Something’s Behind You
Introduction
Growing up, my sister and I didn’t have religion. Our parents never took us to church or even taught us the meaning of religious holidays. I went most of my life (until a few years ago) without knowing that Easter was related to Jesus. Growing up without a god meant also growing up without the idea that the devil and ghosts exist. It’s not that our parents told us not to believe in them, they just weren’t ever a topic of interest.
I had always heard ghost stories and loved watching paranormal movies, but had never experienced anything that even resembled the idea that it was real. It’s not that I didn’t believe in ghosts, I just had nothing to compare it to. It wasn’t until after my parents divorced that I started to feel different about the whole situation.
After living with my grandmother and renting a small trailer in Moxee, Washington, my mom was ready to buy a home and give us the chance to start over. We were all pretty mentally defeated from the chaos that came from the divorce, and just wanted to start over and be happy. The last part of our family from before the divorce was our dalmatian, Jerricho, who had died a year prior to moving into the new house. All that was left was my mom, my sister, our three cats, Abbey, Teddy, Callie, and our toy poodle, Charlie. I was twelve years old when we moved into that rickety, old house. It all seemed so perfect. It was even right next door to my grandmother.
From the outside it looked pretty normal; forest green wooden shingles covered the exterior, some crooked from age and weather, but I mean, it was built in the nineteen hundreds so it’s expected. The inside of the house was kind of strange. I’m not one to say “it just had bad vibes” but… it just had bad vibes. It was cold and still. You know the feeling you get when someone’s watching you? That feeling became a constant part of my life once we moved in.
The house was pretty narrow and long, so when you walked in the front door, you entered the living room. From there, as you walked forward, was a small hallway with one bedroom off to the right, then the kitchen on the left which sat in a small corner. In the kitchen, on the left hand side, was a door with an old fashioned door knob; the kind that uses a skeleton key. This was the basement. This was a place that no one wanted to be.
The basement was unfinished. It had cement floors and walls; some of which had jagged holes that seemed to go forever. We tried to see where they went, but never could tell. As you opened the basement door and reached in to turn the light on, cold air would rush up and hit you in the face, almost making your eyes water. It smelled musty and old. The inside of the door, and the walls that followed the steps, were painted pastel children’s colors and had horizontal scratches all over. Not something anyone would generally be excited to see considering it was less than inhabitable down there. The ceiling was covered in spider webs and piping for the plumbing. The only reason any of us would venture down there was to flip the breaker box if the power went out. It wasn’t a place we wanted to be.
Walking further back into the house was the dining room and laundry room. Immediately after the basement door, to the right, was a steep staircase that led to the attic. It was one narrow empty space that was the same length as the front part of the house. The feeling was similar here as to the basement: uneasy.
I, being the shortest, was the only one that could fully stand up in here because the walls were slanted to the typical look of a triangular roof. There were only two windows, one on each end, both of which were tiny and just big enough for us kids to get out if needed.
Going back down the stairs and into the dining room, there was the bathroom on the left and what would soon be my bedroom on the right. It was the largest room in the house because it had been renovated from previously being the garage. The large window on the far side of the room did not open, and the window that did open, had been blocked off by the cat pen that had been built to let our cats go outside without running away. So, if there were ever a fire, and I needed to escape through a window in that room, I would be screwed.
The feeling of being watched just got more and more intense as you walked deeper into the house. It was such an eerie feeling.
Part 1: Am I just crazy?
I think initially I was the only one who had things happen to them, then as I started being open about what was going on with my mom and sister, it got worse for everyone. I had pretty severe depression when we moved and I guess negative energy attracts more negative energy.
Maybe that’s why it was mostly me having the experiences? Who knows. When we moved in, we had a lot done to the house. Every room was repainted, we had a fence installed in the back yard, a furnace with venting installed in the walls, and completely tore out the bathroom to start from scratch. Supposedly, when someone renovates a house, it angers spirits and demons because they are used to the way things were before.
At first, the activity was subtle. If you were walking towards the back of the house, you would hear light footsteps behind you, maybe a few whispers and footsteps in the attic. Our cats and dog would sometimes stare into the dark and bark or hiss. Occasionally, we would all notice a smell in the house; not like anything we had smelled before. It smelled like rot. Nothing really threatening, but just enough commotion to make you feel extremely uncomfortable. This went on for months.
