I live in a small house that was fairly recently built. It’s not new, exactly, but it’s less than a hundred years old. My grandmother was the second person to ever live there after moving to a cheaper location to support her large family. This doesn’t leave much room for anyone to have died on the property, certainly only one generation of people prior to my grandmother arriving. The property is built over some old mine shafts. I’ve done the research; nobody died down there. By all accounts, this house should be perfectly ordinary and lacking in any form of paranormal activity. That’s how I reassure myself, anyway.
So the first story comes from my aforementioned grandmother. A year before her passing in 2017, she spilled the beans about something that happened to her when my grandfather was alive (he passed the year before I was born). She saw her husband walking down the stairs dressed for work. When she spoke to him, he didn’t respond, so she shouted to him. His shouted back from the bedroom. It was not her husband on the stairs. The man continued down the stairs and left through the back door of the house, a route my grandfather would take on his way to work each day. However, unlike this entity, my grandfather would usually open the door before going through it. The whole time, her husband was in bed while she argued that he was clearly walking down the stairs. I find the story slightly humorous, as she continued arguing with her (real) husband while his doppelganger left the house.
Chronologically, these events are the first to have taken place in this house (at least, that I know of) but this story came out following other, smaller events. It was certainly the most corporeal manifestation witnessed in our home.
My birthday is not too long after my grandmother’s, so when my 23rd came around there were still balloons from her celebrations scattered around the house. I was somewhat depressed and lonely around this time, and found it disappointing that my mother decided to tidy away the balloons, thus taking away anything celebratory at a time when I was struggling to come to terms with my increasing age. After midnight, ringing in the actual day of my birthday, I found myself in a state of melancholic reflection. I was snapped out of that by something I still cannot explain to this day. One of the half-deflated balloons that had been tidied away in another room came floating in to the living room. It had floated out of one room, performed a ninety degree turn to float down the hallway, then another turn to approach me in the living room. It floated through the door, across the room, up over the arm of the sofa, and along to the seat next to me where it came to a stop. I was flabbergasted. I tried to explain it away as a draft but there was no conceivable way a draft could carry a balloon along such a perfectly choreographed path. After a while of freaking out, I thanked whatever or whoever brought the balloon to me. I must have been visibly shaken as, between 15-30 minutes later, the balloon reversed its course and went to another room down the hall. It was in this room that my grandfather passed away 24 years previously.
There was a more unsettling event that I don’t remember the timing of. I’m not even sure if it was real or just a dream, but I’d like to include it. I woke up some time in the dead of night, only to see a shape in the dark. It was the form of a woman holding a small baby. She wasn’t fully manifest, more like she was imprinted on the visual noise of the dark. I didn’t realise it at the time but this year I was going through some of my grandmother’s photo albums and the manifestation closely resembled her when she was much, much younger. My grandmother had lost a child long ago, but I cannot explain why she herself would have appeared to me while she was still alive and, at the time, sleeping just two rooms away.
Paranormal activity is rare in my home, which makes sense considering it has little to no history and there’s no real reason for paranormal activity to be taking place there. However, following the death of both my grandmothers - the one who owned the home and the one on the other side of my family, within just a couple of months of each other - there was, of course, a long period of mourning that cast a dark cloud over the family. I believe this may have become a source of negative energy for the small spark of whatever was already there. My mother started hearing strange sounds in the night. I started hearing soft music that was coming from nowhere in my bedroom. Soon, my mother was also hearing music, and distant conversation. I tried to capture some of the mysterious music and chatter on my phone’s dictaphone app, but caught only a strange ticking sound (there is not a working clock in my room). This was all mostly ignorable until it became more direct.
My mother was awoken in the night by the sound of booted feet walking on her bedroom floor (I heard this from my room but assumed it was her). The footsteps approached her bed. She felt a weight press down on the mattress, as though somebody was climbing into the bed. She lay motionless. Then, right in her ear, came a deep guttural sound she could barely describe. Rather than show her fear, or possibly due to her sleepy state, she quite loudly told the source of the sound to, and I quote, “fuck off.” We’re British. This is how we handle the paranormal. Apparently, whatever creature was attempting to scare her had weak sensibilities as it immediately disappeared upon being told to, erm, leave. Still, this left my mother quite scared and she was unhappy to return to bed for several nights following - and even considered having the house blessed. She would not divulge the full information for my own sense of security, but apparently this wasn’t the first time she had experienced strange things in the night, but this was certainly the most unsettling. The fact that we both heard the footsteps solidified this as something more than a nightmare and unsettled us both.
A little over a week later, I was sitting in the livingroom with the stairs in my peripheral vision. The landing light was off and it was around 6PM in the autumn, so the stairs were dark. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. Turning my head, I saw the silhouette of a man on the stairs. The shape wasn’t fully formed, but was clear enough that I could see that the figure had a walking stick which initially caused me to mistake it for my mother, who cannot walk unaided, until I realised she was in the kitchen. The figure walked down the stairs part way, before turning prematurely - well before reaching the bottom - and disappearing into the wall. I could only stare until I found my voice and gasped those now family-famous words, “fuck off.”
Since the appearance of the shape on the stairs, my mother claims the air feels much cleaner in the house. She feels more comfortable going to bed and her fears are fading. It would seem this manifestation was the culmination of energy that had been building for some time that was then discharged through this single event. Now that whatever lurks in our home is exhausted, we can hopefully assume it will be a while before anything paranormal rears its head again. However, if it really does feed on negative energy, that certainly makes me worry about how my clinical depression and occasional dizzy spells may relate to the events in our home.
Other, smaller or indirect things:
Several times, my mother and I have heard our names called by other people in the house, only to find it wasn't them.
On a nearby parking lot, a man took his own life through decapitation. I've never seen anything but a very stoic family friend saw a headless apparition in the area and a group of children warned me off the area after supposedly encountering "a monster" there.
My father once, while watching a meteor shower, saw a black triangular shape swoop silently by overhead.
I once, in the middle of the night, heard strange child-like giggling in a patch of trees where there was nobody to be seen.
I've seen two orb-shaped things in the sky that I couldn't identify, but to be fair I wasn't wearing my glasses and they could have been anything.
My father saw a small glowing orb shoot by him inside a supermarket.
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