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I am working on a book about the last house my son and I lived in... in Phoenix, AZ. A lot of paranormal stuff happened there, this is but a part of it:
The house on Cypress Street was haunted. My son and I lived there with my mom for ten years. We moved after she died in the house. She haunted the place only because I could not help but see her everywhere I looked. I doubt her spirit lingers there - she loved the place, but not enough to stay there for eternity.
Our house was not the only spooky place on the street, but I don't know the other stories because I only lived my own. I do have a spooky story about the house across the street, but that is for another day.
Bad/weird stuff started happening from the very first night....
We had a pit in the corner of the living room. It was carpeted and had two steps down and a carpeted bench seat around the perimeter. My mom completely forgot about this pit and fell down the stairs and hit her head hard on the brick wall. She suffered a bad bump and headache.
Moving objects was the biggest thing going on. Keys that always got hung up would be found in the freezer, in the bathroom, inside the fridge, in the sugar bowl... all weird places. None of us admitted doing it... and I believed it.
Lots of objects were played with the same way. It was like one big game of hide and seek. If I only had a dime for every time this happened I would be a millionaire (maybe not that rich!) now.
One night I was sitting on my bed, writing. I like to sit cross-legged with a big hard pillow in front of me for a table. When I take a break from writing I always set my pen down to the right of the pillow - on the bed. Usually I tuck it a bit under the pillow so it doesn't roll away if I get up.
This night I set the pen down, but did not get up, did not move the bed. I turned my head to the left, reached over with my left hand, and picked up my glass of water and took a drink. Set the glass down and faced forward. I reached down to get my pen and it was not there.
I picked up the pillow - it had no pillowcase - and threw it on the floor. No pen anywhere.
I got out of bed and removed all pillows and notebooks... still no pen.
I was sitting on top of the covers, so I stripped the bed cover by cover - no pen.
Ok, now I am seeing just a white sheet with not a damn thing on it.
The bed was against a wall and I got my flashlight and looked down there... all I found was a bunch of used tissues.
Using the flashlight I searched all under the bed, pulling everything stored under there out and looked through it all... as if I was going to find the pen.
By now I was plain baffled and frustrated searching for a damn pen. I figured I would just go get another and be done with this search.
I stood up, and there - in the very center of the white sheeted bed - was my blue pen!
The pen would go missing quite often. I learned to tell whoever was moving it to give it back NOW and I would find it quickly - but never on the right side where it started.
This is just the beginning of the "fun" on Cypress Street.
My mom and I loved that place. My son always hated it.
We felt comforted there, my son felt threatened.
I grew up in Alton, IL which is arguably one of the top 3 haunted cities in the United States.
The house I was raised in was built in 1903 and was originally a side by side meaning that it was actually two residences with separate entrance ways.
Children are usually acutely aware and very sensitive to things that are hidden to adult eyes both physical and mental.
At around four years of age I began hearing what sounded like whispers coming from different rooms.
I remember attempting to understand and make out what they were saying but it was always just enough below the threshold to make out anything intelligible.
The house itself had two owners prior to our family owning it.
Later I found out that both of these owners died in the home along with some family members at different times.
I was raised by a evangelical Christian mother and grandmother.
When I broached the subject of the voices with them they would always say that it was nothing and that I was enjoying an active imagination of a child.
The voices would come and go but at other times they became louder like they were in the same room as I was.
At times I would catch either my mother or grandmother being caught off guard by the voices and it caused them to become shocked and jumpy.
Finally when I was eight years old I said to both of them when they were together in the living room "" You do hear the voices, I've watched your reactions to hearing them "".
They sat me down and said they did hear them but there were things in this world that sometimes cannot be explained by the human mind and the God has this under control.
That proclamation made me feel better but it also made me leery that if these voices were also affecting my personal authority figures then what defense if any did I have against them?
In 1976 My grandmother passed away in the home in a hospital bed we had for her.
I remember a week after her death my mother sitting me down and telling me that grandma came to her while she was asleep and told her that she loved me very very much and that everything would be alright.