One morning when I woke up, I walked to the bathroom with sleep still in my eyes to start getting ready for the day. As soon as I stepped into the bathroom, I started to feel on edge. The hair on my arms was standing straight up and I had goosebumps.
I felt like I was dreaming when I looked down at the sink and saw a rotten tooth. My stomach sank and I felt queasy. It was just sitting there; large like a molar and black towards the long root. I gripped the sink, knuckles white, to keep from falling over and yelled for my mom and sister.
Since we were the only ones living here, there shouldn’t have been a tooth in the sink that wasn’t ours. My sister just as freaked out as me didn’t really know what to say, and kept quiet. My mom tried to make us feel better by saying that it might have come up from the drain in the sink or something, but I could tell she was just as concerned as us by the worry in her eyes and the quiver in her lips.
With our mom working a lot, my sister and I were home alone some nights. With our grandma right next door, we weren’t really too worried about being alone. I remember one night specifically that scared us both pretty bad.
When the back fence was installed, they put in a gate from my grandma’s back yard to ours, so that she could easily visit us. She would come over unannounced all of the time. It was normal. The back door made a very distinct noise when it opened because the screen part of the door had a gritty whine to it that nothing else did.
That evening, my sister and I were sitting in the living room, at the opposite end of the house, when we heard the back door creak open. We didn’t think anything of it. A few minutes went by and we didn’t hear my grandma’s, “It’s just me!” We got a little worried.
I told my sister, Kourtney, to stay in the living room. I walked to the back of the house, not really knowing what to expect, to see that the door was closed and the deadbolt was locked.
I thought, Oh, she must have forgotten something and went back for it.
I texted my grandma and asked her why she locked the deadbolt if she was just coming right back. Her reply gave me chills. She said she had been home all day. She wasn’t the one that opened the back door.
Throughout the night and following nights, my sister and I continued hearing the back door creak open and close, but every time we checked, it was still locked. The footsteps upstairs continued to get louder and more distinct. Occasionally, it would sound like someone was dragging something heavy across the floor in the attic, but when we went up to check it out, everything was in place. Nothing had been moved.
I started having extremely vivid dreams almost every night. Not all were nightmares, some were just normal, everyday events, but the detail I was seeing was something I had never experienced before — never once in a dream could I see individual strands of hair or feel water running over my hands — my dreams prior to moving into the house were pretty colorless and vague, kind of like taking off your glasses and trying to see.
Being the edgy teen that I was, I decided to paint lightning bolts with bloodshot eyes inside of them on the outside of my bedroom door. I was pretty into Guitar Hero at the time, so this was my tribute to that game. After a hard day of…playing Guitar Hero, I lay down for bed. On this night I had one of the worst nightmares of my life.
I dreamed that a dark figure had climbed up my bed and gouged my eyes out. At the time, it was the most painful experience that I had ever been through and it wasn’t even real. The dream seem to last for hours. When I woke up, I was covered in sweat and felt like I hadn’t taken a breath the entire time. It was morning.
I frantically jumped out of bed to see that the eyes that I had painted on the outside of my door had run as if the paint was still wet. The paint was dry well before I went to bed, and, it was permanent house paint. There was no explanation as to how the paint ran, but it looked like the eyes were bleeding. Considering I had just had a dream that my eyes were gouged out, I was terrified, but really couldn’t explain it.
Part 2: Sleepovers
Sleepovers are something every teenage girl wants to experience. My sister and I knew that the things that went on in our house at night were scary, but kind of just hoped that our friends wouldn’t notice. This was far from the case.
My sister had sleepovers more often than I did. Her friends, Katie and Maddie, were usually the ones that would stay over for days on end. One night, while I was out with my mom, my sister had Katie come over to keep her company. They were sitting in the living room watching TV when our dog, Charlie got off the couch and started barking at the hallway leading to the back of the house.
