My haunted house

I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the story of my haunted house. Now I know some people don't believe in things like that. But spend a little time in my house, and you very well might change your mind! Although I must stress that whatever is in my house is nothing scary. Not that it hasn't unnerved me or freaked me out from time to time. But on the whole, nothing about the ghosts in my house seem actually scary or evil or bad in any way. At least not that I can tell. In fact, sometimes it feels incredibly protective instead.

Which leads me to the story of the little boy ghost who everyone in my family (including our neighbors on the other side of our duplex) have all seen. He's about 8 years old, blonde hair, blue eyes. And according to my son, his name is Austin. We moved into this house a couple years before our son was born. We experienced a few episodes of weirdness right off the bat. Noises, things disappearing then reappearing later on in the same spot you already looked for something. Stuff falling off shelves, footsteps in the hall, cabinets being open when you knew you didn't open them. But it wasn't until our son was born that the little boy ghost made himself known.

This was when we first started seeing him peeking around the corner in the hallway. At first it was just my husband who saw him, and I thought he was imagining things. But then I saw him with my own eyes. And when you'd walk down the hall towards him, he'd disappear. We had a black cat at the time who was very mellow and never afraid of anything. But she would get really spooked and immediately run into the baby's room and stand guard over the crib. She would watch our son sleep all night long. And before he came along, she was the type of cat who slept under the bed or in a closet, anything to be away from people. But she seemed to have this protective guard over the baby. And often times when he got a little older, she'd climb in the crib with him and sleep in the corner just to be close to him.

Once our son was old enough to say a few words and convey things he was feeling to us, we started hearing him talking to someone in his room. That's not so unusual because babies talk to themselves and babble things that make no sense. It's just what they do. But if you would peek in on him, he was offering toys to someone unseen. And sometimes would laugh hysterically as if someone was making faces at him. We sort of wrote it off as a baby with a good imagination. But then when he was around 2, he really started having full conversations with someone in his room all the time. And we'd ask him, "who are you talking to you?" and he'd tell us he was talking to his friend Austin. Now, just the fact that a 2 year old came up with an actual name for someone, a name that he'd never actually heard before, was weird enough. But then he started telling us that his friend was nice and funny and liked trains and he lived in his closet.

Again, we thought maybe he just had a really great imagination. But then my son surprised me by bringing up a time months before when he woke up hysterical in the middle of night screaming there was a robot in his closet. And I had tried to calm him down then and assure him there was no robot in his closet. But he was so frightened. And now he was telling me that the robot wasn't a robot, but it was Austin. And now that he knew that, he was fine. We didn't know what to make of the things he was saying, but we just went along with it all. And often my son would sit and play with this 'friend' of his and stay entertained, so I figured whatever made him happy was fine with me. But then my son started wanting us to buy him toy train things. He had never liked trains or cared about trains, but he said Austin liked trains. So we bought him this little plastic train that made choo choo noises and whistled if you pushed certain buttons.

One night, while everyone was sleeping, the toy train started whistling and making choo choo sounds. It woke me up and I went into my son's room and he was fast asleep in his crib. And I found the train in the closet going off by itself. It freaked me out a little honestly, and I turned it off. But as soon as I turned to leave the room again, it went off again. So I took the batteries out and went back to bed. About an hour later I heard the train going off again. It had no batteries in it! At this point I was shaking out of fear because how the hell does that happen? I took the train and I put it outside in the garage so that at least if it went off, we couldn't hear it. But that was something I could not explain at all...and as a side note, that was not the last time that electronic noise making toys would go off by themselves, even without batteries in them. It happened at later times with a Nascar steering wheel that made race car sounds, and a General Lee car that the horn would go off and sing Dixie....both of these items had no batteries...and electronic books where if you push a button animals would moo or oink...they would just randomly go off during the night when no one was touching them...

But back to what I was saying...it felt apparent to me that there was some sort of connection between the apparition of the little boy we saw, and the person my son claimed to be friends with. When I asked my son at one point, what Austin looked like, he described the same boy we'd seen in the hallway. I was creeped out, but at the same time, nothing bad was happening. Annoying at times with all the toys going haywire, but not bad.

Then one night when my son was about 2 1/2 maybe almost 3 at this point...my husband was out of town on business, and it was just me alone with my son. It was about 10:30 at night and I was on my computer just messing around when I heard loud banging on the garage door. This had happened once before, and I never knew what caused it because when I ran outside to check, nothing was there but a cat. But this time, the banging was so loud and so persistent that it sounded like someone trying to rip the garage door off the hinges or kick it in or both. And at the time, our garage door was a rickety piece of wood held on by some spring hinges. It wasn't a metal door that rolled up and down. You just lifted this rotting piece of wood up and it didn't even fit correctly so there were gaps on the sides. It was something that was basically easy to destroy if you really wanted in the house. And it definitely sounded like someone was destroying it in effort to get in the house.

