In need of some advice

Tiorum3 · Curious About Ghosts Joined: 26 Sep 2007 Posts: 4

I don't know where to really begin. It started a long time ago in the house I grew up in. Its a very old home in Northwestern Pa. It was built around 1900 by one of the major contractors in the area who built alot of homes in the area at that time.

The first time I became aware of an issue wasn't when i was home, it was when my mother was there by herself. I get this frantic call by my father telling me the police are on the way to the house and he wants me to go over to be with my mother and see whats going on. She claimed she was hearing someone in the house and thought it was a burglar. This in the middle of the daytime though, which seemed odd. Long story short, they go through the house, find nothing, and my mom, scared to death claims there was definitely something very loud moving around on the first floor.

Time passes, and it was forgotten.

Then after what is way too long a story to type out, I end up living there by myself with my parents living in opposite sides of the country. I was 17 at the time. I'm not sure how much you guys need to know but ill try to paraphrase what was a year long string of occurances. At first it started as knocking sounds and lights flickering. I thought it was my imagination. I started getting scared about it, so I had either my girlfriend, my best friend, or another close friend of mine start staying with me, but it mostly on weekends. I would have seriously started questioning my sanity at first but since there were alot of other people who started having the same experiences I knew it wasnt just me.

There is so much that happened its hard to tell what I should tell you in this post. Ill try and just bullet the highlights.

- 1st biggie - I followed audible footsteps through the first story of the house with a gun in my hand thinking it was a burglar, I swing around the corner into the dining room and almost shoot my dog! She was acting really wierd, whining and her ears are pressed down, tail between her legs, and then the footsteps start up again on the other side of a door which cant be opened without making noise (its old and has mirrors on both sides of it). I open the door, my dog runs away and the footstep continue into the kitchen (floor had linolium on it) and turns the corner and is gone.

- 2nd biggie - This one is too long to just type out the whole thing. I took a shower around 7pm and noticed a vibration through the toilet i was sitting on while I dryed my hair. ( i know it sounds stupid, but if you see where the toilet is and that there was a medicine cabinet mirror across from it) The vibration got louder to the point it was REALY loud, vibration was shaking the house so hard the lamp shade was rocking, and i ran out of the house in my underwear and went to my best friends house and wouldnt go back until someone came with me. I didnt tell them what had happened. When we got back, I went upstairs, they stayed downstairs (it was my best friend and his cousin). When i come back down they ask me what had happened and it started all over again, same sounds and vibrations. Almost on que. We all ran out at that point and i didnt stay there again for a week.

- 3rd and the biggest- I SAW HIM. he woke me up by turning on and off my lights in the bedroom. When the light went off I saw a dark figure outlined by a picture window in the hallway. He had red eyes and was motionless. I was so scared I literally couldnt move. suddenly the lights come back on and he is gone. He was seriously one pissed off ghost or whatever he was.

Other things were my books moving from my desk to my bed when i went to the bathroom, i made food one time and it disappeared (plate and all) and my dog was outside in the backyard and noone else was home, and numerous other accounts of friends hearing things in the house, ect.

My father found out there had been a murder in the house long before we had owned it and that the husband suspected of killing his wife had never been proved. he found this out by going to the library and researching our address. I didnt know this until 2 weeks ago when my mother told me about it, and said she didnt want to tell me about it at the time. It was apparently labeled a suicide (what type of suicide I dont know). All I know is that whatever was in that house was really, really pissed off.

All this came back up again because my best friend's father recently passed away and I was at his house with his cousin again, the first time we had been together all three of us in years. We were all drinking and John (his cousin) says "remember when we went the house together..."

I have had some experiences since that time (that was 20 yrs ago) but nothing like what happened back then. We are just finishing rennovating the house almost completely. My mother has to live there by herself. When i talked about it with her that weekend of the furneral, she said she is worried about things starting back up again with the house being changed so much. How much to we have to worry about him coming back? Why did everything settle down after I saw him? He had the power to shake the whole damn house. I am concerned for my mother but i dont want to scare her since things have been relatively quiet. What is my best course of action now? And if he starts up again, what should I do this time?

Sorry for the long post but these are serious questions I need an answer to. Thanks so much for your time.

madcow · Ghost Hunting Enthusiast Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 151

Tiorum3, welcome to the forum. What you describe sounds very interesting. I am also from NWPA (Erie), there are also a few other members here that are from the Erie area.

I have not done any formal investigations but there are a few on this board who have and I am sure they can point you in the right direction...right Aedryan?

