A Family, Haunted

I’ve always loved a scary story. I grew up reading Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul, among others. I was an avid reader and could never get enough, but I always knew ghosts, spirits, hauntings, and the supernatural were the stuff of vivid imaginations. I’m a 44-year-old mother of seven, but I still love anything zombie-related — same with vampires, but I don’t really talk much about them anymore because the Twilight series gave the bloodsucking undead a wussy reputation, in my humble opinion.

In 1993 I married my second husband, Rail, and he moved in to my farmhouse with my 3-year-old daughter and me. The original house was comprised of the kitchen, living room, bathroom, master bedroom, and basement. In the 50’s another foundation was built and two more bedrooms were added to the home. The original basement had very low ceilings, but the newer basement had been finished and made into a family room and a sewing room. My husband immediately claimed the third unused bedroom and the newer basement directly below it as ‘his’. It didn’t take long for him to put locks on the doors to keep me out. I didn’t know what he was doing behind those locked doors, but (as I later discovered) he was a sociopath with some unspeakably evil tendencies.

For the majority of the marriage he worked second shift at a foundry an hour away from home, so he was gone from early-afternoon until well after midnight. Most nights I would wake up and go looking for him, and the majority of time I would find him locked in his room or his basement. He would not allow me to enter.  Instead, he would tell me to leave him alone…so I did.

Not long after the wedding I started feeling uneasy at night. I heard strange noises and felt as if I was being watched. Sometimes it sounded as if someone was stomping around in the attic. I thought we must have raccoons in the attic and I asked my husband to check for animals. He found no signs of any animals and told me I was making things up. Whenever I told him I was hearing things or feeling uneasy, he would make fun of me and tell me I was a psycho, so I stopped talking to him about it.

My little girl, Melody, was beginning to tell me about things she was seeing and hearing and I grew more concerned. I knew there was something going on, but I didn’t know what, and I had no one to talk to about it. I mean, if my own spouse didn’t believe me, I wasn’t going to tell others and have them think I was crazy, also.

When Artie was about five years old, he became extremely afraid of taking a bath or shower. He would panic when I sent him to bathe. He was a very mild-mannered child, but when it came to bathing he would do just about anything to get out of it. One night I sent him to take a shower and I heard him screaming. Running back to the bathroom, I found him dripping wet and screaming in terror about something with red eyes watching him when he was in the shower. I was afraid for him, but I didn’t know what to do.

Life carried on like that for years. Sometimes items would be moved or broken with no explanation, but Rail would just blame and punish the kids and me. As the unexplained activity continued, he became angrier and meaner — evil, really.

After we left him, we stayed at a domestic violence shelter for three months. On New Years’ Eve the staff had gone home and just the residents were at the shelter. We were locked — for our safety — in to the living quarters. My sons saw a figure outside their window and came screaming from their room in a panic. We called the sheriff and they investigated, but there was no one on the property and no footprints in the snow outside the window. The therapists later said it was just a flashback due to post traumatic stress. Soon after that, Artie was again accosted in the bathroom by a dark figure that spoke to him. The therapists said it was suppressed memories trying to surface.

We were all excited to end our suffocating three-month-stay in the shelter and we moved into a beautiful five bedroom home far from the farmhouse and the atrocities that were committed there. My children started telling me right away that they were hearing someone walking in the attic and through the upstairs hallway at night. Soon we were seeing dark figures, hearing something whispering to us, feeling the electrical charge in the air during these incidents. Sometimes the air grew so heavy that I had difficulty breathing.

I started reading about people who were haunted by spirits and discovered that very often evil spirits (demons) attach themselves to people and follow them. I believe this is what is happening with my family. I was told that I would have to make it leave by prayer and exhibiting a lack of fear and demanding that it leave. So far it hasn’t worked. We had our former pastor and elders come out and walk through the house, praying and blessing it. The spirits remain.

I had told my new husband about all of it before we were married, but it didn’t bother him. I was hoping that the apparitions would want to leave when Atticus moved in because he has such a strong faith in Christ, but that has not been the case. In fact, in the last week things have escalated. I am not afraid because I don’t believe these spirits can hurt us, but I am gravely concerned about the state of mind of my children after having to constantly deal with this presence and the fear it causes in them.

Little Scout has been coming into our bedroom during the night completely distraught and refusing to go back to bed. It happened again Wednesday morning and just as she was climbing into our bed, my alarm went off. I got up to dress and saw a dark figure standing in Scout’s and Jem’s room. It was gone in an instant.

The next day I put Sprout on the school bus and sat down at my desk. I noticed the dog wasn’t nearby and Scout said he was in the foyer and she would go get him. She wasn’t out of sight but for a few seconds when I felt the familiar electrical charge on my skin, announcing the arrival of the entity. My dog came barreling back to me, shaking like crazy, and in his wake little Scout was running also, terror etched on her face. She flung herself at me and clung to me while my dog cowered and shook at my feet. I couldn’t get Scout to speak. Eventually she settled down, but it was several hours before Bugsy would leave my side.

Last night Atticus and I didn’t go to bed until after midnight. Our room was cold and we huddled together under the quilt to warm ourselves and fall asleep. My back began to hurt severely and eventually I couldn’t stand the pressure any more, so I was extricating my limbs from Atticus when he sat up suddenly and said, “I saw him!” I was painstakingly trying to roll over and I asked him what he was talking about. He said he’d seen the thing — the apparition — standing right behind me and that when I had begun to roll over it ran to the end of the bed and disappeared. He said it was as if it didn’t want me to know it had been watching me. I’m wondering if that thing was causing the severe pressure in my back.

All night it thumped around, waking me. I heard it walking and whispering. Sometime during the night it threw open our bedroom door. I was startled and sat up. My husband woke, but he is hard of hearing and had not heard the door crash against the wall.

I’m not afraid any more that someone is going to think I’m crazy. I couldn’t care less if they do. I know what I’ve seen, heard, and felt. There is something haunting my family and it is evil. It says it wants to destroy us. It hates us so much that it even seeks out Melody and haunts her in her new home, thirty minutes away from us.

This is the opinion I have formed: I believe that Rail was possessed…and that the demons possessing him are haunting us. I know we can’t move away from them because we’ve moved twice and so have they. I believe that I am stronger than them because God says His children have all the powers of Christ, but so far I have not been able to make them leave.

I don’t know what’s next, but I’m hoping that by writing this — by getting it out there — someone can help me understand what’s happening and show me how to stop it.