It Can Happen

From: Dave Frohman (HairFreckleToenail@aol.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Over Here
Source: Form Submission

When I was a kid, five or six years old, my family and I moved into an old house, homestead Late 1800s. It was in the middle of the city surrounded by newer houses. The former owner, who was a relative of a relative, had lived there for more than 60 years, had a heart attack and died. He layed in his vegetable garden for three weeks.

When we moved in, my brother and I shared a bedroom at the back of the house. For the first few weeks, we heard moaning coming from the vegetable garden behind the house. A few weeks later, when the pumpkins were ripe, my brother and I carved them for halloween.

I started to have vivid dreams of the land around the house before any other houses were around, just trees. I knew exactly how it all looked with no other houses around. I still have those dreams to this day, twenty years later. We found some old pictures in the attic. The house was in one of them. The picture shows what looks to be turnish of the century picnic with the house about a quarter of a mile in the background with no other houses around and more trees. Odd.

There was that sense of being alone but not feeling alone. Footsteps were always heard around the house. My brother and I were in bed just before bedtime watching television. The doors in the bedroom had wooden pegs on the doorway next to the doorknob to slide and hold the doors closed. I'm guessing this was Late 19th century design original to the house. It looked cool. A door at the back of the room slowly swung open and swiftly shut. It didn't slam, just closed. Then footsteps click-clacked across the floor to the closet door. It swung open and quickly shut. When we were brave enough to come out from under the covers to have a closer look, we saw that the doors were still secured by the pegs. Sometimes when the sun shined through the front door window, (the front door was in the kitchen, on the front of the house nonetheless. Strange.), you could see a shadow on the floor from a figure moving across the front porch. Sometimes they would knock, too. Ofcourse, no one was there. There was an atrea off of the main hallway to the front of the house, the kitchen. The kitchen entrance had been walled over, and the space was turned into a closet. It was directly in the center of the house and we're sure that was where it spent most of its (or their) time. We could walk past it in the main hallway and ofcourse the peg didn't keep the door closed. You could catch it in your peripheral at the back of the closet, but would disappear when you investigate.

My dad started to have frequent nightmares of getting shot by someone while he was asleep in bed. He would wake up to sharp pains all over his body that would soon go away. My mother started to get sexually groped by an unseen presence while asleep on the couch or bed. She said that it was a heavy weight on top of her. It would pin her down and wouldn't let her breath or scream, almost as if a hand was covering her mouth. It would touch her all over. It would only last for a few seconds at a time. I hate to think of how it made her feel. She caught a glimps of it once while headlights passed across the dark edge of the bedroom. All she remembers are its long claws. Hmmm.

Luckily, she handled it well. She didn't lose it. Luckily we all didn't go crazy there. We only stayed two or three months, but its an experience we will never forget. Hey, it happens sometimes. The house still stands to this day, in the middle of a busy city. It was remodeled and updated a couple of years ago, but its still an odd and ugly house. It bugs me. Sometimes, when I pass by it on that busy road, I think about knocking on the door, just to see if I can still feel its presence. Actually, I still feel it.