r/hauntedhouses • u/INTZBK • 6h ago
This happened to me My childhood home
In February of 1969, I was 4. My father was in the army, and had just returned from Vietnam in June of 1968, and had been assigned to a post in the south. My parents bought a home, a brand new house, that no one had ever lived in. It was in a fairly isolated housing development about three miles from the gate of the post where my father was stationed. It was a typical late 60s middle class home, a three bedroom brick house, with two baths, a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and a den. A nice little family home for my mother, father, older sister and myself. My younger brother was born about a year after we moved in. The neighborhood was mostly full of families like ours, with military backgrounds.
Not long after we moved in, I was in the den, and I noticed something. The den was paneled in pinewood paneling with heavy grain. I was looking at the wall, and in the grain of the paneling was a face. It looked like an old man with long hair and a beard. Now, I am aware of pareidolia, but it seemed to me that no matter where in the room you were, the face in the wall was looking at you. I pointed the face out to my mother and sister, and my sister, who was 9, seemed particularly alarmed by it. My mother brushed it off as just the way the paneling looked, but not long after, she hung a large picture over the area where the face was. Once it was covered it didn’t bother my sister or myself anymore.
It began slowly. Occasionally, things that were placed well away from the edges of shelves or tables or window sills would somehow slide off the edge. It usually happened when people were in the room, but no one was near the area where the object fell. It was puzzling, but my mother assured us it was nothing to worry about.
I can remember that I started hearing voices in the living room late at night. It seemed to be a man and a woman talking, not loud enough to distinguish what they were saying, but loud enough to get my attention. I was little, so I thought it must have been my parents, although it happened when everyone was usually asleep. I asked my mother about it, she said that it was probably a dream, but my sister told her she had heard it too, on more than one occasion. My mother insisted it was bad dreams.
We had a female German Shepherd. My parents had the backyard fenced in not long after we moved in so the dog could run around. So, she stayed in the backyard during the day and then slept in the house at night. We had had her for a couple of years, and she had always slept in the house at night, everywhere we lived. But, on some nights, she resisted coming into the house. She would stand at the back door and whine. If my parents forced her to come inside, she would pace from room to room whining, all night.
Then there was the knocking. We started hearing knocking on the walls, sometimes very light taps, sometimes more forceful knocking. My mother blamed it on plumbing, or the house settling, or something in the heating ducts. Then one afternoon, my mother and sister and I were sitting in the kitchen, and suddenly there was a loud continuous banging from inside the kitchen cabinets. My mother finally stopped claiming that it was something normal. Instead, she told us to ignore the stuff happening, pay it no attention and to just to keep doing whatever we were doing.
This kind of thing continued as time went by, with some new developments. We started seeing something in the hallway. Everyone saw it, including my father. We only ever saw it out of the corner of our eye. It was always n the hallway, either running up or down the hall, or darting across the hall, going from one room to another.
Some particular incidents that stand out include a time when my mother was scolding my baby brother because he had dumped his food onto the floor from his highchair. Suddenly, the dish draining rack, which was on the counter next to the sink, slid forcefully into the sink. It was full, and dishes and silverware went everywhere with a loud crash. On another occasion, my parents had hired a young black woman to look after my baby brother, do some cooking and cleaning, and to stay with us kids until my parents came home from work. One afternoon , when my sister and I got home from school, she was sitting on the front porch, holding my brother. She was out there, she said, because the “haints” were acting up. She didn’t go into details, but she wouldn’t go back in the house until my mother got home. I never learned what had happened that scared her so badly, but she quit not long after that. Then there was the time my mother got up in the middle of the night, and found that every door leading to the outside - the front door, the back door, and the carport door - were standing wide open. Not unlocked, not ajar, but completely open. It was quite unsettling for all of us. And lastly, one night my sister was in the bathroom off the hall, getting ready to take a bath, and was looking in the mirror while brushing her teeth, when something grabbed her hair from behind, and yanked it straight back. I remember that she ran out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, screaming bloody murder. My mother got her calmed down and then had to sit in the bathroom with her while she took her bath.
I spent my childhood living with incidents like these, and that’s why I believe in the paranormal to this day.