True Ghost Stories
A Connecticut haunting
December 15, 2014 |
3 comments
Image Credit: sxc.hu
This story was submitted to the site by Samantha from New Milford, Connecticut.
Between the ages of 10 and 14, I was terrified of my own house. A place that should have been comforting and an escape was full of fear and panic that I did all I could to stay out of. I begged my parents to believe me and believe what I saw and heard on a daily basis, but they wouldn’t. It wasn’t until I left the house for good that I was finally free.
In the spring of 2002, my mother and her new husband purchased a home in New Milford, Connecticut. It was an older, remolded house from the early 1900’s. It stood on top of a hill, its bright yellow color was inviting and the two trees in the front yard were perfect for climbing. The inside was just as beautiful as the inside, but needed work: worn out wood floors ran throughout and many of the house’s original features stayed intact including cubby holes, a separate, smaller in-law apartment, old skeleton key locks and loud, copper pipes in the basement. But the house was our new home and we couldn’t have been happier together. My parents planned out renovations for the house and we settled into our new life. My sister and I were thrilled to not have to share a room anymore; in retrospect I would have rather sleep with her in the room than alone.
My first experience with the paranormal happened when I was ten years old. I was sitting in the bath tub after a particularly hard struggle with my homework. As I was sitting and relaxing, I watched in shock as a black hand reached in the front of the bathtub and tried to turn the water off. I screamed, and in an instant it was gone. My mother came running in and in a panic I tried to tell her what I had seen. I knew she believed me but she denied it, suggesting that maybe I was tired and should get some sleep.
A few weeks passed without incident and I did shrug off the shower incident and blamed it on sleep deprivation. However, one horrifying incident would change my mind. As my parents renovated the house, they worked from the bottom floor up to the second floor where my bedroom was. I was used to repair men walking up and down the steps day and night. One afternoon as I played in my room alone, I heard heavy footsteps rush up the steps but they stopped about half way up. Curious as to what the repair man was doing, I looked out of my room but nobody was on the steps. I hadn’t heard footsteps down the stairs, so somebody had to be there.
I turned back into my room, and in the corner was a black shadow mass standing nearly six feet tall. The shadow was shaped like a person; I could see a head and shoulder outline, its long arms were by its side, and I could see my yellow wallpaper between the spaces of its fingers. The entire shadow was opaque and loomed motionlessly, but I didn’t stay to see if it would move. I ran down the stairs and outside to the front porch. I sobbed and rambled through what I had seen and she finally told me she believed me; she had seen this shadow figure too.
She admitted she’d seen and even heard things in the house but didn’t want to tell me or my sister so we wouldn’t be afraid. That night, as we all huddled in the living room to sleep, my parents discussed what we should do next. My stepdad was unwilling to believe that there was an entity in his house, but he agreed to get the house blessed by a priest. The four of us were raised in Catholicism, so placing our faith in God was the only rational solution.
My sister and I didn’t attend the blessing of our house, but when we returned afterwards, I knew it hadn’t gone well. My parents weren’t speaking and the energy was just as dark in the house as it was before we left.
The priest suggested we finish the renovations as quickly as we could. While the physical structures of the house were exposed and changing, the more agitated the entity could become and as he put it, the “occurrences could become more dangerous.” After my parents painted the last wall of our spare room, I remember taking a relaxing breath. I was hopeful that our house would calm down. However, I still was woken up by cold breezes and by unexplained noises for years. I believed if I ignored it, the shadow creature would become bored and leave. From the moment I woke up in the morning to when I went to bed, I felt like I was being watched and followed. On more than one occasion I would hear my mother calling my name and I knew that she wasn’t home. The first few times were terrifying; how smart was this entity that it could replicate my mother’s voice?
When I was fourteen, I decided it was time to take care of the entity myself. I researched methods of expelling entities and even though I was terrified of what would happen, I needed to live in peace. Following the directions carefully, I opened all the windows and doors in the house, I took burning sage through the entire house and told the entity that it didn’t belong and it needed to leave.
During the cleansing, the house creaked and it felt as if the floors were vibrating under my feet. As I entered the last room, my bedroom, I felt a pressure on my head and back, almost as if something was pushing me. I kept repeating “you need to leave, this is my house!”
For a few months after my cleansing, my house was calmer and I felt a sense of relief. But the stress of the house had gotten in between my parent’s marriage. My freshman year of high school came with change. My parents were separating and my mother, my sister and I were moving out.
As we were hastily packing, our elderly neighbor came over to say her good byes. My mother explained that her and my stepdad couldn’t work things out and that it was time they took some time apart. I will always remember what our neighbor said next. “You know, now that I think about it, since I’ve lived here all the couples that have lived in your house have gotten a divorce.” Our neighbor shrugged it off as a coincidence, but I knew it wasn’t. Whatever entity had been terrorizing my family had been around for a long time and my family wasn’t its first victim.
Moving to a new home was just as freeing as I imagined. I lived a less paranoid life and didn’t feel so trapped. However, I know that the four years I lived in constant fear have affected me, and I will be more prepared in the future if I ever have to face something like this again.
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