Nothing was there...

I think all ghost hunters have similar backgrounds and reasonings for exploring the paranormal. They either grew up in a haunted house or encountered something unexplainable.  For the majority of people who experience something strange or unusual, the last thing they want to do is talk about it, let alone chase it. But for a select few of us, it begins a journey of finding out why.

I was in the former category of people who enter the paranormal world. I grew up in two different houses from birth to age nine. Neither house was haunted. I don’t have stories of talking to people in my house who looked as solid as you and I or have an imaginary friend that was a little less than imaginary. I can only recall one instance of “paranormal” activity, and that was when I was 3 or younger, having a dream in black and white of having coffee at a Parisian cafe probably in the 1920s-1940s. I didn’t know what a Parisian cafe looked like, so describing it was difficult to my mom and dad. I remember my parents being dismissive, and I let it drop for a long time, but one day when I was an adult, it came back to me.  I realized that the dream might have been set in Paris, France, but I’m not sure. Definitely, Europe in the very least. I could recall how the coffee tasted, how people were dressed. Was this a glimpse of a past life or a time slip? I’m still not sure to this day.  But this is my only example of anything paranormal happening to me until I was nine. 

A house similar to the one I grew up in.

In 1999, my family moved from one subdivision to another one about a mile away.  For context that will become relevant later, this house (a split level) was built in the 70’s, no deaths occurred in the house, but the entire subdivision was built on the grounds of a former plantation. Due to privacy reasons of people who live there and for my family as well, I will not include any key identifying historical clues online.  

I knew when we moved in that it felt very different than the house we had just moved from. But again, I was too young to differentiate the feeling of the paranormal from anxiety, and certainly could not explain or express my feelings. All of us started smelling tobacco smoke at random times. Now for transparency, my parents were actively remodeling the house, and the odds that someone had smoked in the house before we owned it are extremely high, so this could easily be written off. Footsteps came next. My parents dismissed this as the settling of the house since we lived on a hill. To this day, I’ve never heard a house settling in steady thumps crescendoing up a stair case. 

The first major event went off with a literal bang. My sister and I used to “camp” in the living room on Saturdays. We had done this regularly at our old house, but due to moving conditions, had not been able to at the new place. Camping consisted of sleeping with blankets either on the floor or in the La-Z Boy chairs in the living room. From what I remember we had just started to go to sleep, when we heard knocking on the wall near the built in desk. We both thought initially it was the other trying to be scary. But it continued. What happened next set my life’s trajectory. 

I turned to my right, and all of the kitchen cabinets were hanging open. All of them. They had not been like that before, and our mom hated people leaving the cabinets open, so it was not anyone in our household. Before my sister or I could even comment on the cabinets, they were slammed shut simultaneously with amazing force. I don’t recall running up the stairs, but we were both in our parent’s bedroom screaming frantically. They were not thrilled with us. In fact, both were pretty angry and ordered us to our rooms. That was the last camp out we ever had. 

Activity continued sporadically as the years went on. Knocks continued, footsteps up and down the stairs at least once a week. The animals took notice, and often would track with their eyes something in the room. A new behavior emerged with my sister and I. We would play down in the lower part of the yard, and without warning we could be in mid-conversation or play, we would get up and run all the way up the hill and into the house. Then we would never talk about it, and go about our day. It wasn’t until years later, that my sister admitted she remember us doing the same thing, when it happened, it was almost like we would go blank, and something was forcing us to do this. I could never understand why it would happen.  When I’ve told this story in the past, I’ve had people ask if I thought we were “possessed”, but I don’t believe we were. It would only last a few seconds and as soon as we were back in the house, it “released” us. One thing was for sure, and that was we were not fully in control. 

By the time I was in middle school, my parents let me have my own room. I was very happy to finally have my own space free from my sister’s “meddling”. About a couple weeks in, I was dozing off to sleep when I felt a hand go through my hair, pick up my head by the hair, and violently slam my head into the pillow. I sprang out of bed swinging and hit the light. No one was there. There is no way humanely possible that someone could have opened the door, walked in, slammed my head, and get out of the room while also being silent and closing the door silently behind them in the time it took for me to spring up and turn on the light. Despite this, my first thought was it was my sister messing with me.  Even though no one was in my room (which had become ice cold during this encounter) I got up, and walked down the hallway to my sister’s room ready to fight. When I got there, the realization of impossibility began to hit me. She was passed out snoring, and not a person who could fake sleep well. I even checked my parents room on the off chance that they had lost their minds, but they were asleep as well. I began to realize I was completely alone, but something had attacked me. The next day I remember talking out loud in my room and told the ghost that they could stay, but they couldn’t let me see them and they couldn’t touch me. This is advice I now recommend for those who may be experiencing a haunting, but at the time, I didn’t really know what I was doing. To the ghosts’ credit, I never saw any of the spirits or have one touch me again. 