Kourtney got up to see what he was barking at and he ran deeper into the house, still barking. In the hallway was a box of computer accessories with our mom’s old laptop in the bottom of the bin. I don’t even think she had used it since we had been living here. When Kourtney got closer to the box, our mom’s computer turned on and said, “WELCOME” louder than normal.
When Kourtney looked up, she saw all three of our cats sitting in a circle facing the basement door, just staring, and there was Charlie, also staring at the basement door, but quiet now. It’s like they were in a trance.
Kourtney, freaked out, went back into the living room with Katie and tried to ignore it. They were too afraid to check the basement, but considering there was no exit door down there, it should have still been empty.
Later that night, they decided to go upstairs to the attic, where Kourtney’s room was and lay down. Kourtney gave Katie her bed and she slept on an air up mattress right next to her. They talked and talked until they were tired and decided it was time for bed. They turned off all of the lights and went to sleep.
Kourtney woke up around 3:30 in the morning to realize that all of the lights were on upstairs and the comforter that was on Katie was down at the end of the room and halfway down the stairs. Half asleep, thinking to herself, “oh, she must have had to use the bathroom and forgot to bring her blanket back to bed,” she went back to sleep.
When Kourtney woke up in the morning, the lights were off again and the blanket was covering Katie. When Katie woke up, Kourtney questioned her about why she left the lights on and didn’t bring her blanket back to bed after using the bathroom. Katie said she had never gotten up or turned the lights on, and thought she had her blanket all night. They were both scared, but didn’t really know what to make of the situation.
The next night, Maddie joined them in their sleepover. This time, too afraid to sleep upstairs, they decided to stay in the living room. They turned all the lights off and decided to watch scary movies. Maddie fell asleep about halfway through the movie, so they turned it off.
Since it was approaching 3:00 am, they decided to set up a camera that was watching Maddie on the couch and made their venture into the kitchen for a midnight snack and upstairs for video games. When they came back down, hours later, what they found on the camera gave them chills.
In frame you could see Maddie, sprawled out on the couch in a deep sleep. On the left side of the frame was the hallway that lead into the kitchen, completely dark. A few minutes into the video is when the unthinkable happened. When they set up the camera, they weren’t actually expecting to see anything.
Coming from the hallway was a dark talk figure, jumping sporadically into the living room and eventually landing right on Maddie. She didn’t seem to notice, but it stayed over her sleeping body for about a minute and a half, still and solid black. Kourtney and Katie looked up from the camera at Maddie, still asleep, and decided to wake her. When they showed her the footage, she got pretty upset and ended up leaving. I believe that was the last time she came over.
My sister had a keyboard piano in the hallway that lead to the kitchen. It wasn’t super nice, just a keyboard to learn on. We never really used it, so it just sat there unplugged and covered in a thin layer of dust. I had my friends, Stephanie and Teanna, over for a weekend sleepover and we all decided to sleep upstairs with Kourtney. Playing dumb teenage games like Never Have I Ever, we fell asleep and I woke up to Stephanie shaking me. She said she heard a piano playing. I listened and I could hear it too. It wasn’t just noise. It was beautiful and sad. It sounded like it filled the whole first floor of the house. Too afraid to look, we stayed upstairs and waited for the morning to come, eventually falling asleep.
In the morning, we tried to brush off the scary events that happened the night before, and they left. I was walking past the piano to see that it was still unplugged and the dust that once covered the keys had fingerprints all over. Like someone had actually been playing piano. The thing is, we were the only ones home, and no one knew how to play piano.
Terrified, I told my mom that we needed to get rid of it, so she gave it to one of her friends. For some reason, I was thinking that by giving away the piano that would stop everything else from happening, but whatever was in the house just found new ways to torment us.
Part 3: It comes for me at night
Nighttime was the hardest part about living in the house. It made us dread going to bed and turning off the lights. The physical experiences only ever happened to me. They paralyzed me with fear. Thinking about it all even now, I get shaky and a little sick. To this day, I am afraid of the dark.
The first night it happened, I chalked it up to my imagination. I was laying in bed, with my dog, Charlie, next to me. I slept as if in a cocoon, so none of my limbs were outside the blankets and my bedroom door always has to be shut. I’m allergic to cat hair, so the cats were never allowed in my room.
