Maybe I Attract Spirits?

From: Karen (mydingaling@comcast.net)
Story type: Ghost
Location: My house
Source: Form Submission
Date submitted: Sun Mar 25 01:20:04 2007

Growing up, I lived in a suburb of Chicago, and my family lived in one of the first houses built on our block. My parents bought it in the 60's for the huge sum of $16,000 for four bedrooms, two baths, living room, dining room, family room, sewing room (or office), semi-finished walkout basement and work room with tool bench. It even had authentic stained glass windows--quite a deal even back then.

However, there were some strange things when my parents moved in--certain rooms were painted black (I don't think that was fashionable even in the 60's), the stained glass windows were bricked over from the outside and lathe and plastered over from the inside (what a treasure), and half of the basement was a dirt crawl space.

I never really liked to go down to the basement alone, I don't know why, but even as a child it gave me the creeps. The same with the back bedroom in the upstairs--just always had a feeling of not being alone.

I lived in this house since I was born. By the time I was about 15 I was already used to strange things happening in our house. Things would disappear and show up in strange places. Or, you would put your car keys on the dining room table and go back for them and they would be gone!! If you said loudly, "I want you to put my keys back where they were!!" and leave the room, if you came back several minutes later--there were your keys, but in a different spot! My Mom came to call the "ghost" Beauregard--so the big joke around the house was, "I guess Beauregard did it."

Being the natural skeptic, I just chalked everything up to weird feelings and people forgetting where they placed their keys and misplacing other objects. But then I had not one, but two, personal experiences that made me believe that there was something going on in that house.

The first occured when I was in high school and was doing my own laundry. I was down in the laundry room in the basement(which happens to be next to the work room with the tool bench) when I saw a man with his back to me at the tool bench. He was wearing a flannel work shirt and was moving some tools around on the bench. I just assumed it was my father and being an angsty 15 year old, I did not deign to speak with him. After finishing changing the laundry, I went upstairs, where I ran into my mother. I asked her why dad was not at work (this was midday on a weekday during the summer) and she showed surprise and said, "Of course he is at work." I said "No, he's in the basement getting some tools or something." I just assumed he came in the back basement door without Mom knowing. She went and checked--and stated I must be crazy--no one was in the basement!! But I had seen him--someone--a full figure apparition!

The next occurred not even 3 months later. I had to walk past my older sister's bedroom (the back bedroom) to get to mine. As I walked past her open door, I saw what I thought was my sister pulling a frilly white dress over her head. Getting what I needed from my room, I headed back downstairs passing my sister's room once again, and saw her still trying to get this dress over her head (I was only in my room a second or two). I got downstairs and ran into good old mom again and said "Why is Karla (my sister) getting all dressed up? Where is she going?" Mom says "What are you talking about? Karla is in school--she has classes all day today." I was like--No, I just saw her up in her room.

So we went upstairs (there is no other exit than the stairway were were having this discussion by) and there was no one there.

I never saw the face of either of these apparitions. It may have been just residual haunting, but it was strange that both occurances happened within a short amount of time and no one else witnessed what I saw. Everyone acknowledged that strange things always happened in the house, but I wondered if the spirits were especially attracted to me.