Your True Tales II!

Welcome back to the second edition of your true tales!

So, I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to clarify that the title is, once again, a misnomer but I guess that’ll have to wait a bit. Visitation to the site (and our various socials) has continuously increased (especially since the last live event) but I still don’t really have any sightings coming in at the moment. For the time being, here’s another story of my own!

As I said in my last blog post, I’m going to be staying away from talking too much about UFOs or Aliens. I feel like I’m focusing too much on that. It’s mainly just because it’s on my mind a lot recently (it seems like a very popular topic at the moment and it’s hard to avoid it because of that). So what to talk about today? Big hairy monsters? Strange footprints? How about a ghost story?

***

In 2011 I lived in an apartment with my family in the northern part of Huntsville, Al.

When we moved in, we were informed by our neighbors that the place had something of a troubled past. See, our prior neighbor above had died in a fairly disturbing manner. Our apartment had belonged to a family that constantly fought. The scars from these confrontations still peppered the walls, despite managements attempts to patch or repair them. These occupants had apparently left in the middle of the night and without alerting anyone to their departure. A single clue was left (besides the now suddenly empty domicile): the word “gone” carved into a support pole close to the front door. Every morning and every night, when coming and going, I was greeted by this message, and wondered what exactly had gone down in, this, our new home.

We’d lived in haunted houses, it seemed, for as long as I could remember.

In the days before all those ghost hunting shows, my uncle (along with my mom and aunt) had a website dedicated to hosting their own strange or unexplainable photographs that they’d captured at the house we lived in at the time (I believe it was called “Three of Us: Ghost Pics”; my many attempts to find any evidence of its existence outside of my memory have been fruitless). That house was built in the early 1900’s and had still had the original barn on the property, just up against the house. A small amount of fruit and nut trees were scattered across the small yard. The field next door, which was plowed every year to grow corn for a yearly maze, would give up (from time to time) native american artifacts that laid buried in it.

Some of my earliest memories here are of, after my grandma died, the TV’s turning themselves on and off, doors opening, the feeling of someone sitting beside me, and hearing her call out my name (alongside the voice of another child, but that’s a story for another time).

From there, we moved into a house that seemed to come alive at night. From my bedroom I (and my family from their rooms) could hear the sounds of footsteps in the kitchen throughout the night. Occasionally, you could hear faint music (it’s important to note we had no close neighbors) from somewhere in the house. The feeling of being watched from around corners was fairly common. At one point, my sister claimed to have seen a shadowy figure that seemed to be wearing a hat watching her from around the corner in the hallway.

The fact that this paranormal presence seems to have taken up residence at whatever home or apartment we’re living in leads to believe a now common refrain amongst investigators: houses aren’t haunted, people are. For whatever reason, there seems to be something or someone that, over the years, has taken a liking to us. I could, and probably will, attempt to trace it back to its inception, but it goes back further than my own memory. My aunt, for example, talks about seeing an apparent doppelganger of my grandpa in her own childhood.

This presence is now a fact of life for us, I think. Growing up around that kind of stuff and in this kind of environment made it, for most of my early life, something of a matter of fact kind of thing for me. It was just part of our home. I didn’t even think about the fact that we had something like a ghost living with us. It just was. Of course, this fostered my interest in the phenomenon and led to me spending a lot of time watching bad documentaries and exploring horribly designed website but, again, that’s a story for another time.

When, in 2011, we’d been living in this new apartment for a few months, it’s hard not to notice something strange going on when it comes right up to you.

We were in the middle of a very tumultuous period of our lives at this time. The exact details are something that I don’t intend to go into whatsoever, but it seemed to make a very good breeding ground for strange occurrences. There are people, researchers, out there who would suggest that this kind of stuff is very frequently a result of unchecked emotions running wild. That it’s somehow a direct result of teenagers going through puberty and experiencing the hard facts of life for the first time. I wouldn’t necessarily rule that out.

Nevertheless, when you come into the living room and the shadowy figure of a bird is sitting on your bookshelf one second and gone the next, it’s hard not to take notice. My sister, I believe, would see something similar within a few days.

This spectral bird (a crow as best as I could tell) almost seemed to act as a harbinger. We were, although we didn’t realize it yet, entering what may have been the hardest part of our lives up to that point.

From there, things were quiet for a time.

I wondered what the implications of this sighting were or could be and found myself scouring the internet for interpretations of the event. A book I had at the time proved somewhat helpful, as it spoke, for the briefest of paragraphs on occult links between sightings of spectral birds and the occult/witchcraft. I didn’t think we were cursed or anything like that (I still don’t believe in curses), but it definitely didn’t look good.

The next thing I remember was hearing cabinets opening and closing at night.

We had a cat so I couldn’t really say with anything close to one hundred percent certainty that it wasn’t her. However, it seemed like we’d hear both the lower cabinets and the upper cabinets opening and closing. She was never much interested in getting on the counters, so it left me wondering.

That October, my mom and I were in the living room watching A Nightmare on Elm Street. I’d never seen it prior to this, so I was being “educated”, if you would. On top of the television (a fairly large bodied CRT TV) I kept a commemorative hockey puck from our local SPHL team (the Havoc). It wasn’t uncommon for me to keep my copy of the house key on top of this puck. In the middle of the movie, in a sequence leading up to a jump scare, we heard a metallic ching and both saw a flicker of something move through the air. Landing beside my feet, a good four or five feet from the television, was that key. It was as if it’d been flicked off of the television at us.