Laying there awake, I heard a scratching noise, coming from inside my room. It sounded like it was getting closer when I felt my bed shake a bit — almost vibrate. I was stunned and too afraid to move or uncover my face. Then I felt pressure right next to my feet, like someone’s hand pressing the blankets down. The pressure started to move up my body alternating sides, like something was crawling on top of me. When it reached my head, it stopped, but the pressure was still there, like it was waiting for something. There was no sound, and my dog was still asleep next to my head. Eventually the pressure let up and I was able to calm myself down and go to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, I told my mom and sister what had happened, and they thought that maybe one of the cats had gotten into my room and was just climbing up onto the bed. I knew this wasn’t the case, but didn’t want to scare them further.
The following nights were exactly the same. Too afraid to set up a camera and see something I didn’t want to, I just decided to ignore it — or at least try.
For weeks, I experienced the same thing, but it never got worse, so I kind of just got comfortable and expected it.
One night I went to bed and instead of the scratchy sounds coming closer, it was footsteps. It was a clicking sound, more like an animal’s hooves than a person. They stopped next to my bed near my head. I could hear it breathing and almost feel the air hitting my blanket. It waited there for a few seconds and slowly walked to the end of my bed, and the pressure began, like normal, climbing up my body. Nothing more happened, except that I could hear it breathing right in front of my face.
Of course, I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t tell myself it was fake anymore. The fact that I could feel it and hear it breathing gave it more of a reality to me. There was actually something in the room with me.
Eventually the breathing stopped and it felt like it had crawled off of me. The clicks of footsteps faded away. I swear I didn’t sleep at all that night. In the morning, I slowly got out of bed, exhausted but too afraid to even try to sleep. At the end of my bed, I had a full body mirror where I checked my outfits and such.
What I saw on the mirror was something I’ve only seen in horror movies. There were hand prints. Not normal ones though. The palm was about the size of a golf ball and the fingers were twice the size of normal fingers. They weren’t straight and none of them looked the same. They were bent different ways and pointy. What I didn’t understand is that they actually had the individual whorls and lines, like human hands. You could see the detail in the prints.
I felt like I was going to pass out. I called my mom in, keeping quiet so that my sister wouldn’t know. She took one look and called my grandma and uncle over. They had no words. We quickly washed it off. My family were all ghostly white and didn’t know what to tell me; we just knew we couldn’t tell my sister and scare her even more.
I didn’t know what it wanted with me. Why it was singling me out the way it was and trying to scare me. I had never played with a Ouija board or anything even remotely similar. I felt hopeless. How are you supposed to stop something that you can’t even see?
That same week was the scariest event of my life. I think it tried to kill me.
I went to bed with Charlie. I had a little space heater in my room because I always get cold. I heard nothing and felt nothing. Happy that I was being left alone, I fell asleep quickly.
I woke up to Charlie barking and trembling at the end of my bed. I threw the blankets off of myself and grabbed my glasses, only to realize my room was filled with smoke. I looked over at the space heater in my room, and it had a burning red ball of fire inside of it. No flames. Just a small red ball of fire.
I jumped out of bed with Charlie in my arms and as soon as I touched the cord to unplug the heater, the ball of fire disappeared. I ran out of my room screaming and my mom came out of her room, pretty freaked out. I told her my room was on fire, through coughs. I looked back to see the smoke billowing out of my room. I gave her Charlie and ran back in to turn my light on.
There was no fire. My fire alarm was not going off. There were no burn marks on the space heater, or anything else in my room.
We opened the back door and windows in the house to try and air it out.
I was so in shock I couldn’t think straight. I took a lighter and put it under my fire alarm in my room, and guess what? It went off. It worked perfectly fine.
I could have died. If Charlie had not barked, I wouldn’t have woken up and would have died of smoke inhalation.
Something I couldn’t even see tried to kill me.
Part 4: Showing itself
After my room filling with smoke, I was done sleeping alone. I couldn’t ignore it anymore or pretend it was all in my head. Kourtney, also afraid, moved into my room. We put our beds together to make one giant bed. For a while, nothing happened. We thought maybe things had calmed down and it was over.