If there is anything I can do to help you feel free to PM me and I will do what I can.
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I wasn't mad until I got a belly full of Erie politics

Tiorum3 · Curious About Ghosts Joined: 26 Sep 2007 Posts: 4

Thank you for the welcome. I have spent a good part of the evening thinking about everything that happened back then. I am a big time dog lover and wanted to say that my dog was sort of my confirmation of whether or not something I would hear or experience was imagination or real. If the dogs reacted to it, I knew it wasnt just me when i was by myself. Animals seems to be alot more sensative to this stuff than people are.

One other big question I had was why if the person who lived there who had died was a female yet the person who I "fought a war with" was male? I'm not entirely sure why I know he was male but thats always been my sense of who it was.

One thing I forgot to mention was that across the street from my house was a house that used to be the county jail. I remember seeing balls of light both inside the house and outside of it. For many years no one lived there yet it was always kept up.

After having a chance to spend quite a bit of time listening to other people's ghost stories I have come to believe that ghosts themselves arent out to harm anyone, but are usually there to communicate something that hasnt been finished or that they need closure about something before they pass on. This did not seem to be the case with whatever was in my house. To my knowledge no ouiji (or however its spelled) was ever used in the house. I dont claim to have alot of knowledge about spirit world stuff beyond my own religious background, but whatever it was seemed to be feeding off from me. I was having an extremely hard time dealing with real life issues esp being back in that house by myself away from where I used to live. I do believe its possible that negative energy was very possibly what brought him there.

Whatever the case may be, this wasnt a friendly spirit. I wish I had someone with "the eyes" or someone who could verify whether or not this presence was gone. The other experiences I have had (i can count them on one hand) leads me to believe he is still there, but has calmed down now. I just hope this major renovation doesnt change things.

Anyways, any answers to now growing list of questions would be helpful.

butterfly39 · Posted: Sep Thu 27, 2007 8:01 am Post subject:

hi and welcome. Sounds like you have a lot going on there. Check out the forums and see if they can give you some answers. I'm sure aedryan will give you some advice, too. Have you tried to capture anything on digital camera, or record any evps? Try to document some of the strange things happening and if you capture anything, put on this site. We'd all love to see. Good luck....

butterfly

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Sep Thu 27, 2007 11:29 am Post subject:

Hi Tiorum,
Thanks for sharing your story with us. When I was about 12 years old, I too lived in a house where "disembodied footsteps" were a pretty regular occurrence. They sounded as much like an actual person walking around as could be. There is the possibility that it could have just been the old, creaky house settling, but other than that things like that are pretty hard to explain, even knowing what I know now.

It's pretty hard to explain things moving around and vanishing too, if those occurrences simply just happened, exactly as you described and there weren't any other possible logical explanations.

In regards to the time your house was vibrating:

- Could it have been the pipes rattling?

- Could there have been some sort of construction going on close by with heavy equipment?

- Could it have been an airplane flying over the house?

- Is the house near an airport or a highway?

- Is the house near train tracks?

- Could it have been an earthquake?

- Did you ask any of your other neighbors if they felt anything in their houses?

I can tell by things you've said that you have looked into this quite a bit and that you're pretty much up to speed on all of the common (grossly unsubstantiated) ghost hunter lore. The first thing ya need to do is forget about all of that crapola and put your personal religious beliefs aside. The LAST thing you need to do is let someone with "the third eye" fill your head with even more mystical bovine fecal matter.

It's too late to try and find explainable causes for all of the things that happened in the house 20 years ago. If things start happening again, the best thing you can do is exhaust every last reasonable explanation possible for each occurrence as it happens. As far as being afraid that renovation is going to cause paranormal activity, that's part of the ubsubstantiated ghost hunter lore I was just speaking of. Theories like that make perfect sense from a mystical point of view, but there isn't any substantial, scientific evidence to support it.

Thanks again for sharing your story with us and please be sure to keep us up to date!

- Aedryan
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Tiorum3 · Curious About Ghosts Joined: 26 Sep 2007 Posts: 4

To everyone,

I want to say thanks for the excellent information on the website. Especially the stages of an infestation. After reading all that, it actually makes me feel better. I didnt mention some of the things that happened, but its nice to know that I didnt really experience anything that out of the ordinary (lol how ironic is that talking about ghosts!).

