[littlemissattitude]

Okay. Having returned from Office Depot (had to buy ink for my printer), I'll tell you the story of the house I lived in for four and a half years in the mid 1970s.

It was your average tract home, three bedrooms, two baths, and no back yard to speak of (but it did have a really big covered patio). It wasn't old enough to have accumulated any sort of "energies", or one would think. But the whole time we lived in that house, weird stuff kept happening and I was just sort of uncomfortable there a lot of the time.

First, the story of my mother's experience. She was asleep one night, alone because my father was out of town on business. She never slept well when he was away, and that night wasn't any different. Sometime in the middle of the night, she woke up facing the closet. The closet was closed, but both large sliding doors were covered by mirrors.

When she opened her eyes she saw what she assumed to be me, standing in the door to the bathroom and bending over as if I were towel-drying my hair. She wondered what I was doing up washing my hair in the middle of the night and turned over to ask me. Except that it wasn't me...or anyone else. Thinking that she had just imagined it, she turned back to face the mirror. Whoever...whatever...it was, was still there, still doing whatever it is she/it was doing. I can't recall if she got up and went to sleep on the couch...I certainly would have if it had been me.

She didn't tell me about this experience right away; she didn't want to frighten me. In fact, it wasn't until after my father passed away that she told me that story. It's very true that she could have been dreaming, but it seems like if that had been all it was, she wouldn't have remembered the incident or thought to tell me about it later. In any case, my mother is a very down-to-earth person who wouldn't immediately assume that something like that had any supernatural overtones and would instead just assume that she had been dreaming or seeing things, and certainly wouldn't have ever told anyone about it.

And I likely wouldn't have assigned any importance to her story if it hadn't been for the things I experienced in that house. My experiences weren't so dramatic as some sort of materialization or anything...although a piece of paper did apparently dematerialize in my presence once. I didn't actually see it disappear, but I saw it fall and it never did hit the floor.

What happened was, I was doing homework (I was a senior in high school at the time) and had a card table set up in the spare bedroom, where I had my bookshelves. I was typing a paper (that was pre-pc, and we had to actually type papers back then), and was almost finished when I needed to use one more sheet of paper to complete the assignment. Conveniently, there was one blank sheet sitting on the table, back near the edge of the table farthest from me. I reached out to pick it up and instead sent it slipping over the back edge of the table. No problem. I got up to pick the sheet off the floor. The problem was that there was no sheet of paper on the floor anywhere it could possibly have fallen. I looked all over that room, and even outside where it couldn't have gone, and there was not one loose sheet of paper, used or blank, in the room. It was just...gone. I must have looked for that thing for an hour, and it wasn't that large room.

I didn't like going in that room for awhile after that.

The other big thing that made me uncomfortable in the house wasn't really one big thing, but a lot of little things. The whole time we lived in that house, I would hear people saying my name. Many times, this would happen when there was no one else in the house, no radios or tvs on, and as far as I could ever tell, no one outside close enough that I could hear a quiet voice saying my name. We lived with a freeway pretty much in our front yard, and so if it had been someone outside, they would have had to talk in louder than a normal tone of voice to be heard inside, and I've found that that sounds different than a conversational tone even when the person talking is far enough away for it to sound quiet. So, I don't think there is a realistic chance that it was someone outside doing it. That, and the fact that it happened at all times of the day or night, over the whole time we lived there. It wasn't an everyday thing, but I'd say that a week never went by that it didn't happen at least once. Along with the hearing my name said, I often also felt someone tapping me on the shoulder when there was no one there to do so. Which was really creepy.

Now, if this was a common occurrence when I lived other places, I really wouldn't think anything of it, other than that I might be prone to hallucination. But the voice (it was always the same one) and the tapping didn't happen before we moved into that house, and it never happened, as far as I can recall, since we moved from that house. I have no explanations, only the stories, which are quite true.