We were wrong.
Kourtney and I were getting ready for a band concert and were taking pictures together, our backs to my bedroom. We snapped a few pictures and went on about our night. When we got home we looked through them to see something behind us. It was the shape of a person peering out of my bedroom with deep, dark holes for eyes. We were both so scared. It wasn’t over yet.
The next day, my sister was in the bathroom, I was in my bedroom and our mom was still at work. Kourtney heard the front door of our house open, footsteps into my mom’s room and what she thought was the sound of our mom’s purse hitting her dresser.
Kourtney yelled “MOOOOMYYYYY” just to get her attention and my mom yelled back “KOURTEEEEEYYYYY” (a nickname she would always call Kourtney). Kourtney came out of the bathroom and walked to our mom’s room, finding that her purse was not on the dresser like normal. She called out for my mom again and didn’t hear anything. She walked out to the living room to see that our mom was just pulling into the driveway. She wasn’t even home yet. It wasn’t our mom that replied to her.
She ran into my bedroom and frantically told me what had just happened. At this point I didn’t really know what to say. It wasn’t a surprise to me anymore. I just tried to calm her down.
That night we went to bed, but had forgotten to turn the lights off in the living room and dining room. Kourtney got up to do it this time. I heard her walk out and heard her come running back along with some other crashing sounds.
She said that she had gone to turn the lights off and when she turned her back to start walking she had heard footsteps right behind her and when she starting walking faster, things started falling off of the walls that she was passing. I calmed her down and we just sat in bed and waited for morning.
We eventually fell asleep. That morning, I had gotten up and left with my mom to run errands. Kourtney woke up to the sound of hysterical laughter. She said it was coming from the living room. She said it sounded like a mental hospital patient. Crazy, booming laughter. Paralyzed from fear, she couldn’t even grab her phone that was right next to her to call us.
When we got home she told us what had happened in tears. I felt so bad for leaving her. Normally things wouldn’t happen in the daytime.
That evening I had saxophone lessons, so my grandma came over to stay with Kourtney. I was only gone for an hour or so. When my mom and I got back they were both in shambles. My grandma explained that they were both in the living room talking and they heard booming laughter coming from every direction. It was deep and sounded like a man’s voice. After a few seconds it stopped and nothing else happened, but they were both a wreck over it. My mom, taken aback by how upset my grandma was, didn’t really know how to react. It was one thing to have your kids scared of something you can’t see, but seeing a grown adult with the same fear in their eyes made it more real for her.
That night my sister had Katie over again. She was tired of everything going on and wanted answers. I was asleep in my room by myself. They decided to make a homemade Ouija board and take it upstairs with a candle. At the same time she had turned on audio recording on her phone and placed it a few steps down into the basement. When they went upstairs, Katie was hesitant to participate, so Kourtney did it herself.
She asked, “Is there anyone here?”
The glass piece moved to “Yes”.
Shocked that it worked, she asked, “Are you a boy?” and the glass piece moved to “Yes”.
Then, hesitantly, she asked, “Do you just want my sister?” and the piece moved to “yes”.
More scared than when she started, she threw the board away and went to retrieve her phone to play back the audio. Nothing was said, but you could hear footsteps up to the phone and the sound of someone scraping it against the cement steps. Nothing was resolved. The only thing that she was now certain about was that the thing in our house wanted me.
The next morning, my grandma was over and offered to make us breakfast. While in the kitchen she said that as soon as she turned her back to the basement door, she heard something growl in her left ear. She flipped around, but didn’t see anything. After breakfast I went into the bathroom.
As I walked out of the bathroom and past the mirror, the reflection of myself turned to look at me as I walked away. I hadn’t moved to make it do that.
I jumped and ran as fast as I could into the living room. Why couldn’t this just end?
Part 5: Moving out
For the next few years, there was similar activity, but nothing more than hearing footsteps and feeling watched. I moved out before I could really tell if things had finally stopped, but I’m so glad I did. Living in that house was the scariest experience of my life and really opened my eyes to what ghosts and spirits can actually do to cause harm in the physical world. I’ve had a few things happen since then, but that story is for another time.
I hope you enjoyed!
