Paranormal Experiences?

Greetings reader,

I am quite new to this website but I like to share my personal experiences I've had regarding the paranormal.

First something about myself. I am currently 20 years old and I've lived my entire live in a small village near the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands, which is also the city where I am studying right now. For privacy reasons, I dislike stating where exactly I live or what my name is.

I have never actually seen myself as someone paranormal. Apart from the few events that happened to me that I can't explain (which I will talk about in a bit), I am rather sceptical about some things that have happened to me and I often try to debunk things that occur with reason. However, in my teenage years I became intrigued by paranormality and the afterlife. The (sadly) very few events that happened to me led to believe in such things, as some (to me) unexplainable events happened throughout my lifetime.

1) Aunt

Growing up as a kid, when I was two years old I lost my aunt, who also was my godmother, in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. Since I lost her at such an early age, I do not have memories of her, but I was told that she was a really nice person and spent a lot of time with me.

A short time after this event, my grandparents moved into her house and shortly after that we moved onto the same street, living only two houses away from my grandparents.

Because of this, we spend a lot of time at my grandparents house. My mom works there, for instance, and we always eat dinner at the house of my grandparents.

Since my mom works at my grandparents' house, and sometimes my father made long hours too, it often occurred that I was put to bed in my grandparents' house (me and my sister had our own room there). When my mother was done working or my dad would return home from work, they would carry a sleeping me back to our own house and put me to bed in my own bed.

Just before my parents would go to bed, they would often check on me right before they went upstairs (my room was on the first floor and theirs was in the attic).

When I was a bit older, my mom told me that often when she went to check on me, she would see a blue glow on my wall. This glow has never startled or scared her, nor did it wake me up or scare me. My mother and I think that the glow is the presence of my aunt, who was still watching over me as my godmother.

What's more is that when I was younger, I would often sleepwalk. This happened almost every night to such a degree that at one point, I was afraid that I might open a window one night and jump from it. The reason I mention this is that my aunt was also a heavy sleepwalker when she was young. My grandmother told me that at one point they found her standing in the window. Could it be that my aunt was watching over me, to make sure I wouldn't do the same thing and put me at ease, since I was so afraid of doing it?

2) Shadow

Another unexplainable event happened to me about 2 years ago, in 2012 / 2013. I can't remember the exact date, but it was somewhere late in the year, probably around October/November.

When I got home from school, I parked my bicycle on the patio in front of our house. Since my dad has no bike of his own, he would often borrow it in the evenings and place it back in the barn in our garden at the back of our house. If he didn't have to borrow it, I had to place it back in the barn in the evening, to store it for the night.

Our street consists of terraced houses. In our row of houses, my house is located one house before the end of the row on one side. To get to my barn, I have to walk around my neighbour's house, then turn left into a small passageway, then turn left to get to a parallel passageway that runs across the backside of the houses in my street, then open the door that leads to my garden and place the bike in the barn.

On this particular date, it was quite cold outside. But since it is such a short walk around the house to to barn, I never put on a jacket or decent shoes, as I dislike placing my bike in the barn and try to do it as fast as possible. So, together with my bike, I ran into the passageway that leads to my garden, placed the bike in the barn and closed and locked the doors.

It is important to know that on each side of the passageway behind our houses one single streetlight is placed for vision at night. So there is one behind the house of my neighbour's on one side, and one way across the street on the other side of the terraced houses.

As I was running my way back to my house, I took the same short route back: a turn right past my neighbour's house, another turn right back into my street and another turn right at my own house once I passed my neighbour's house.

As I ran back into the streetlight of the passageway, I always see my own shadow approaching. Since I'm running forward, the shadow stays in it's place until I take the turn. But as I approached the end of the passageway and wanted to turn, I saw a shadow about the same height as me flash by with incredible speed. It came running across my own shadow, so it was coming from the right (the way I need to turn to get back in my street) and was running across to the left. For a moment I was startled and frozen in my place, but soon I recovered. I immediately tried to debunk it as someone running across the far end of the passageway, but the light from that streetlight is simply too weak to provide a shadow on the wall that I was running too. The shadow was just as dark as mine, so it should have been coming from the direction that I wanted to go to. Could it be that I saw a ghost running across? This was the only time I had seen that shadow on that place, and at the same time the only thing I have seen something unexplainable with the naked eye.

I hope to receive feedback on my stories, so I would like you to tell me what you think. I never told my family about these experiences, since everyone in my family would just try to debunk my stories with reason.

If you liked these stories, I have a few more experiences with the (which I believe) paranormal, but since this is my first time I will leave it with these two.

Thank you for reading my story and/or contributing to it by sharing your thoughts on it!