I have been watching the forum, and I've read many past experiences, so I thought that I would share mine. This is the first encounter I ever had with the paranormal. It was the early 80's, I was very young and we were living in hot and humid central Florida.
My parents had divorced, all of us kids (3 of us) moved with my mother out of the family home. After searching for weeks for something that was affordable, my mother fell upon a huge 2 story home where the rent was unbelieveably low. Seemed like it was meant to be, or so I thought. We moved in, got most of the unpacking done, and tried to settle in to our new life. There were boxes that needed to be stored so we were going to place them in the attic, but after getting up the ladder, the opening to the attick had been boarded up. So we didn't enter it since we were only renting and didn't want to damage anything by pulling all that down.
Well, it wasnt long before we started having strange things happen in the house. We heard knocks, bangs, and footsteps. We had doors open and close on their own. We heard voices and would think that it was just the other of us talking, but then go look and it wasn't. We would even come home after school and our German Shepard, Dutchess, would be locked in the laundry room inside the house when we had actually left her outside. You would be laying in bed at night trying to sleep and hear footsteps in the hallway, soft voices mumbling inaudibly, and then your bedroom door would slowly open. It felt like we were being checked on and watched constantly. All of us at some point would catch sight of a man walking through the house. I never saw his face, only his back as he walked away. He had a black suit and a black hat on. My mother said she saw him many times. Never felt like it was trying to hurt anyone, just kinda creeped all of us out. We, kids, had never been in the middle of anything like that before. All of us wondered if it had anything to with that old boarded up attic.
One day, in mid summer, we woke freezing our tails off. I remember laying in bed with my covers pulled up to my chin, watching my own breath form a fog as it left my mouth. I had never lived anywhere but Florida, so I hadn't experienced such cold. To make a long story short, the entire house was freezing inside, but it was above 80 degrees outside. I mean, literally, freezing. We had a fish tank in the living room with a fish in it for each of us kids. The tank was frozen solid. All the fish were suspended, mid-swim, in a 10 gallon block of ice. That's how cold it was in the house! My mother apparently, had experienced the paranormal before and was convinced that the ghosts in the house were causing this freeze and the attic was the key. We decided to break in to see if there was something up there. There was.
There was a trunk full of books, photos, a journal, and a black suit jacket. My mother recognized the man in some of the photos to be the man she had seen walking through the house. She read through the journal and apparently this home belonged to this African-American preacher. The journal, at the end, had an entry from the preachers son. He wrote in it, that he had killed his father.
I was very young, mind you, so my mother didnt share any other details with me about his death. Only that he had died in the home and his son was responsible. She said that out of respect, we shouldn't bother anything else in the attic. She had my brother put the boards back in place and left it be. After a couple attempted break-ins, a peeping Tom who beat our dog with a shovel, and an incident involving my brother and a neighbor boy which resulted in my brother having a broken leg, we ended up moving.
And that was the end of my first ghost story. Sounds like a bad movie, but it was actually very real!
Thanks for letting me share!