I was way too scared to even look inside the garage because it was so loud I didn't know what I'd find. I flipped on the outside light and tried to see if I could see anything out in the driveway from the window. I heard someone say something, then I heard footsteps running from the house. Someone had been out there this time. It wasn't a cat. It was a person. And apparently me turning on the light scared them away. But I immediately grabbed the phone and called the police. I told them someone was trying to break into my house and I was alone with a small child and I needed help. The sheriff arrived in about 5 minutes and he called me from in front of the house and told me that he was the police and he was coming to the door, so it was safe for me to open it.

So I did open it, and I told him what happened, and we went outside together to investigate. The wood frame around the door was completely busted up like some had either kicked it, or used a crowbar to pry the door open. And there were greasy dirty fingerprints on the molding by the door. He dusted the prints but told me they were too smudgy to be of use. But the evidence was right there that someone had indeed been trying to break into my house. And we went back inside and he wanted to investigate the inside of the garage too and take pictures. This was when the weird thing happened. We opened the door to get out into the garage, and that's when I saw a baseball bat lodged in the hinges of the door, effectively making it impossible to open the door even if they busted the lock.

The policeman asked me what that was and I honestly had no idea. I didn't put it there. And my son was way too little to be able to reach up as high as this was to have done that himself. Not to mention I never let him go out to the garage to play or anything, so he would have had no opportunity to do it. And we'd had the door open earlier that day, so it obviously wasn't there from my husband doing it before he left. I had no explanation. And I was sort of shaking and freaking out and asking the police officer, "how did that happen??" because I was very spooked, but obviously he had no idea how it got there. But he took pictures of it. And then he just told me he doubted they'd be back again. But that if I heard anything else, to call 911 right away.

Then he left me his card, and went on his way. And I just stood there in the garage looking at this baseball bat lodged in the hinges of the door. If that hadn't of been there, whoever that was probably would have gotten in. That bat saved me because I have no idea what that person was after. Robbery, rape, murder, all of the above? I have no idea. But they weren't able to do it because that bat made it impossible for them to open the door, and gave me enough time to scare them off and call the police.

The next morning I asked my son, just for the hell of it, "did you put this baseball bat in the garage door?" I knew he couldn't have, but I needed to know if I was somehow underestimating his size or him sneaking out there when I wasn't looking. And he looked at me very matter of fact, and said, "I didn't do it, but I know who did..." And I asked him, "who did it?" and he told me Austin did. And when I asked him how he knew that, he said, "he told me. He stopped the bad man." And this point, my son did not know there was a 'bad man'. He slept through the whole thing. He didn't know the police came, or that I was scared or that anyone had been outside. And yet he told me Austin stopped the bad man. How would he even know this?? He couldn't have just made this up because there's no way for him to have known any of it.

But from that moment on, I truly believed that little boys spirit was here to protect us. I don't know who he is, or why he's here. I don't know if he lived here and died here...and I'm not sure how to find out. But over the years, he's definitely made his presence known. Sometimes he likes to throw things across the kitchen. Usually bagels or bread. We'll hear a noise in the kitchen, and go investigate and find the bread halfway across the room on the floor. He likes to untwist the knob to the linen closet so that we find it on the floor in the hallway. Once my keys flew across the room even if they were on a hook on the wall. And they didn't just fall straight down, as if they just weren't on the hook properly. They launched across the room and landed in the middle of the floor.

He still likes to peek around the corner in the hallway. And sometimes he gets bold enough to come down the hallway into the living room, and I'll see him standing by the tv out of the corner of my eye when I'm in the kitchen. Once he was standing behind me in the kitchen and startled the hell out of me because I thought he was my son, and then I realized my son wasn't at home at the time. But the most interesting thing he does, is that he likes to crawl in bed with you. Only if you're sleeping alone, and more often if you are sick or upset. It's happened to me and my husband and my son has also reported feeling someone climbing on his bed in the middle of the night. Since we live in a duplex, which is like one big house cut in half by a wall, we've talked to our neighbors. We never said what we saw, we only asked if anything odd ever happened there. And they readily told us all about the little boy who loves to sleep in your bed. They've seen him before too. All the time.

And then there is also a woman in white. I don't know if she's related to the boy or totally separate. But the neighbors have seen her often, and so have we. She tends to not interact, but just glide through the hallway and disappear into the wall. Always in the same spot. The spot where my cat will sit and stare at the wall for hours meowing at nothing. That place in the hallway where we took pictures in the dark just to see what we'd find, and there were mysterious glowing red whisps of light that no one could explain. I even had professional photographers look at the photos to see if they could say it was a trick of light or a flash or a reflection, and they couldn't tell me what it was.

I tend to think the woman in white is a residual haunting. There is a lot of granite in this area and that's a known energy source for residual type hauntings. She never does anything but walk through the walls and go down the hallway. But the little boy is different. He's interactive. He does things purposely. He communicates with us. There's a big difference there.

I wish I knew who he was, or how to find out what happened in this house or on this land. But I don't really know where to even start. And I don't know that he's the only real spirit in this house. I've heard voices and seen things that didn't seem light or friendly...dark shadow figures, strange glowing eyes in the dark...but I also feel like this little boy protects us from these bad things. Maybe that's not true, but it's how I feel. All I know is that after living in this house for 15 years, things just keep getting weirder and weirder....lol But I hope my protective little spirit sticks around.