AUGUST 2016 – JANUARY 2019

In 2016 we bought this home, and it wasn’t long after moving in that every family member had seen the shadow being in the house. From the living room one would see out of the corner of their eye a shadow being watching from the hallway. And seen walking from the hall into a bedroom even if the door was closed. Once my daughter and I were up late watching tv and she got up to get a snack from the kitchen. The kitchen has a view back into the living room where I was lying on the couch with the recliner back and my feet elevated. My daughter who began coming back into the living room paused because she saw what looked like the shadow being creeping from under my footrest and around the back of the couch and quickly back into the hallway. Other times it was seen moving behind the couch and toward the front bathroom. Multiple guests saw the shadow figure as well. Our garage door had to be unplugged at night because it would randomly open, and we couldn’t get to the root of the problem. Early on the shadow being was seen directly behind me. I was standing in my bedroom doorway that faced my daughter’s bedroom doorway and we were having a conversation. She saw it behind me walk across my bedroom and into a closet. She states it was large with a top hat, long coat, and pointy nose. She also says that was the first time she saw it, but the only time it looked like that. Other times it was skinny or lanky without the hat. The feeling was never bad with the shadow being it seemed curious but didn’t want to be known or seen. I awoke one morning, however, with my first and only experience with sleep paralysis and saw a dark creature in the corner of the room above my doorway to the hall. It was as if it was crawling out of the ceiling and had a hand almost extending towards me. I could see it and wanted to get out of the bed but couldn’t move. I didn’t take my eyes off the creature and tried with everything I had to point back at it and state, “I see you.” I struggled against whatever was holding me back and got nowhere with my hand to make it point, and I could only make the slightest strained speech to utter the words. I wanted it to know that I wasn’t happy with this intrusion and that I could see it. Once I got out what I wanted to say, the tension was gone and so was the creature. This creature seemed different than the shadow being to me. I had a family member and friend that do paranormal investigations come over to investigate. At the beginning of the evening, we picked the middle bedroom to do the ghost box. While in the dark room and everyone sitting in a circle I began to feel really drunk. I was so nauseous and dizzy that I couldn’t even tell them how I felt. I just got up and excused myself. I went outside and lay on a hammock to get some fresh air. I came back in and had to lie down in the front bedroom and then fell asleep. They completed their investigation and packed up and left. The only thing they stated they could get was some EVP readings in the hallway and my daughter’s room that couldn’t be explained. I feel that whatever was in the house used me to avoid detection, because I began to feel better after they left. We sold the house when I graduated college and moved to the Appalachian Mountains. One night a few were awoken by an extremely loud noise. I went to investigate and so did my daughter. We could not find anything to explain the loud bang, and nothing had been disturbed. We found the next morning, though, the cat bowl on the floor and cat food all over the floor. This still wouldn’t account for the noise which was more of a metal sheet pan sound nor the fact that we didn’t find that on the initial walk through that night. We were told the home was vacant for about 20 years and used as a storage home aka “pack rat house” before we purchased it. We bought from a renovation company who got the home from the original owners after a fire destroyed some of the interior. During our few years of owning the home we found the remains of a dead cat and about 50 pounds of animal feces in the attic above the garage. A vermin specialist said there was no active animals in the attic and that the feces looked to be cat or raccoon. The odd thing was the feces were piled in the far corner of the attic that was very narrow. It was as if it had been purposely moved to that location, but the logistics didn’t make sense. We only found it because of a stain seeping through the ceiling in the garage and I crawled in there to investigate. We had this cleaned out properly before selling the home. We did have our cat die of weird circumstances at that time. We were told it was an impact. There were no external injuries or blood visible. The cat was found outside of my daughter’s bedroom window, but his collar was hanging on the fence between our house and the neighbors about five feet from the body. The collar was a safety collar that pops open with tension, but it was intact. Our only conjecture was that a hawk picked the cat up and dropped him, but we have no thoughts about the placement of the collar. We had seen a hawk swoop through the yard and there was a new fledgling that was learning to hunt, and my research showed that this was a possible explanation however bizarre.

Submitted by Christina