This brought a peace to me but in the following months after her death that year activity in the house increased to include not only voices but doors shutting on their own along with many of my grandmothers figurines she collected being moved around on their bases inside a china cabinet where she had kept them.
In 1977 my mother and I moved out of the house.
The realtor we used to sell the home contacted us approx 6 months after the sale and asked if anything strange was heard or seen in the home.
We said that sometimes some things would occur but did not reveal the full story.
We kept up with neighbors as to the status of the home for close to a decade after we left.
They had told us that in the close to ten years of us selling the house it had been on the market five times. One former neighbor said that the current owner of the house at the time came to him frightened from hearing voices in different rooms and seeing objects move on their own.
If I was in the position to move back to that house and if it was for sale I would buy it and reside there.
I'm a part of that haunting. It permeates my soul.
I lived in a haunted apartment in the East Village of NYC. It was on St. Mark's Place. This was in the late 1970s at the height of the NYC Punk Rock - CBGB seen.
Many some what famous people of that era witnessed glasses breaking, the presence of strange and horrible smells, a strange feeling that the whole place vibrated, a baby cying and more.
A few people wouldn't visit, they found it so scary.
I believe I have lived in more than one place with some sort of presence.
I lived in a place when I was pregnant with my firstborn son (over 21 years ago) that was definitely haunted. It was built around 1910, a big old American Foursquare chopped up into four apartments. I had an upstairs tiny efficiency.
The first thing I noticed is that my cigarettes would go missing, but they weren't taken by friends or neighbors. Instead, I'd find them "hidden" in bizarre places, like underneath all my clothes within a dresser drawer, or at the very back of my pantry behind all my canned goods.
During the time that was happening, I was pregnant, but did not know it yet. Think that ghost wanted me to quit for the baby? Or just because?
As my pregnancy progressed, my two cats would insist on sleeping on my belly, in a very protective fashion, and they did that all the way through my pregnancy.
I didn't feel threatened there but other people did. I had friends who would not come inside, ever. My downstairs neighbor wouldn't even come up the stairs all the way, insisted the upstairs was "creepy". The ghost did not like my mother at all, I don't think. Once, when my mother had opened the kitchen window and was looking out, as she pulled her head back in the window (old wood frame) SLAMMED down with crazy force. Much more intense than if it had just 'fallen' shut. My mother didn't get her hands out of the way in time and it sliced her fingers on both hands, at the knuckles, almost to the bone!
We also had a little attic space with a front window that would continually get broken -- from the inside! None of us (tenants) even had attic access. It was all closed off and there was no way to get in there. The landlord would blame us every time, fix the window, and a month or two later it would happen again. We would notice when we saw broken glass all over the front sidewalk and then look up and sure enough, it would be broken again from the inside!
I would routinely hear water running and go into the bathroom to find the faucets in either the tub or the sink open and on full blast, both hot and cold spigots. Once, I left for a weekend and got a call later that day from the downstairs neighbor because there was a water leak from my apartment down into hers. I came back to town right away and found my bathroom flooded, because the water was on full blast and the claw foot tub drain was plugged tight! I had the old manual rubber stopper type drain and I had left it on the edge of my sink, nowhere near the tub, but there it was, in the tub and the water on full blast.
I caught hell from the landlord for that one.. but what kind of sane person leaves for weekend and leaves the tub plugged and the water running? Even with pregnancy brain? Thankfully my neighbors all understood and believed me and backed me up with the landlord!
Parts of the little apartment would get icy cold for no reason (and we live in Texas, icy cold doesn't happen often even with good reason!) -- and I continued to find stuff in weird places the whole time I lived there. I'd find a can of soup in the bathroom cabinet, find my toothpaste in the freezer. Stuff that makes you think you are going crazy, especially when you live alone or with a tiny baby!
I have other stories but I think that's good for now.
I believe I have lived in more than one place with some sort of presence.
