Freak Out

Hi! My name is Beth and have been telling my story to my friends for many years. I am now 32 and at the time of my ghost experience I was 9 or 10 years old but it feels like it was yesterday because the picture of him is so vivid in my head.

We (my mom, dad, and two other sisters) lived on a farm place that we rented from our neighbors and this was in Raymond, Minnesota. We moved there when I was probably two but I never noticed anything for quite a few years. Of course a lot of noises you could never explain but wrote them off to three girls home alone in the country. We raised Arabians on our farm and had about 10 - 15 horses and we also boarded some too. So my sisters and I would go riding and in the fall we would be riding the horses through the leaves and then every so often I could hear something so would stop the horse and the footsteps would continue for a few more steps and then stop. So then I would do it again -- ride for a little while and then stop and the same thing -- some footsteps would continue in the woods. Since all the leaves were off the trees you could see right through the woods and nothing was there.
Then another time that sticks out was when my sister was home alone and she heard what she described as a whole dresser falling over and crashing -- she was so scared she just ran to the neighbors, which was not close, and had them come over and look with her and nothing had been moved.

Then finally I saw him. I was going down into the barn to the tac room to get my saddle and in the barn were many stalls for the horses to stand and at the end one was a ghost -- I know because he was there but yet white cloudy looking -- an old man with a long beard and overalls on. Needlesstosay, I totally freaked out and droped everything and ran to the house to get my mom and went back and nothing.

That was pretty much it besides more noises and then we had to move to town because my mom and dad got divorced and mom and us girls couldn't handle all the chores. So we picked a house and moved in and I went into the basement and in the pantry was a picture of this old man that the people had left -- he looked exactly like the old man that I had seen in the barn. Now this is two totally different houses and from the country to town and not our picture. This, of course, really made me nervous but for some reason left the picture sit down there and did nothing with it. As a prank -- we thought -- my girlfriend and I had told a couple of boys from my class the whole story and they didn't believe us so we took them to my house to show them the picture. Well we, my girlfriend and I, shut them down in the basement and the one boy could see a shadow walking towards him and totally paniced and pounded on the door to let him out and that someone was coming. We let him out and he was white as a ghost and ran home. I think that freaked us out so bad that we never really talked about it again and nothing further happened. I do think I made my mom take that picture to the garbage though. It was scary but at the same time I feel lucky to have experienced it.

By: beth_o@co.kandiyohi.mn.us