A Malevolent Presence

I am a regular visitor of this website and find all your experiences and narrations fascinating. The incident I am going to tell you about happened to my in-laws last week. I hope you all can shed some light on it.

They were staying at my mother-in-law's sister's place last weekend. It is a recently constructed building and they had moved in just over a year ago. Their apartment is a huge 4-bedroom flat. My in-laws reached there in the evening and were being given a tour of the flat, when my father-in-law noticed a small door that was bolted shut from the outside. Without thinking, he opened the door. It was a small room piled up with cardboard boxes. On inquiring, they were told it was a store room. After having a look inside, my father-in-law closed the door and bolted it again, unaware of the horror that was to follow.

My in-laws were sleeping in one of the four bedrooms. Coincidentally, the bedroom was adjacent to the store room. Late at night (at around 2:30am), my father-in-law (who is normally a very sound sleeper) was woken by sounds of someone banging repeatedly on the door. He sat up in shock and looked towards the door. Now, the bedroom door was actually a solid wooden door, but suddenly it seemed translucent. And he could see two shadows on the other side of the door. One was of a woman, who had her hand raised (as someone would when they were knocking on doors). Beside her was a shadow of a man. Initially, he thought it was someone from the house and called out their names. No one answered. The shadows remained. The woman seemed to put her hands above her eyes, as though peering in to see inside. My father-in-law woke my mother-in-law and asked her to look at the door. But, by then, the shadows had vanished and the door had gone back to its opaque, wooden self. My mother-in-law hadn't heard anything. Thinking that it may be been a hallucination, they went back to sleep. After an hour or so, he heard loud banging on the door again and saw the same shadows. Panicking, he woke his wife again to find that they had disappeared. Needless to say, he didn't get much sleep afterwards.

In the morning, he related his experiences to the family, and to his surprise, found that strange things had been happening in that house. People falling ill was a common phenomenon. Disturbingly, they had also found scratch marks on pictures of Gods a few days ago. This leads me to believe that there is something really malevolent inside the house. I also think the store room door opening triggered the events that followed in the night. We found out that there was once a school at the same place where the building has been built.

All in all, there is a palpable sense of negative energy there. My father-in-law did not believe in the paranormal but last week's events have made a mark. What do you guys think? Any comments/suggestions would be most welcome.