Author’s Note: This story is true… it all happened to me. I am scared to tell this out loud for the first time, but I feel I am strong enough now. I know it is long- but it did happen over a really long period of time. Enjoy, and I’d love any stories back and such :)
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My grandmother was a psychic. It doesn’t matter the level of belief of whomever might read these words- I will forever believe in things unseen to close-minded eyes, and my grandmother is the perfect example of why.
She was spun of fine french heritage and held an air of aristocracy that was rare and surprisingly without condescension. She was a regal, yet tiny, woman… and was the last human one would ever think to be abnormal.
According to my aunt’s and mother, there was never a time when she didn’t have visions or premonitions. She would have them so often, and they would be so accurate, there was little question whether or not to heed their warnings. She once told my Aunt Kat to refrain from going on a school trip to Fox Lake, Illinois. She cried and begged her, but my aunt resisted. That day my aunt ventured out onto the lake on a snowmobile- normally a safe activity considering the medievally brutal winters suffered in the American midwest. But by some unknown force, my aunt’s snowmobile broke the ice and she went down with it. She survived- but barely, and the hypothermia damaged her internal organs irrevocably.
My grandmother also would wake up from sleep screaming phrases, turn on the television, and everything would be elucidated. She once screamed out- “The plane is down! They’re all dead! Oh my God they’re all dead…” and turned on the television to find a plane crash at Chicago O’Hare Airport. Most famously, she once yelled “My furs are burning!” only to find her drycleaners burning down on the evening news.
Perhaps the instance that will stick with me forever will be one involving my mother. My mother was older when myself and twin brother were conceived, and had previously had quite a lot of trouble keeping children to term. She found out she was pregnant, and not two minutes later did her mother call and tell her it was twins.
Why mention any of this? Perhaps because it makes me sound a little more reasonable.
The women in our family have all inherited ‘gifts’ from my grandmother. Some have her premonitions, some her empathetic talents of reading auras and personalities. My mother garnered her intuition and almost ungodly luck. I received something a bit different.
My grandmother left my lake house for the last time when I was six-years old. I screamed and thrashed and threw such an epic tantrum that my mother started crying herself out of frustration. It was viciously out of character for me- a normally soft-spoken child. However, I refused to let go of my grandmother. Mainly because I knew I would never see her again.
I didn’t. She died only weeks later after a fatal stroke. But my mother never forgot my odd behavior, and as I grew older she always noticed things that seemed out of the ordinary.
I would dream of dead relatives of hers, spelling out messages of mainly guidance. I became jumpy, and would jump even when there wasn’t anything in the room, just because ‘something’ startled me. I was always scared of ghosts, even though at that young of an age no one had ever explained them to me. My whole body shook at the mention.
It was only when I moved to Wisconsin that things took a turn I wish they hadn’t.
It started with a picture of a little girl in my bedroom window. A brunette little girl. I was blonde at the time we bought the house and this picture was taken as I stood next to my mother. In our backyard. There was no one else in the house.
The little girl didn’t really come back until a few years later. My room was always significantly colder than the rest of our early 20th century home, but my family chalked it up to being part of a ‘newer wing.’ However, I knew it was cold for a different reason.
A psychic later in life told me that I should have gotten out of there the minute we moved in. Everyone who has known me before and since we moved from there is astonished by the difference in my personality. To best describe it- my room devoured me. Anything happy in my life… it took. Anything exciting… it dulled. Anything beautiful… it destroyed.
The little girl rarely moved. Occasionally I’d see her in different parts of the house, but mainly she sat right in front of my face every night and day when I would lie down in my bed. I knew she was harmless… lonely the best adjective for her demeanor, but she would become scared, and that scared me to no end.
I had taken a vow off of anything having to do with horror or ghosts at a young age, but one night my twin brother and I were watching “10 Most Haunted Places in America” in our damp basement. I had complained to my mother numerous times about the light in my room turning on at random times during the middle of the night. She had the whole house’s electric checked and everything was normal- so no abnormalities. Rick, my twin, had gone upstairs momentarily, leaving me to watch the program by myself. They were talking about some mansion in the west when the dialogue stated, “And all the lights would go off at once.”
The lights in the basement went black.
I ran faster than I ever have to get Rick. He went to check the lights and he said the switch had just been turned down- like I had simply flipped the switch and turned the television off. Problem was- I hadn’t moved from the couch.
The basement was never a positive place for me either. It was where I developed a serious alcohol problem during my senior year of high school. But before that, there were more weird instances. You could not go down without feeling like someone was watching you. Things would disappear or break so easily. But on my 13th birthday, things started getting out of hand.
My friends had dared Rick to come down to the basement and give me a hug (the “OMG a boy in our class is hanging at this party too!” kind of mentality). He was a strong kid before the house took him too. But that night something was wrong. He picked me up in an enthusiastic bear hug, and next thing I knew I was on the ground, ankle twisted in such a grotesque way it looked out of a horror film.