I lived in a place when I was pregnant with my firstborn son (over 21 years ago) that was definitely haunted. It was built around 1910, a big old American Foursquare chopped up into four apartments. I had an upstairs tiny efficiency.
The first thing I noticed is that my cigarettes would go missing, but they weren't taken by friends or neighbors. Instead, I'd find them "hidden" in bizarre places, like underneath all my clothes within a dresser drawer, or at the very back of my pantry behind all my canned goods.
During the time that was happening, I was pregnant, but did not know it yet. Think that ghost wanted me to quit for the baby? Or just because?
As my pregnancy progressed, my two cats would insist on sleeping on my belly, in a very protective fashion, and they did that all the way through my pregnancy.
I didn't feel threatened there but other people did. I had friends who would not come inside, ever. My downstairs neighbor wouldn't even come up the stairs all the way, insisted the upstairs was "creepy". The ghost did not like my mother at all, I don't think. Once, when my mother had opened the kitchen window and was looking out, as she pulled her head back in the window (old wood frame) SLAMMED down with crazy force. Much more intense than if it had just 'fallen' shut. My mother didn't get her hands out of the way in time and it sliced her fingers on both hands, at the knuckles, almost to the bone!
We also had a little attic space with a front window that would continually get broken -- from the inside! None of us (tenants) even had attic access. It was all closed off and there was no way to get in there. The landlord would blame us every time, fix the window, and a month or two later it would happen again. We would notice when we saw broken glass all over the front sidewalk and then look up and sure enough, it would be broken again from the inside!
I would routinely hear water running and go into the bathroom to find the faucets in either the tub or the sink open and on full blast, both hot and cold spigots. Once, I left for a weekend and got a call later that day from the downstairs neighbor because there was a water leak from my apartment down into hers. I came back to town right away and found my bathroom flooded, because the water was on full blast and the claw foot tub drain was plugged tight! I had the old manual rubber stopper type drain and I had left it on the edge of my sink, nowhere near the tub, but there it was, in the tub and the water on full blast.
I caught hell from the landlord for that one.. but what kind of sane person leaves for weekend and leaves the tub plugged and the water running? Even with pregnancy brain? Thankfully my neighbors all understood and believed me and backed me up with the landlord!
Parts of the little apartment would get icy cold for no reason (and we live in Texas, icy cold doesn't happen often even with good reason!) -- and I continued to find stuff in weird places the whole time I lived there. I'd find a can of soup in the bathroom cabinet, find my toothpaste in the freezer. Stuff that makes you think you are going crazy, especially when you live alone or with a tiny baby!
I have other stories but I think that's good for now.
Scary! Sally, I was wondering if the people in the other apartments heard or felt anything?
Forgot to mention the odd thing that happened at the house I am currently in. It is newer, so not real likely to have spooks, but a month or so ago we had just gotten into bed and our bedroom door which is usually 80% shut when we go to bed SLAMS shut. Not a gently click but a slam.
I blew it off at first as the wind sucking the door closed, which it will do from time to time, but then something started to bother me. Our bathroom window was open a bit, like it always is, but after I got up and checked the house, not only were no other windows open, but it wasn't windy outside.
The next day I called around to see if any relatives had died, but so far no one has turned up deceased.
Check out the history of the land.
The first house we purchased had this really weird feeling about the bonus room above the garage. One night I was up there with my husband and we were talking about how I felt weird in that room. We came down from there and right as we crossed the kitchen the light fixture fell to the ground and shattered. It freaked both of us out. We found out later that the husband abused his wife and children in the bonus room.
Scary! Sally, I was wondering if the people in the other apartments heard or felt anything?
They heard noises, noticed doors shutting when they weren't supposed to but the downstairs neighbors were not at all afraid of their apartments down there like they were of mine. It was the two upstairs units that creeped them out! Only one guy who lived downstairs would come up freely to see me.
