Hello Again!!

This is my second submission to your site. After reading so many stories, I find myself remembering how scared I was to go to sleep while living in this one house. I must've been between 7 and 10 years old. The house was my maternal grandmother's house, which had been passed down to my mother after she died. Did I say house? It was more like a third-world wooden shack - literally! Four rooms in the house in all - small living room, smaller kitchen and two bedrooms in all. How did 7 of us live there?!! Oh yeah, did I forget to mention the outhouse?

Anyway, my grandmother was a medium and was always contacting the spirit world, this before I was ever born. After her death, my mother, her new husband and all 5 kids move in. Though the worst horrors I remember in this house had nothing to do with spirits, (having been an abused child) I never had a good night's sleep in that house. The roof was nothing more than tin planks, so when it rained it made a wonderfully lulling sound that could put most people to sleep. Me...I heard this, plus clapping, all night! As I would lay in bed, in between my two sisters, (we shared one bed and never would I sleep alone or on the outer side of the bed - always on the inside!) I would think, that's not clapping, that just rain falling. But no matter how much I tried to fool myself out of being scared out of my mind, it wouldn't work. Some of the clapping was so loud. I would lay there in bed and envision these hands, nothing more than these pairs of hands in the kitchen, the room right next to our bedroom, floating and clapping all night.

My sister swore she saw this woman going up the walkway that lead from the roadside up to my mother's aunt's house (she lived behind us). She said the woman was dressed in black complete with a black veil covering her whole head. As my sister was looking out the only window in our room, the woman turned to look at her and called her name. I never believed her either. I told her she was dreaming. Though I never "saw" anything strange, I cannot deny the minute night fell (whether raining or not) I was always terrified to go to sleep and would lay awake for hours sometimes listening to other noises of the night.

Of course, this was rural Puerto Rico, where there were rats the size of possums in the cornfields across the road from our shack! So many of the noises I would hear in or around the house, I would attribute to these and other critters of the night. My mother swears experiencing some supernatural events in the house while her mother was living. She was sitting in on a seance her mother was holding one night and was picked up, chair and all, and held up against a wall, while everyone sat and watched.

I was her firstborn and she divorced my father even before my birth. She went back to live with her mother and one night, after I was born, she and my grandmother were awoken by my hungry cries. They both got up and my grandmother picked me up and told my mom to get my bottle from the kitchen. My mother could not leave the room - there was one solid wall in front of them but no door! Both women tried to find the doorway and couldn't. So my grandmother sat back down on the bed and said, When they are ready, the will let us pass. They waited about a minute and possibly said a prayer and then they were able to walk right through the doorway they both knew was there. The room had been dark, due to no electricity in the house - we lived by candlelight back then - I am now 42, just to give you a time reference. Even 20 years ago, most people there did not have a telephone and would receive and make phone calls at someone's house who did. Many roadways in this small rural community were not paved and every yard had a handful of chickens - so, yes, very rural indeed!

As a kid, I heard more than my share of supernatural stories. Some I found easy to believe some I didn't. While my experiences have been very few and not having actually seen anything, I know that certain people can open doors into places we'd rather not go to.

I know this is getting lengthy, but I just remembered another house (this one a row home here in the states) where some creepy stuff was supposedly going on. In this house it was said that the previous owners had found some witchcraft or black magic artifact in their front entrance and this had brought some spirits in. People claimed some weird stuff was going on.

A friend of the family was over one night and while she and my mother chatted in the kitchen, us kids hung out in front of the TV. My mom's friend got up to go to the bathroom upstairs and did a fast walk back to the kitchen - without having gone up! She told my mom that she saw a teenage girl dressed in a long, white, nightdress walking from the back bedroom and towards the front bedroom, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. I was about 13 at the time and did not believe her, but she looked white as a ghost herself and I now think, Why would this woman make this up?

There's more that we experienced in this house, but I will have to share that later. Though not terribly exciting, I still hope you enjoy the read!

By: arleneodiaz@earthlink.net