I don’t believe in the supernatural.

The house I live in is my fathers childhood home. His mother was, frankly, schizophrenic, in an era where most people equated mental health with Rose Kennedy. She went untreated. She beat him as a child, and drove her entire family away. She died 15 years ago, and we are still cleaning out her accumulated garbage. She called for him on her deathbed; my father still didn’t go.

My mother also died in this house, suddenly. But she loved us, and we love her.

So I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I have been friends with two self proclaimed witches, who both said this place has an “off” energy. and sometimes, at night, you might sense movement out of the corner of your eye. It can be unnerving.

I moved into a new apartment in a new part of town, just had a mattress on the floor and a few items moved in, and took a nap. When I woke up there was a man standing over me watching me sleep. Scared the shit out of me. Then I watched him slowly fade away from into thin air. Turns out I wasn’t 100% awake yet and my dreaming brain had created a brief hallucination.

I was facing a wall shelf with a stack of hard plastic cups wedged into it, and when I turned away from the shelf I heard the cups fall to the floor. Based on how tightly they were wedged in there’s no way they could’ve fallen on their own. Although there was an open window that was adjacent to it there’s no way that a breeze could’ve knocked them over, and even if someone on the lower floor punched the wall it wouldn’t have knocked the cups down. Nothing else happened in that room that was out of the ordinary.

Although I’m still a skeptic, I don’t have a reasonable explanation for this one.

When I was a little kid, maybe 5 years old, my family lived in this old house that used to be a Civil War hospital during a few battles.

All kinds of weird shit happened there, but one event stands out.

I was sleeping between my parents in their bed on the second floor. I woke up. It was late and very dark.

I looked to my right and saw the curtains blowing in. The windows were painted shut. I watched as the curtains start to slide off the wall. It looked like someone was holding them up. I shit you not. Like I could see feet just underneath the bottom.

The curtains moved to the foot of the bed, and fell.

I don’t remember seeing this, but my parents swear I told them that when the curtains fell, a woman with a yellow dress and no eyes had been holding them up, and that she stood at the foot of the bed for a while.

The curtains, according to my parents, we’re in fact on the floor at the foot of the bed. I can’t vouch for that though because I was a kid and frankly, don’t remember.

My best non-supernatural explanation is that I had sleep paralysis that night and hallucinated much of what I saw. I’ve had it chronically since, so it’s possible.

I don’t know though. It’s one of those things I think about late at night when I have too much free time. What the fuck did I see?

A few years back, I moved into an old farmhouse in the countryside. It was peaceful, except for the noises that would come from the attic every night, a soft thumping like someone walking around. After a couple of sleepless nights, I finally mustered the courage to check it out.

I climbed up to the attic with a flashlight. It was full of dusty old furniture and trinkets, probably from previous tenants. As I was examining a pile of old newspapers, my flashlight caught something - a pair of eyes glowing in the dark, staring right back at me. I nearly dropped the flashlight in shock. As I shone the light in the direction, I found an old portrait of a woman. The eyes were eerily lifelike. I convinced myself it was just the way the light was hitting it.

The noises didn’t stop, but I learned to live with them. But the weirdest part was when I left the house a 6 months later. The movers came to get my stuff, and I told them to leave everything in the attic, I’d Grabe those items myself. I mainly needed movers for the big heavy stuff. Later, when I returned to pick up some remaining items, the portrait was gone.

To this day, I still can’t figure out where it could have gone, why just that. Probably some completely logical explanation, but it still gives me chills when I think about it.

My sister and I got a Ouija board as teens because we were curious. We had a few interesting sessions, but things got dark one afternoon after school. Words were being misspelled that we both knew the correct spelling of. The messages were getting aggressive. At one point the message announced that both our parents had just died in a auto accident on the way home from work. (It was after 5 at that point.)

They both arrived safely, but a couple of hours later a friend came over who led a weekly class in metaphysics. (This was the late '60s.)

The instant he walked in the door, he froze. He announced with great concern that there was someone present to needed to be encouraged to move on.

At the beginning of that night’s class, he held some kind of ceremony encouraging whatever that was to leave.

We put the Ouija board away and never used it again.