There was no way he should’ve dropped me. He didn’t even know how it happened. I was just on the floor with a cracked ankle.
Fast-forward a few weeks, and I was still in a cast and on crutches. Being the ever effervescent child, I had tied ribbon bows right above the handles. After a tough day at school, I came home and put my crutches by my bedside before limping off to a shower.
I was healing nicely, but I still had to keep the cast out of the bath to not get it wet. About three minutes in there was a loud POP! and the shower curtain closed in on me, causing me to fall and re-crack my ankle. I have tried to recreate this scene many times, and there is no way to do so. It requires immense force to physically wrap a shower curtain around a human being, so it could not have been a wind draft- my only plausible explanation.
Cold and terrified, I got out of the shower as quick as I could, running into my room.
And that’s when I noticed the crutches.
The ribbons were below the handles- not above like I had put them on.
I couldn’t stop screaming, and my mother came in with salt for her home-remedy house cleanse sorta thing. This became a common occurrence throughout my years at the house. Especially in high school.
In high school I had a lovely friend who loved ghost television shows like “A Haunting” and “Ghost Hunters.” She told me a story about how she would wake up to a dark man in what looked like a top hat, standing above her. He would rearrange her room- but other than scare her, he wouldn’t harm her.
About a year later I started seeing my own dark man.
I have never publicly aired this story before, and as I type, I am terrified of what might happen. You see, I don’t know if the man was attached to the house or to me, and I might never find out.
He showed up around the time the little girl by my bedside started getting scared. He would stand in front of my closet… just looming. He was nearly as tall as my ceiling, and he loved it when I was in pain. In fact, many people have told me that he was probably there even before I could see him.
At 3:24am every morning I would wake up. On the dot. For about a year. My mood this year went from normal happy teenager to a depressed sociopath. I didn’t care about anyone, anything, especially myself.
Previously diagnosed with BED (Binge Eating Disorder), I began to starve myself- for fun. Not for any other reason. No triggers or control issues… just for the pure sake of I felt like I needed to hurt myself. I became malicious and unpredictable… spending days doing nothing but staring at walls or my computer.
My room became even colder. My parents stopped recognizing me. I became an alcoholic and manic depressive to dangerous stages. Self-harm seemed just a side hobby. The pride I felt from hurting myself and anyone else around me was like a drug. But I knew it wasn’t me.
I never wanted to hurt myself. I definitely never wanted to hurt others. Everything I did made me sick. And it drained me. I looked and acted dead.
When I went away to college, everything changed. It was like a complete 180. It wasn’t until two years when my parents finally sold the house that I saw a psychic about it.
The house wasn’t letting me go. Every time I was home it had me again… and the starving, self-harm, and darkness came back. My parents were understandably exhausted. But this time there was a difference. If I left the house, even for thirty minutes or so, I was happy-go-lucky and how I was at college. To this day I’ve never experienced anything like it.
My last week in my room, I did no packing. It was if it wouldn’t let me. I packed everything the day of the move- and it was the hardest task I have ever accomplished. The lights would go on and off all night long… and 3:24am was again a constant.
But I got out.
And then I went to a psychic, who had never been to my home and who hadn’t seen me in 4 years.
"Was your room blue? Like a turquoise" she asked out-of-the-blue at the end of our session.
"Yeah."
"Your room did not like you." She gathered a puzzled look upon her face. Like she was translating from a different language.
"I know."
"No, Kels, you don’t understand. It wanted you dead. There was a soul-sucker… a very aggravated spirit, very malicious, and he thrived on your pain. He took any happiness you had. There was no hope for you." She began to shiver, as if the room had dropped about 20 degrees, "Oh God, your room was so cold wasn’t it?"
"Freezing."
"There was no life left. He took everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone died because of your room. A couple." And that’s all she said before ending the session.
But I already knew she was right. About a year earlier we had received a magazine in the mail featuring our house. A couple who had owned it awhile before my family had committed suicide together to spare themselves from dying of cancer or something similar. It talked about how it was unexpected to friends, but not to family. They’d seen what the house had done.
After years of this, I finally told my parents everything that the psychic had said- and how it was true. My mother broke down into tears. My father simply told me a brief tale…
"One summer, when you were at the cabin up north, I was home just watching tv. I started hearing the floor wood cracking (this was not uncommon) but then I heard footsteps. They were in your room. Then they went into our room. I could hear them through the ceiling. I started walking upstairs and saw someone run into your room. I thought you might have come home to surprise me (also not uncommon), so I went into your room. There was no one there. I checked your bathroom- nothing. Then I heard someone going down the stairs, and I guess what I’m asking is- did the little girl by your bed have brown hair?"
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Credits to: Kelsey Grace Pfeifer (http://cricketscrushedincars.tumblr.com/)
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