I also think I had something that "followed" me as a child. I always knew the house I grew up in was haunted. It was just obvious and we talked about "the ghost" like it was no big deal. We never really felt scared, maybe me a bit more so though because I was younger. We constantly heard attic noise way too loud to be a squirrel or rodent and when we'd go check it out there would be boxes moved and tossed all around. Doors would slam loudly for no reason. There was a small little attic space separate from the rest, back behind a laundry area (the attic space I am talking about was in the eaves of the second floor so off to the left of the living area, accessible via a hallway). Anyway that little "room" freaked me out more than anything else and I would NOT go in there. I had an irrational fear of being locked in there forever. I had a lot of night terrors and sleepwalking incidents when we lived there and weird "flying" dreams like I was outside of my body looking down. My mother would often hear a noise and wake up to find me downstairs or in the back yard. Once she found me standing on the tiny lip of counter space in front of the kitchen sink, looking out the back window into the yard, and i had drug my bed sheet all the way with me! I was about 7 or 8 and it took her forever, she said, to safely get me down.
Still it was not ever "terrifying" to be there. Years later though, when I was about 20 or 21 and my mother and I were there to work on it after a tenant moved out. We were sleeping on air mattresses in an upstairs bedroom and I woke in the middle of the night, scared out of my mind for no apparent reason, just in a full blown panic attack.
That happened the next three nights and I started having crazy nightmares that were just visions of blood everywhere. I had never felt like that all the years we lived there when I was a kid though. It would be spooky sometimes but never absolutely TERRIFYING. I insisted on leaving and my mom and i went to a hotel; I was okay to be there while working on it during the day but not alone and NOT for sleeping! She still owns that house and I still won't sleep there anymore.
As for the following me thing, we moved out of that house for a few years when i was 10 then moved back when I was 13 and in the next place we lived I also had "experiences" of a supernatural nature, and when I would go stay with my father in summer, weird stuff would happen there too. One night at my father's I was up late in the living room watching tv andhe was sleeping in his bedroom when I heard a big crashing sound coming from the kitchen. I ran in to see what was going on and thre was a ketchup bottle (glass) that had apparently fallen down from an upper cabinet with a closed door. No reason for this, and he didn't have cats or anything (around here we just blame all noises on the cats! --- of course he blamed me even though I'd been in the other room. It was scary!
I just thought of another place I lived in that was haunted, although it was not my apartment, but the apartment above me.
Lots of times we would hear a small child running across their apartment. (They did have a small child, but she was always asleep when we heard these noises. Truthfully, we never heard this child when she actually did run around upstairs.) When we heard this child running around we always heard a ball rolling across the carpeted floors... this sound was actually louder than the child.
We also smelled pasta cooking at all hours of the day and night. When I asked them about it they always said no one was cooking. This smell filled the bathroom and we often had to close the door and leave the fan running to get rid of it. Happened hundreds of times in two years - we got used to it happening, but never the smell. (Cooking pasta now brings it right back - every time!)
Talking to the tenants (who were friends) they told us that someone once asked them about their puppy. They had seen a cute dog in the window earlier that day while the tenants were out. D told them that she had no pets, and no dog was in her apartment.
We never heard a dog bark, but some loud sounds were often attributed to said doggy.
D knew about the child with the ball (she said she and her daughter would lie in bed and hear them) and about the pasta smell.
She did not know about the dog, nor believe the story, until one day she came home and saw the dog in the window of her apartment.
We had a cat that climbed the tree just out side of our living room windows. He got as high as the upstairs window and just sat up there making strange sounds while staring at the window.
Nothing got the dang cat down the tree, so D's husband removed the screen and coaxed the cat inside. The cat was calm, so we all figured the dog and child probably left.
D was a magnet to the paranormal. She told us story after story about her hauntings. They followed her when she left that apartment.
They did not follow us (because they were not in our unit) but the house we moved into after leaving that apartment was haunted, and is the house I already (briefly) wrote about.
PS to Sally, EEEK! Loved your ghost story and I am with you... if I had nightmares like that for a few days I would never sleep there again.
