When my grandfather came home from WWII, he purchased land in Bound Brook, a small city in central New Jersey. He built his own house on an empty lot. This lot had only been home to an old barn, which he stripped down to nothing except for the stone basement, which he subsequently buried. The house was built in front of where the barn used to be, and the covered basement became the backyard.
The strange things started when I was five. Being a little girl, and very attached to my mother, I used to sleep in her bed almost every night. I woke up a lot during the night, most of the time because I thought I heard noises. When I would comment on this to my mother, she would tell me that our house was very old, and that it was probably just the house settling at night.
One night, I woke up due to another strange sound, which I can only describe as one heavy footstep. I thought maybe my grandfather had come up the stairs, since he still lived with us, so I sat up and looked expectantly at the door to my mother's room. Instead, I saw a strange man walk into my mother's doorway. He was dressed in overalls and a plain white shirt. We stared at each other for a moment before he spoke to me, in a clear, deep voice. He told me to get out, continuing to stare at me intensely. Since I was a child, I decided that if I stuck my head under the covers, he would obviously leave me alone. I stayed under the covers for a few moments and then raised my head, seeing that he had disappeared. Still scared, I woke my mother and told her exactly what had happened. She simply told me that I had a bad dream, and that I should forget all about it.
Years later, when I sixteen, I brought up the memory to my mother. She seemed uncomfortable about it, and I had to press her to get her own experience. Apparently, many nights she would feel someone get into bed with her and hold her. Thinking it was me, she would turn over to make sure that I was alright, and that I had not had a bad dream. Instead, she would find absolutely no one next to her. I asked her if she believed that I had seen her "phantom bedmate" and she finally told me that she believed I had, and it was much more than a bad dream.
Before he died, I asked my grandfather about the ghost that both my mother and I had encountered. My grandfather was not a very superstitious man, but he did not doubt that we had seen something. He told me that many times, in the backyard, he felt that there was someone there with him. He said that many times, when I was too little to remember, I would come running to him from the backyard, crying about "something scary" in the backyard, and refusing to go back there. It was then that he told me about the barn, and that he believed that whatever it was had come from there.
Up until the day we moved, I can still remember waking in the middle of the night to noises, and never feeling comfortable in the backyard. I can only hope that the people who live there now aren't bothered, and that someday whatever was in that barn will go away.
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