Charlie

I grew up with stories of ghosts, angels, demons, and like my mother and her family, been interested in the paranormal. I can still remember sitting outside in the garden beneath the trees, listening to my aunts and my mother trade stories of their encounters with those of the other side. As a child, I was terrified by these stories, yet always stood my ground until they were finished. Now, I find myself scouring the internet for true ghost stories and while I do get to become paranoid at worst, I've accepted that whatever these entities are, they're here to stay.

I've had my share of ghostly encounters, but one of the things I tend to see around my house are just quick flashes of people. It tends to always be a man in a white t-shirt. I've never really been able to see what his face looks like, but always recognize the same white t-shirt.

Some background on the house I currently live in. My parents bought the flat in 1997, and it seemed nice enough. The house was built in the eighties and hadn't had much use before my family came along. Three rooms, two bathrooms, and a big backyard. With five kids and a dog, the house rarely had a quiet moment. The three girls (my older sisters and I) shared the room on the side of the house, while the two oldest (my brothers) shared the tiny room beside my own, and our parents had the master bedroom that was across from mine.

Back to the occurrences. The door to my room would always open slightly, despite there not being a draft whatsoever, and my sisters and I, jokingly, dubbed whatever opened it, 'Charlie'. Whenever a door would open, we would greet the invisible guest and then go back to whatever we were doing. Nothing frightening happened, until one day, a friend of my sister's slept over. She slept in my room, and we all squeezed into the bunk bed. I fell asleep before the rest of them, and not until the morning, did I find out what happened. Being the nosy five year old, I heard my sister and her friend, talking about the scratching they heard on the side of the wall. Deciding it best to investigate, they headed outside, to the place where we kept our bikes. The bikes had somehow moved during the night, scratches visible along the wall. We had a tiny dog, a terrier mix, and we concluded that she had no possible way of having moved those bikes. To this day, we have no idea what moved them.

I forgot about that incident, and went on with my childhood. The next big thing happened the summer before sixth grade. I was sitting on the floor, playing on our Play Station. My sister was in the bathroom getting ready to go to work, and my mom was cleaning the kitchen. Just as I hit the buttons for the final blow to KO the opponent, a volleyball plaque belonging to my sister flew four feet off the wall, landing right beside me on the floor. Screaming for my family, I jumped up and ran out of the room. I was terrified, sure, but I couldn't keep from laughing excitedly, my first real encounter. After measuring the distance the plaque flew, I hung it back up, and shrugged it off, telling myself to be sure to tell it to my friends once school started again.

In the tiny room, which used to be my brother's, has this weird thing that, when my sister slept in the opposite direction (away from the window), she kept having nightmares. Not until she lied in bed towards the window, did she sleep through the entire night without any nightmares haunting her.

Nothing major has happened since then, other than always seeing the man out of the corner of my eye. Perhaps the most significant thing is our new dog (our old dog passed away a year later after the plaque incident) always stares at this one spot in our living room and just starts growling at it. There's a full length mirror near the spot he hates so my sister and I think he's barking at his reflection, but he's always looking off to the side. My sister and I get the chills whenever he barks at it, but we leave it alone. We've lived in this house for 13 years, which is time enough to say that the entity seems pretty docile.

However, I would like to know who or what this entity might be.