READERS TALES
Sleepless Nights and
Ghostly Phone Calls
Here's the story of my haunting. In the
summer of 2000, when I was 11 years old, me, my mother, and her boyfriend all
moved to a small house in the town of Deal, New Jersey. Despite it's small size,
The house was quite luxurious with it's tastefully decorated rooms, dual sink
bathrooms with Jacuzzi bathtubs, and it's unique features, such as the old
record player in the family room.
My mother and her boyfriend stayed in
the main part of the house, while I got the whole second floor to myself. You
would think a nice luxurious house with the whole second floor to myself would
make a kid happy, but I wasn't. For some odd reason, I could never really warm
up to the place. I wasn't in the best situation either, me and mom or me and her
boyfriend would get into fights every day about one thing or another, and I was
always getting picked on in school. My life was really going downhill. I would
wake up, get teased for six straight hours at school, come home either pissed or
sad, get in a fight with my mom and her boyfriend, and lay awake in bed either
enraged or crying, and that was a good day for me.
However, anger and sadness weren't the
only things that kept me up at night. For some reason, I always felt oddly
uneasy in my room, or floor rather, at night. It was like the way you feel when
you go to bed after watching a really scary movie; you know nothing's going to
happen, but you lie awake scared that there's a monster under the bed anyway.
So, I did what anyone else would do, blamed it all on my own imagination and
ignored it. Then, just when my life couldn't get any worse, the frightening
oddness of the house dramatically escalated.
I began to notice that the upstairs
floor of the house was always freezing cold, no matter how high the thermostat
was set, my insomnia was to the point where I had to take benadryl just to get a
few hours of sleep at night, and I would always feel the room getting darker.
It wasn't the lights actually dimming; it was like the darkness was coming into
the room rather than the light coming out of it.
This is the part of the story where I
stop believing that it's just my imagination and start to question whether it
could be something more. If I told my mother that the undead inhabited my room,
she would probably have sent me to the crazy house, so I was forced to live with
the demonic presence in my floor of the house, until things went too far. One
night while I was lying awake in bed, I saw this glowing green light in the
shape of a clawed hand appear in the middle of my room, stay there for about
second, then disappear. It took me a few minutes to even register what I just
saw. I was completely terrified, all I could do was sit up in my bed, stare wide
eyed at the walls of my room, and wish that the sun would come up.
After that incident, I considered going
to live at my father's house. However, it would take one final incident to push
me over the edge. It was about two weeks later when I saw something again,
something far worse. I was lying awake in my bed again when I heard what sounded
like feet shuffling across my floor. My mother and her boyfriend were both
asleep so it couldn't have been them. The pair of shuffling feet became
two pairs of shuffling feet, then two became three and three became four until
shuffling filled the whole room. I was frozen with fear once more.
Then came the voices. The voices weren't the usual inaudible whispers you
would expect to hear from ghosts, but rather the jumble of voices you hear when
you're in a crowded place where everyone's talking and you can't make out what
any individual person saying.
Just when I thought things couldn't get more terrifying, they did. I heard a
bunch of phones ringing all at once. It couldn't have been a real phone
because there were no phones on the second floor. In the midst of all this
shuffling, talking, and ringing, one voice rang clear. It was the voice of
a woman. She picked up one of the phones, said hello, and then I heard her
say "yes sir, the file is ready." Then, just as suddenly as it began,
everything stopped. No more talking, no more ringing, no more shuffling,
just silence.
After that, I moved into my fathers
house quicker that you can blink an eye. Ever since I moved, I feel no
more uneasiness; I sleep sounder than a baby, and the only demons I stay awake
watching are the ones on Inuyasha. It's been four years since I've seen
that house, and when I look back on it all I sometimes wonder why the hell would
a ghost be talking about some damn paperwork?
-Mandy.
