Paranormal Activity

When I was growing up, my mother had an unhealthy obsession with all things Stephen King.  In fairness, it was the 90's, so I'm pretty sure most of America had an unhealthy obsession with Stephen King.

Anywho, she owned probably every Stephen King book that had been published up to that point, and our walls were literally lined with shelves packed with VHS tapes that held every possible B-horror movie that's ever been made.  

Yes, even Return of the Killer Tomatoes, the movie George Clooney wishes everyone would just forget ever existed, already.

I've been watching bad horror movies since I was old enough to sit up in my crib (thank you, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for haunting my dreams all those years), so I'm no stranger to the world of the paranormal and I'm not easily spooked.

We bought our house about 5 years ago now, which I'll get back to in a minute.  At the end of the hallway where all the bedroom entrances are, there's a floor-to ceiling mirror mounted to the wall.  I refuse to remove it, for my own weird reasons (it was here when we moved in and I have a thing about mirrors anyway).  So one night, everyone was asleep and I decided to allot some "me" time and do a whole mini spa thing, with mani-pedi and a face mask.  A freaking avacado face mask.

Have you ever seen someone wearing an avacado face mask?  When it dries, the color is a weird green-gray, like Japanese horror movie makeup, and if a person were to be wearing that face mask, in a very dimly-lit hallway with a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the other end of it, well...

Yup.  Nothin' paranormal here, just a dark, quiet house and the genius who didn't immediately recognize herself underneath the scariest spa mask ever.

We have a cat, an adorable little slice of Satan that will purr and rub on you one minute and then have a sudden Bipolar spaz attack and then try to rip off your face.  We got her shortly after we moved in, when my girls spent their first summer visitation away at their dad's.  This cat, who did nothing but purr and look at us lovingly on the trip home (she was a rescue kitten) and for a full month after, became psychotic in this house.  She would startle awake out of a dead sleep and go running like a banshee down the hallway.  She would yowl continuously outside of the girls' bedroom doors, which we kept closed because she wasn't fully box-trained yet.  She would hiss at nothing, her eyes turning from a gorgeous golden color to a steely gray as she fluffed her fur up in a manner that I assume made her think she looked more leopard than alley cat.

Then my boyfriend started sleepwalking.  It was funny at first, since it appeared that our houseguest just thought it was funny to make him strip down to his skivvies and stand on the front porch or try to cuddle with my nephew on the couch.  Just my luck right, a smartass ghost with a stupid sense of humor. 

Then it got weird.  

He'd get out of bed, open the bathroom door, open one of the girls' bedroom doors, and then come back to bed.  Sometimes he'd get out of bed, open the front door, and fall asleep on the couch.  The cat would still yowl, standing at the doorways, and wouldn't come near him for months, even after the girls had come home and everything had returned to normal.

I'd been praying about all this for some time, pretty much just asking that if there was something in my house that didn't belong there, for it to leave.  Apparently it thought it belonged there, because the last straw was the night I was laying in bed, unable to sleep, and suddenly felt something move over top of me and hover there.  My heart was racing, my eyes darting around in the dark trying to figure out if there was something there, or if I was just imagining things.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't glad that I couldn't actually see anything, but my heart was racing, there was a sudden, odd pressure on my chest - I can't even really describe the entirety of the feeling, but I knew something was there. Something ugly.  Something malicious.  Something that I did not want to co-exist with.

So I did what any rational adult would do - I pulled the covers up over my head and whimpered like a toddler.

  

Ha ha, Boogey Man, I'm invisible now and you can't get me.

...and I prayed.  Hard.  And it wasn't any of that "if there's anything here that doesn't belong" crap,  it was, "get this unholy entity out of my house."  It seemed to work; the feeling dissipated as quickly as it came.  My whole body kind of relaxed all at once and even though I was still scared, I couldn't feel it anymore, and that was good enough.

We decided that there was a portal somewhere in the house (for those of you who believe in such things), since we've had what seems to be many visits and our house tends to be ... active ... but the "personalities" never seem to be the same.  We've had tricksters, like the one we tend to think was a dearly departed friend, who stuck half my cousin's crap on the front porch while she slept on our couch.  We've had many that could be felt but not seen, and we've had a few that thought it was funny to move things, turn things on and off, rattle posters just enough to freak us out, whisper random words, and chase the cat down the hall.   Our motion detectors are constantly blinking when there's nothing there to make them blink, and that's rather disconcerting - but overall, I don't really mind our visitors, if that's what they are.

As long as they leave my girls alone and none of them decide to play Dementor over my bed, we're good.  

Because f*ck that.

What do you think?  Do you believe in the paranormal?  Have you had "visitors" in your house before or experiences you can't explain?    Share in the comments, I do love a good ghost story!