploring, but then I started noticing that cupboard doors they couldn't possibly reach were somehow opening themselves at night. But okay, so what. A few cupboard doors don't like to stay closed. Bizarre, but nothing serious.

The next thing I noticed was the pantry door and the bathroom doors. Since one of our cats (Buster, as you might remember from my story about my Spirit Guardian) had a habit of sleeping in the bathroom cupboards, I decided to start shutting the bathroom doors at night to keep him out. This would also rule out the possibility that the cupboards opening in the bathroom had something to do with him. However, I would wake the next morning to find the pantry door either wide open or halfway closed and all of the bathroom doors open. I thought that my brother might be sneaking down at night for a snack or that my dad had left the pantry door open when he made his lunch before everyone else got up. Those were explainable, but we have four bathrooms throughout the house in my parents' room, next to the game room, next to my room and downstairs next to the guest bedroom. All of them were open, and I doubt that someone waking up in the middle of the night would just go through and open them all. Again, the doors had been checked and were hinged and close properly. But again, no big deal.

The next noticeable thing, and this time it was my step-mom who pointed it out, was a bit more strange but could potentially be explained by the cats, though I think it's unlikely. We have a set of decorative pillows that sit on the couches. Every morning without fail, we wake to find a single pillow in the middle of the floor. The other ones are where they were last and the funny thing is that it's not even the same pillow. It's different pillows each time, but one of them is always on the floor in the exact same spot. A bit more strange and unexplainable, no?

The worst of it kept me from sleeping last night. I was having a hard time sleeping, so I was on my computer messing around. I kept getting that feeling of being watched, so I would glance over my shoulder every so often to find that nothing was there. I thought I was just being silly. My brother was still awake in his bedroom with his music on low, and I heard him talking to someone on the phone. My parents were asleep. I called my fiancé and decided to talk to him for a little while. He reassured me that everything was okay and that if I needed him to come over, he would. I decided that I would try to go to bed as it was already very late, past 1:30 a.m., and so I lay down.

I couldn't sleep, however, and I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was nearby me and didn't belong there. Out of nowhere, I heard this really loud series of pops, like the sound someone makes when they poke ventilation holes in the plastic seal over a frozen dinner plate with a fork. I thought that my brother might have gone downstairs for food, though I hadn't heard him open his door. Still, I decided to call my fiancé back and told him about the sound. I asked him to stay on the phone with me in case I went downstairs to check things out and found that someone had broken in or something, though that didn't seem likely because we have a house alarm. I knew instantly that it wasn't my brother because as I walked out into the hallway, I could still hear his voice from within his room.

I went downstairs with my fiancé still on the phone with me. I could see the kitchen light on. When I got to the kitchen, no one was around, and nothing was out of place. The cats were nowhere to be seen, but I didn't think it was them that had caused the noise anyway. I was telling my fiancé how strange it was when my phone suddenly started freaking out. He was talking to me, but his voice began skipping and in between. I could hear static and interference so loud that it made me pull the phone away from my ear because it hurt. Usually, if we had bad reception, the call would drop, but I had never experienced any interference. Then, as if on cue, the call dropped. I was getting a bit freaked out, and on top of that, I had the "watched" feeling very strong in my gut. I jogged back upstairs and immediately tried calling my fiancé back on the house phone.

I tried calling him four times. The line refused to go through, and it's a land line that I have never experienced problems with. I made absolutely sure I was dialing the right number, too. Finally, I picked up my cell phone again and called him, and this time he answered. He told me that he hadn't had any missed calls from me. I was really tripping out now, so I decided to stay upstairs for the rest of the night. I shut and locked my door. I was sure that if I said anything to my brother, he'd just have a laugh and tell me to go to bed. I fired up the X-Box and played a few rounds of a game with my fiancé, which allowed me to keep talking to him through the voice chat. After a while, I started feeling really tired again, so I told him that I would try to get some sleep and worry about it the next day, and he promised to stay by the phone in case I called him back.

I turned the lights out, put some music on and laid down with the big comfy blanket my fiancé had bought for me while in Kuwait. It reminds me of him and makes me feel safe, and I figured that I needed all the comfort I could get right then. I remembered glancing at the clock before I took off my glasses, and it read 1:57. For a few minutes, I tried to sleep. I lay flat on my stomach with the blanket pulled up and around my shoulders, and I did my best to clear my mind.

After only a few minutes, I felt the same feeling of being watched again, but this time it was close and almost crushing. My instincts were screaming at me to yell or get up and run out of the room. The first thing I did was begin counting my breaths and listening steadily to the sounds around me, just to make sure that I was really awake. I could feel someone's presence very strongly, as though they were standing right over me. All of a sudden, the room seemed to get very hot. I could feel my face getting warm and a heat spreading across me like a fever. I began to hear sporadic tapping sounds, much louder than my music, that sounded like they were coming from my window. I was too afraid to open my eyes, so I did my best to ignore it. It wasn't long before the feeling got so strong that I began feeling sick to my stomach and a bit dizzy. I felt like someone was leaning over my shoulder very close to my face, and I could even feel short, warm puffs of air like someone breathing above me. It scared me so much because most of the stories I'd heard about ghosts and apparitions tell of the room getting cold. Now I was afraid that somehow, a living person had crept into my room and hid in my closet or something, waiting for me to make myself vulnerable. I just couldn't take it anymore. I told myself that even if I saw something that scared me, I would have to do my best to be brave and tell it to go away. If it was a person, I would fight and scream.

I turned over very quickly and threw the blanket back, but nothing was there. I did not speak out loud, but very strongly in my head, I said, "STOP IT. I'm trying to sleep." The tapping noises suddenly stopped and the oppressive feeling left the room almost instantly. Seriously concerned, I got up and called my fiancé back again to explain what had happened, though something told me to leave out the part about the feelings I had that someone was leaning over me. It was 2:07 a.m.; exactly ten minutes from the second time I'd tried to lie down.

He answered and we talked for a little while. He told me that I should spend a little time doing something until I was so exhausted that I'd just fall asleep easily, so I got on my computer and played a game. I stayed on the phone with him until about 3:30. When I was too tired to stay awake any longer, I shut everything down, said goodnight to my fiancé, and finally went to sleep.

When I woke up, it was roughly five minutes before my alarm was supposed to wake me up, which was at 5:30 a.m. It was again warm in my room, but I was shaking like I was freezing. I didn't have a fever or feel cold at all, I was just shaking really hard. I lay there for a few moments trying to compose myself. I couldn't remember dreaming about anything, so I had no idea why my body was acting that way. I finally calmed down and got up for work.

I have no idea what all of these things mean. I'm not sure if I was visited by a spirit last night or if I just have some sort of extreme case of paranoia. All I know is that whatever happened last night, it really scared me and all day long, I've been paying the price for staying up so late. I'm very frustrated and I want to know if anyone has any ideas as to what I experienced. Thank you for reading.