<snip>
We had a cat that climbed the tree just out side of our living room windows. He got as high as the upstairs window and just sat up there making strange sounds while staring at the window.
Nothing got the dang cat down the tree, so D's husband removed the screen and coaxed the cat inside. The cat was calm, so we all figured the dog and child probably left.
D was a magnet to the paranormal. She told us story after story about her hauntings. They followed her when she left that apartment.
They did not follow us (because they were not in our unit) but the house we moved into after leaving that apartment was haunted, and is the house I already (briefly) wrote about.
PS to Sally, EEEK! Loved your ghost story and I am with you... if I had nightmares like that for a few days I would never sleep there again.
Awww, that is so sad. It is sad enough to read about a child ghost but somehow a child ghost with a puppy!
With my luck I'd have a ghost puppy while living in a place where dogs weren't allowed and I'd have the landlord on my case about a dog that didn't exist!
My dogs bark all the time here at "nothing" and I wonder... but usually I write it off to them just being silly dogs. I am more creeped out when all 3 cats seem to stare in one direction with no apparent cause. The place we are in now was built around 1912 and we've been here almost two years, no real happenings really, but the other night I was sitting here in my room, everyone else was asleep, and I heard loud and clear from behind me a "whistle", like a person whistling.
I think I blow stuff off more easily after all the years of weird "stuff" in most places I have lived, and I suppose I kind of expect something when I live in 100+ year old buildings (which is the norm for us).
Now, I have another story from a place we lived in probably six or seven years ago. Like this place it was a big old house built in the early 1900s. It was a duplex (one apartment on top, one on bottom) that used to be one big old fancy house. We were forever hearing doors close, footsteps running in the hall, things "fall", even when the upstairs apartment was vacant. My wife swears she once saw and heard a young boy about five or six in an old fashioned long white nightgown crying and saying "Please don't!" She says she saw this same child in other parts of the apartment, always just brief images.
I didn't hear or see that, but I remember one incident very clearly. I was in the bathroom and no one else was home except my youngest son who was about 6 at the time. Before I'd gone to the bathroom I'd checked on him and he was in his room, which was one room away, lying on the rug coloring in a coloring book. I told him I'd be in the bathroom for a bit and went off to do my thing and after I was in there a couple of minutes I heard loud and clear a voice calling "Mama!!" I assumed it was my son (he used 'Mama' vs Mom or Mommy at that age) and responded by yelling out "What? I am in the bathroom, I will be out in a minute!" and in response again I heard "Mama!!!" not really a scared tone but impatient and insistent. Again, I yell "Hold on! I am in the bathroom!" and I come out to see what on earth he wanted that he couldn't get up and come to the bathroom to tell me. He is still on the bedroom floor, quietly coloring. I ask him why he was calling me and he looks at me, bewildered.. "I didn't call you. I was coloring."
He was never the trickster sort and didn't seem to have any idea what I was talking about. So, someone was yelling "Mama" but it wasn't him!
It certainly fits with the ghost kid my wife said she saw.
I had very similar things happen in our last house, only I was always on the computer when it happened.
I would be sitting quietly in the corner of living room and clearly hear my son clunk his plastic glass on the counter. It was a noise I often did hear him make. Only sometimes he was not there when I heard it and turned around to ask him something.
Other times I would hear the glass clunk and then, "Mama." I'd say "what?" without turning around and get no answer. Then turn around when I got no response. Ok, maybe he already went back to his room. No sooner do I turn around when I hear, "Mama!" a bit louder. I turn around and he is not there.
I would get up and ask him if he just came out for a drink and what did he want... and he always said has not moved in a while.
This voice said other things, but I am too tired tonight to find them in my brain.
He, on the other hand, would often hear, "Matt" called louder and louder, until he finally got up to see what I wanted. I was quietly minding my own business on the computer and never once called him, nor did I hear the voice - which he said was quite loud.
I heard a child's voice and he heard a woman's.
We think there were two children and their mother there, also an old man and a monkey.
But that is another story and basically is going to be the last part of the book I hope to someday complete.
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