This question gets asked frequently on this site, so several years ago I wrote this and saved it. It is absolutely true.
When I was 15 or 16, we moved across town to the smallish cape cod house along the Toms River. The street, 123 Pine St., was lined with Mimosa trees which smelled like sweet peaches when they were in bloom during the hot, humid summer. We had lived in a cap cod house in Holly Park, years ago, so when we moved into this house, my mom did the same as she had in Holly Park, which was to make the second downstairs bedroom, one that looked across from the kitchen, into a dining room, and my bedroom was in the attic. Being a cape cod, the attic had four dormer windows built into the roof, creating four nooks and more head room in the sides of the sloping roof. The attic was finished with wallboard and I actually repainted the walls a soft yellow. There were two rooms separated by a wall and of course, a door.
The far room became a sitting room, two chairs and a black and white TV. The other room was my bedroom along with my desk where I did my homework, and my stereo. It also had a new piano on the wall with the door, and I had purchased an old, antique, wind up clock which bonged on the hour. I still have the clock. Since this upstairs was the attic of the house, short walls were built and they ran the entire length of the attic. I think there were four doors in each room on these short walls, where things could be stored in the eves of the attic. Some of them had shelves. The doors were on hinges of course, and had handles which latched and kept the small closet doors closed.....most of the time.
So I moved up there and it wasn't long that I noticed, as I lay in bed, that there would begin, a tapping noise in the farthest closet, always on one side. I would try to go to sleep but I would hear, "tap, tap, tap" coming from the farthest closet. Then as time passed, the tapping would move to the next closet, still in the other room, tapping and tapping, stopping and tapping. Then after some time, the tapping would come into the bed room, tapping in the closet furthest from the bed, tapping and stopping, silence, and then tapping and then of course, I would hear the tapping in the closet next to my night stand, the closet next to my pillow and me. This would go on every night without fail.
One morning I went down stairs and my mom asked me why I was walking around in the middle of the night, but I wasn't. They simply heard footsteps. This happened a number of times. I finally grew tired of being afraid of the tapping, so I stayed awake with my hand on the handle to the closet by my bed. I waited patiently for the tapping, and it most definitely came: tapping and tapping, first in one closet and then the next. I waited and waited knowing that eventually it would tap on my closet where my hand lay in wait, and I would be ready. It came all right, but it didn't tap. It banged, hard enough that I could feel it in my hand, feel how wood vibrates when it's been hit hard, and with that I yanked the door open, only to find nothing, all the noises stopped.
But that isn't the weirdest. Not by far. One summer day, a Saturday, I was watching television in the living room with my parents. Suddenly from upstairs, it sounded like every window, all six of them, had shattered, and the sound was deafening, like one of the THX movie theater affects sounds. My dad went running upstairs and I followed, my heart pounding. When we got into the attic, my bedroom, there was nothing out of place. I expected to see glass all over the floor in both rooms, but there was nothing. But that's not the worst thing that happened in that room. This is:
My first year in college, I brought my best friend, also my SO, home for the weekend, and it meant a good, home cooked meal for the two of us. This was in the fall, he and I were 18. We had one drink with my parents before dinner, but nothing after. I had told him about my room so he brought a Ouija board with him. He had and still does, ESP abilities. We waited until 12 midnight and put the Ouija board on the end of the bed, each one of us sitting on the edge of the bed, and our hands on the Planchet. He started asking the usual silly questions, and the plastic pointer was moving around the board. I of course assumed he was moving it. Later he would tell me that he thought I was deliberately moving it. He asked if a presence was here, and the pointer pointed to yes. This went on until he said, "Well if there's a spirit here, show yourself, God damn it!" and at that very moment, a full figured ghost appeared in the doorway, the door being open. Not only could we both see the image of what appeared to be a man, but also his skeletal frame inside this white, translucent, nebulous form. We both were standing up at this point, frozen in terror, because this thing filled us with both a feeling of terror and dread. It floated forward, passing through my left half and all of him as it turned right and drifted through the wall, disappearing.
The half that passed through me became cold. Buzzy, my friend, told me right after, that all of him was cold. The worst part of this was that we felt that whatever we brought forth was evil. Worse, we felt that it wanted our very souls. I had to still sleep in that room when I was home from college. The only way I could was to close the door, and then imagine that the room was filled with candles, candles hanging from chandeliers, candles everywhere, and in my mind, I would begin to light them, one candle at a time until the entire room was filled with light. I felt that I had to dispel the darkness that this thing brought, with light, meeting evil with something that was everlastingly good.
Years later when I married and brought my wife home for the first time, I had to close the door between the rooms, in some sort of effort to prevent whatever that was from re materializing. My friend Buzzy and I have since talked about that strange night, and it is still just as vivid for him as it is for me. There's a part of my mind that says it couldn't have happened, that you can't see the dead or the other side, and if it had happened to just me up in that room, I would have thought something had happened to my mind. But it happened to both of us, and we both saw exactly the same thing. We had gotten into a habit of writing things down, and we wrote down our experiences and shared them before we talked about them. Our experiences were identical.
Years later, my dad would die suddenly in that house from a cerebral aneurysm. Two years later, my mom would die of cancer. When she knew she was terminal, she sold the house to a young couple. They were excited to live near the beautiful river. They even built a fireplace in the living room. Several years later they were divorced. I believe the house is cursed and I pity those who move into it.
This is all true. When I tell this, I always suspect that no one believes it. Why would they. This can't happen. To this day, my mind tries not to accept it, like it was a dream. Buzzy and I know differently.
