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Originally written by Nineflowers.
I grew up in a house my grandfather had lived in since the 1940's. He died in the 50s and my parents took the place on. It was, and is, a big rambling house, once a farmhouse. It's been added to and changed a lot so it has 18thC, 19thC and 1950's bits. My *worst* experience was in what had been my parents' room in the newest part of the house. In the early 70s, the family who were to become my stepfamily came to stay at our house.
The new bedrooms hadn't been built yet, so my soon-to-be stepsister and I shared a bed in the *newer*, rebuilt part of the house. Half way through the night, I woke up for some reason. About a yard away from me, sitting in mid air, was an old man. He was square on, facing me, and oblivious of my presence. He seemed to be not quite solid, made up of pinpricks of light. I was 11 years old but remember thinking he looked like a picture in a comic, made up of colored dots. He had a gray beard and was doing something, concentrating intently on his hands.
Whatever it was he was doing was invisible to me, as was his chair, so he appeared to be floating in a seated position, mid air. I was so terrified, I turned round quickly and bumped my head on my stepsister. She didn't wake up. God knows how I got back to sleep, but I didn't wake her up, or cry out. Just put my head under the covers. Next morning I had a bruise on my forehead which proved to me it wasn't a dream - I had been fully conscious at the point I hurt my head; the bump hadn't woken me up because I was already awake.
As the years went by I never forgot seeing the old man, in fact I connected him with the voice I'd heard - usually afternoons, an old man's voice usually shrieking obscenities which I sometimes heard if I played in the daytime in my room upstairs. The sounds were so common we grew up with them and were used to them. I told my dad what I'd seen, no-one else. He said that old buildings can retain a memory of past events and we don't really know how time works.
He was open to the fact it might have been a *ghost* but, at the same time, he'd slept in that room many years and had never seen anything there. He did comment that when he'd rebuilt that part of the house, he'd changed the original floor levels and made them lower. I had no way of knowing that. I only know what I saw. Over 15 years later, I went out for a meal with my stepsister.
Conversation came round to that house, and she said "You know, I never told you but I once saw a very strange thing in that back bedroom," and went on to describe EXACTLY the same experience, that same night, all those years ago. At some point that night, she'd also seen the man and what she experienced was exactly what I did only she saw it when I was asleep and she didn't get the bruise!
Her boyfriend went on to tell me that they'd been staying there quite recently, and both him and another houseguest on a different floor of the house had both been woken up at 2am by a terrifying, loud hammering at the front door accompanied by an old man's voice shouting obscenities. At the time, he couldn't believe it didn't wake the entire street let alone the entire house. The next day, my aunt asked if anyone else had been woken by the old man hammering on the front door.
My father slept through it all and still claimed he never had a single paranormal experience in that house. As a final codicil to the whole story, last year the local library had an exhibition of old photos of the village. Unbelievably, there was one picture that had the top of our street and that house on. Late Victorian or Edwardian, by the look of it. Stood outside was an old man!
That's at least 4 independent witnesses to phenomena at this house and possibly more could be found. Three of us are professional people, all of us are rational and down to earth. But interestingly, the person who lived longest there didn't have a single spooky experience in over 40 years.
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