The next big event came at 16, though small activity was intermittent to continuous. It was July in the Deep South, and I had just come back from a long day at band camp. My parents wanted to go to the grocery store and asked if I wanted to come along. I said I needed to take a shower, so they left with my sister. I got in the shower and put shampoo in my hair. I had just started to rinse it out when there were three loud booming knocks against the door to the bathroom. My Dad had a habit of pounding on the door when he felt I was taking too long in the shower. Of course I was angry. They had just left for the store, but they came back? And he’s mad I’m in the shower? I just got in! I yelled out “Fine, I’ll get out!” and fuming I quickly conditioned my hair. I was ready to get into a screaming match with him, but after I quickly got dressed, I stepped out of the bathroom. The room was ice cold. That never happens in July. Then I noticed the silence. It was ear ringing silent. We had 2 cats and a dog in that house. The cats were hiding under the bed, and the dog had gone to her crate. More importantly, no one was home. I decided it wouldn’t be half bad to wait outside until my parents got home. It was an hour before they got back. 

The last major event was a doozy. During my senior year, my boyfriend came to my house, and we watched videos on this new site, YouTube. And with that, I just dated myself and aged a thousand years telling you all that. It would take about 5 minutes to load one video, just for it to be a minute long. We’d laugh. Rinse. Repeat.  Imagine TikTok, but slowed incredibly down for you kids out there. We were laughing at one point, when behind us, I heard a woman give a high pitch giggle. I froze, and for the first time outside of my sister I received validation. “Who is that?” We turned and saw no one. The laugh came from the same kitchen where the cabinets had all opened and slammed shut years earlier. Just one problem. My parents and sister were all upstairs taking a nap. We looked outside to see if someone was near our back door, the only possible area where someone could be, but again the sound clearly came from inside the house. There was no one outside, no tv on upstairs, nothing. Up until this point, I had always assumed the ghost was male. This was a woman. I now believe there are multiple spirits that roam that house.

I graduated and went off to college. Since college, I’ve only had a few minor experiences, just enough to know whatever it is, is still there. I majored in History, and was able to use research tools to find out who could be haunting the house. We had confirmed years ago with neighbors who had lived in the neighborhood since the house was built that no one actually died in the house. Later, diedinthehouse.com searches confirmed this as well. I next researched the history of the plantation. There is a whole story I wish I could tell on here, but for privacy reasons, the person who built the plantation was one of several brothers from Virginia who traveled South in the mid-1700s. The plantation was known for growing cotton as most were, but the family also raised and raced Thoroughbreds. The house is about a quarter mile from my house. I know now from experience as an investigator that spirits can indeed travel that far. But what stood out to me is that on map overlays, you could see that the quarters for the enslaved were roughly in the street in front of my house. 

So were the spirits family members of the plantation owners? Or the enslaved? Maybe indigenous, as there was also Native Americans in the area. I have never received any answers because my family still lives in this house, and my mom refuses to allow me to investigate the house. There is a post script to this story however, and might explain why so many things happened to me.

7 months after my son was born, my husband and I traveled to our home state so he could meet our families. We stayed a few days at my parent’s home, and nothing noteworthy happened. We then stayed with my husband’s family for a few days and drove back home. The next day after we got back, I received a phone call from my mom.

“You won’t believe what happened!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Your sister and I were at the bottom of the stairs and we heard your son babbling and cooing in your room.”

“Wait, what?”

“We went upstairs thinking it must be some toy you all left behind, but the babbling continued until we opened the door. It was just silence. Nothing was there.”

Around the same time, I started getting into genealogical research, which has offered even more research tools at my disposal. I traced one line of my family. I saw the familiar name of the plantation owner’s. It’s not exactly an uncommon name, but on a whim I investigated. It turned out we were descended from the brother of the plantation owner. 

If you think that story is insane, you should hear my mom’s story. Another time.