Poltergeist - It Started One Christmas

My parents and I lived in a small home that was around 90 years old. It was in a small town called Bluffton in northeast Indiana. The year would have been 1996. We lived there from the time I was seven years old to the time I was 19. From the very day that we moved in, I felt that I was not alone. At night I would lie in bed with the intense feeling that I was being watched.

One year around Christmas time, I was having a friend spend the night. The heat had just shut off briefly and she and I were sitting in the living room watching television when the temperature dropped substantially. As I rose to turn up the heat, the Christmas tree began to shake violently. Ornaments were falling off right and left and she and I were terrified! We ran upstairs and lay down on my bed. My white cat curled up with us and my door was open slightly. When I gazed out at the dark hallway, I was horrified to see a tall white figure run down the hall. I turned to my friend and she acknowledged that she had seen the exact same thing. She never spent the night ever again.

Years passed and things were uneventful. I became severely ill with a chronic illness and was frequently hospitalized. That's when things began again. After coming near death twice, I began to be able to sense things that no one else could. I once again felt that nagging sensation of being watched. I ignored it this time and the illness went into remission. Once again the activity, if you could call it that, stopped.

When I was 18, I began to experience things like never before. Upon the death of my beloved grandfather, I had become preoccupied with death and frequently visited cemeteries. That's when I noticed an increase in activity. It started out with the voices. It was like a television had been turned on and there was a flurry of voices coming from downstairs or, even more frightening, outside my room. My parents were always asleep when this would happen and their room was right next to mine with a vent, so I could hear my parents sleeping next door. I would get up and check all the rooms, but there was no TV on, nothing to account for the voices. I was getting more and more scared as the voices started happening every night. Then that's when I started seeing shadow figures.

They varied in size, but they were always human-shaped, except for once. One night I was walking out of my room with my cat in my arms when she began to growl ferociously. She never does this. She's normally an extremely docile cat, and I was shocked to see her acting so. That's when I looked down the hall and saw a shadow the size of a large dog run down the hall quickly. We don't own a dog. We had owned one before I became ill, but were forced to give it away due to the fact that we could no longer provide it with the proper care that it deserved. My cat growled and growled until the shadow disappeared.

For all the other times that I saw shadow figures, they never took the form of a dog again. From that point on, the shadow figures were strictly human-shaped, some tall, some child-sized, but they frightened me to death. I would lie in my bed at night, tortured by the fear that I was going insane because no one else was experiencing this. When I confessed my experiences to my parents, they took me to a psychiatrist who could find nothing wrong with me. I continued seeing the shadow figures up until the last few months that we lived there.

As the months went on, I began feeling a dark aura spreading around the place. It was a heaviness, an uncomfortable feeling that I could never quite shake. Sometimes I would get frustrated with whatever was there. I would leave a room and would turn off the light. The light switch would make an audible click every time someone turned it on or off. Each time I would shut it off the click would echo and I would turn around and the light would be back on. Finally, I said in an annoyed voice, "Quit playing games. Could you shut the light off, please?" And sure enough, right before my eyes, the light shut off.

One time I shut off the light in my bedroom before I left the house, and when my parents and I came home my dad said to me, "What did I tell you about leaving your light on?" And I replied, shocked, "But I shut it off when I left." He had nothing to say to that. Another time I was lying in bed when I heard the audible noise of something sitting down in my desk chair. Sure enough, when I sat up, there was a visible imprint in the center of the chair where someone would be sitting. Things would get so bad sometimes that I would be forced to sleep in my parents' bedroom, like I was child.

In August, 2008, we moved to a new house far away from the old house. I have not experienced anything abnormal here and the aura is much lighter. Perhaps it was my dabbling in the paranormal (I had tried communicating with spirits, had frequented cemeteries and tried to provoke ghosts) that had caused all the grief in that house. But one night I went back there to get some of my things, and as I was leaving I saw a dark figure run across the yard. I drove away and never looked back. - Caitlin Williams