The vibrations should be explained a little more in detail. Yes I live right next to a road which becomes a highway. Being in Pa with all of the oil tractor trailers which roll by, the vibrations caused by them is very common and not at all unusual. It was the duration and the sound which was very very different. The duration lasted until I left the house, which is hard to really say accurately, but it was at a minimum over a 1 minute long. Also it kept getting more intense and the sound kept getting louder. The only way i can describe it is a combination of a freight train and wind/hurricane type noise. i have never heard anything like before or since. And when i say loud is was almost to the point where you couldnt hear yourself think loud. Combine that with the whole house shaking violently, and yeah, this was no tanker truck rolling by.

Also the house itself does make natural noises. All the floors in the house are made of the old slatted wood, and you can tell where anyone is in the house by listening to the noises they make as they walk around. An example of this was my mother and I being in the top story of the house (3rd story) in my bedroom talking. We both heard what sounded exactly like my father coming up the stairs all the way to the 2nd floor. My father was working at the time, so she said to me to yell down and tell my father we were up in my room. I did so with no response. About a half hour later, the exact and i mean exact same "walking up the stiars" sound started again. I again went to the top and stairs and yelled down that we were up in my room. This time, my father answered. So when he gets upstairs, we ask him why he didnt respond before and he replies back, "what are you talking about? I just got home." I estimate, btw, that the house is approximately 7-8000 square feet total including the basement which is essentially one big room. The heating system was (its been replaced now) a forced air system, which made up its own set of noises, but these sounds were definitely normal and easy to distinguish.

So after growing up in that house, you get to know every single sound it makes and how come. Out of the ordinary noises are easy to pick out, and if it had just been the knocking sounds and lights flickering I wouldnt have thought it was a ghost. On the lights flickering, they seemed too well timed, done to be annoying. After this continued on for some time, we had an electrician come in and check all the circuits in the house to make sure there wasnt something seriously wrong. For a time my father thought a short in the house might cause a fire, and nothing at all was found to be causing the flickering. After things calmed down, the on/off stopped altogether.

As far as ghost lore is concerned, I guess I have always taken it to be just that- lore. I have been interested in ghosts ever since I had that experience, but I never put too much stock in anything I had read about or heard because this is just way to far off the grid to be expalined by conventional wisdom. I do believe though, from a religious perspective, that ouiji boards are a really bad thing, and can open up or summon things that I dont want to have anything to do with. I believe that there is a struggle going on between good and evil in the world and that demons are real and do exist. Therefore, religious issues can come into play into some of these situations. In my case though, no I dont think this was a demon. Its nice to actually vent this stuff and not think that the people reading it are going to call me crazy. If they had experienced what I had in that house I think there would be alot more believers out there, thats for sure.

To be honest, I dont want to try to stir this presence up again trying to capture him on film or evp. I dont live in my hometown anymore, so doing that sort of thing would take a concerted effort, and with things quiet I'd like to try and keep it that way.

After reading that these things will go dormant and re manifest themselves at a different point in time, I am concerned about when he might reappear again. I am glad to hear that the renovation isnt going to make him get upset though.

Its a relief to finally share this with people who actually know something about it, and if it does start again, I know who I am going to contact about investigating it. Because believe me, it was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced, bar none.

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Sep Thu 27, 2007 3:21 pm Post subject:

Tiorum3 · Curious About Ghosts Joined: 26 Sep 2007 Posts: 4

I just realized something, I am in the process of installing a full home automation system in the house. This includes cameras and motion detectors for security. The cameras inside the house are both day/night, but without IR illumination. They are set to be triggered by motion. Would a spirit/entity set these off? The motion detectors, on the other hand, are IR based sensors. All of the cameras are going to be running to a DVR system, so I might have some information for you guys after all. Also, the inside cameras at this point havent been installed, so maybe I'll order one with a mic. How do you detect evps anyway?

em · Posted: Sep Thu 27, 2007 5:33 pm Post subject:

Hi Tiorum3,

Welcome first of all.....

I am one of those Ouija Boards lover's that Aedryan was metioning.....lol!!!

Well hope to see ya around the forums...

Em

(out of all things i lost....i miss my mind the most)

Aedryan Methyus · Posted: Sep Fri 28, 2007 11:58 pm Post subject:

Tio,
Very cool about the video surveillance system. Maybe you'll get something.... Some people claim that spirits can trigger motion detectors, though i've never personally seen evidence of it. We've used them during our investigations, but we've never had anything set one off.

To detect EVP's ya just have to review your recordings. Be sure and read my article at the following link for more info:

EVP Tutorial

Good luck!

- Aedryan
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madcow · Ghost Hunting Enthusiast Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 151

Just wondering, it has been a while have you captured anything with the security system as of yet?
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I wasn't mad until I got a belly full of Erie politics