The Troubled House

Could four teenagers living in one house create so much negative energy as to manifest in something like paranormal activity? Or, perhaps the pubescent hormones attracted paranormal entities like kids to candy. Or, maybe it had nothing to do with us and everything to the land, past history, or none of the above. Who can tell for sure? Whatever the cause was, the effect was a bad place to live in for almost everyone in that house, me especially, it would seem.

When I turned twelve, my family was whisked away from a happy life in a small mining town in the northern Rockies of British Columbia, Canada to live in a boring city on Vancouver Island. I was always an adventurous, childish kid who still played with teddies so the ways of the city kids with their drugs and sex revolted me. I was lonely and began hanging out with other loners. We would smoke but were otherwise still well behaved and imaginative. Even so, nothing strange happened in the house until we moved to Alberta for a year and a half and then back.

During our time on the Prairies, our house had seen a grow op. By two tenants even I with my thirteen year old eyes perceived to be fishy, and a family of nine. Both tenants badly damaged the house but the second managed to pretty much destroy it, costing my parents a lot of money and sending everyone but my father back to live there. There were signs that the children, shoved 2-4 to each room, had been locked in. They windows screens had also been kicked out, there were holes in the walls, white baby hand prints on my parents' bathroom and bedroom doors, and scratch marks at the very bottom of the inside of my door. All in all, it was a little weird.

My sister and I were very unhappy to be back in Nanaimo and I know my mother was lonely. I'm not too sure about my brothers but my oldest was certainly an angry guy and had tried to hurt me a couple times. Either way, the last tenants could have left a negative atmosphere but we certainly didn't help it.

Many many things happened in this house to a few of us living there as well as guests. Not all of them are paranormal but I'll stick to paranormal in this section, anyway.

In my troubled youth I was depressed and moody. I often refused to go to school but instead slept during the day and read or wrote stories at night. I also happened to have the room right next to the stairs that lead to the main floor. Often in the middle of the night I would hear footsteps coming up the stairs. Now and then it would be one of my older brothers; coming up for a late night snack from the kitchen, but usually it didn't seem so. The house was old and poorly built. There were many squeaky spots on the upstairs floor one could follow another's movements by ear but the stairs were especially bad. Often I could hear slow footsteps ascending the steps one at a time. Sometimes they made it to just the top step and stopped altogether but other times the footsteps only made it to the landing and stopped.

Another time I came into my bedroom and found a clothes hanger that I left hanging on my closet door swinging wildly. I tried over and over again to get it to swing at all by my opening the bedroom door or walking by it but it didn't happen. Soon after that on the same night I was sitting in bed reading and noises-scratching and knocking- started up in my closet. I got freaked out and slept in my sister's room that night.

This is just a brief glimpse at all that happened in that house. More (and the worst!) is to come.