The highlight, if you would call it that, of this era of paranormal goings-on would happen fairly close to our departure. Given the, again, tumultuous time period it’s hard for me to put a date on this one.

I was home alone during a fairly heavy rainstorm. I seem to think my mom and sister were at a concert, but I can’t really remember. From the living room, where I was watching TV, I remember hearing a loud rattling from the hallway. There were three doors that led off from this hallway: the one to the bedrooms, the one to the bathroom, and the one that led to closet where the hot water heater was. I got up, walked down the hallway to investigate, and found all three door knobs shaking and rattling as if someone were on the other side of each, trying to get out. I found myself somewhat frozen in fear for a moment, struggling to explain what I was seeing. In a moment of bravery I reached out to touch one of the knobs. The very second my hand wrapped around the knob to the closet door, all three came to a sudden stop.

For the rest of the night, I found myself overwhelmed by the feeling that there was another presence there with me. I couldn’t sleep until my mom and sister returned home.

All of this led up to the single most chaotic event, I think, in all of our lives. It’s not crazy, I think, to assume that there may be something to the idea that this sort of stuff has some connection to the emotions and psyche of living humans. Perhaps, even, we humans may be at fault for all ghost sightings and hauntings. It’s something to think about, at least, if you don’t really buy into just yet.

We moved out of that apartment by 2013 or 2014. I wonder sometimes if the imprint of what happened to us there doesn’t still echo throughout the rooms, pestering whoever lives there now.

Of course, like I said earlier, this “presence” has followed us to every other place we’ve ever lived.

The apartment after that one had cabinet doors that you could hear opening and closing of their own accord throughout the night. Of course, at this one, we no longer had a pet cat so it became much harder to explain away.

This apartment, too, had a troubled history.

When we moved in the manager called it “that apartment” to his assistant (adding some a very notable inflect to the word that). I never quite figured out what exactly he meant, but I did discover something in my time there: a note, scrawled in pencil across the interior of one of the cabinet doors.

“If I die check on closet wall”

For the entirety of the time that we lived there I never could find whatever it was referring to. That is, up until the very last day we were in the apartment. As we were packing up and cleaning the place out, I noticed a section of wall on the interior of the coat closet where the paint didn’t quite match. If you squinted you could kind of see streaks of paint just about two or three inches wide in two parallel paths. As far as I can tell, whatever message had originally been printed there was lost. I left the message on the cabinet door intact for any future inhabitants to ponder and worry over.

There was a strange orb that we would see from time to time in the hallway. I know most people hear the word orb and laugh it off. What you need to know is that there’s two types of orbs: those seen in photographs (which are most likely reflections of light hitting dust or moisture particles) and those seen by the naked eye, free floating in an open area. This is the type that we saw here. It was green and shimmered like how light does when it reflects off of a pond.

Where I am now has had it’s share of weird occurrences, even.

The water’s come on of it’s own accord. My paints have been knocked around and, at one point, seemingly picked up and dropped while I was in the room with my back turned (a bottle that I’d set on the far right corner of my desk had been picked up and moved to the stand where I kept the rest of my paint and had apparently been dropped on top of them). When I turned back around upon hearing the noise, I was immensely disappoint that I hadn’t seen it happen.

Not but a year or two ago I was awoken to a similar noise (that of my paint bottle being knocked down after I’d left them out). I leaned down to pick up the fallen one and tried to replicate how it must of fallen but found myself unable to. After standing there for a moment, my left arm began to burn and sting. I knew what had happened. It felt like how experiencers always describe it feeling when you’ve just been scratched by some noncorporeal entity.

I stood there, in shock, and watched as, across the interior of my left arm, three long parallel scratch marks formed and began to fade away. I took the following picture slightly too late (as they’d begun to fade) but, hey, at least I remembered to document it at all!

The image is flipped for whatever reason. Click to see the full image; I shortened the gallery size to help it fit better.

I was about to sit here and type that nothing strange has happened since being scratched, but that’s not true at all.

I was home along one day, reading Communion on this blue chair in the living room. The chair faces the dining room and kitchen. While reading I heard the distinct sound of a bare foot slapping across the linoleum in the kitchen. I looked up, partially convinced that I was hearing the footsteps of the nice little aliens in coveralls that Whitley Strieber said would come and take him out of his home.

I convinced myself I was hearing things, got back to reading, and moments after I looked back at my book, there it was again. This time, however, it was louder and much harder to explain away.

I sat, looking in the direction of the kitchen, as this steps paced back and forth over by the sink, just out of view. Finally, the edged their way closer, then backed off to the safety of the sink again.

They kept doing this, almost playfully, edging their way closer and closer to the doorway (where they would be in my view) and then darting back to the back corner of the kitchen. It seemed like they’d come right to very edge of the frame and I expected at any second that I would see some small figure lean around the corner, but every time they’d dart back.

Wanting to know what was in there, convinced that I wasn’t alone, I got up and sprinted into the kitchen (I guess trying to catch whatever it was off guard) only to find the room empty. I haven’t heard the footsteps since an, since then, nothing of note has happened here.

I’ll keep an eye and an ear out, and should anything else unexplainable take place, you better believe that you guys will be among the first to hear!

Stay weird!

-Scott

Note: I had a lot of fun writing this one. Expect more write ups of my encounters, along with descriptions of things that happened during investigations, in the near future!