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When I was between the ages of 12 and 24 I lived in the boonies of rural Ohio. The area, despite being full of rednecks and hillbillies, was quite beautiful. My parents built the house directly on top of an old coal mining path that led from the main paved road to a long abandoned strip mine about half a mile away. The strip mine had filled in with water, making a moderately large manmade pond I used to enjoy walking along. I used to walk there at least once a week with my dogs and just enjoy the nature. The path I took had been used by the coal miners about 100 years ago. It was mostly grown over now with thick grass and small trees but it was still visible. Halfway between the house and the mine was the grown over foundation of an old settlement. The wooden upper part had long rotted away leaving only the stone flooring. The foundation was little more than a rectangle cut into the ground and lined with rocks. It was tiny – barely large enough to fit a motorcycle in if you wanted to do such a thing. I have no idea what the settlement was used for. It’s too small for anyone to have lived there, but the trees had been cut down all around it in a 30x50 foot space so people probably spent lots of time there at one point. Maybe it was a dining area for the workers? I honestly don’t know. I’m relatively sensitive to paranormal activity, though nowhere near sensitive enough to be a medium. I never got any bad vibes from the settlement nor from the mine – they all felt inactive to me. There was one very odd thing about the settlement, though: every year hundreds of huge bright yellow daffodils would grow all around it and nowhere else. I don’t know much about horticulture but these didn’t look like the cute tiny wild daffodils you see every spring. These were the big guys you see in greenhouses and around people’s front lawns, and they stayed blossoming from spring well into the autumn. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. And holy crap did they smell strong. Just by walking past the place the powerful sweet flower smell would hit you like you were holding them right under your nose. I guess they had been planted back 100 years ago, but I thought that big daffodils had to be replanted every year. Like I said, it was weird. Paranormal activity in the house didn’t start until about two or three years after moving in. The house was literately brand new, so there was no history inside it to draw energy from. There was, however, the mining path it was build on top of, and it took a while for that energy to make its way into the house. It started with little things – a hard knock on the outside of a window or a bedroom dresser, new batteries going flat in a few hours, plants in only a few parts of the house turning to mush overnight, smoke making an arc in the air and flooding the floor rather than just going to the ceiling, things like that. Photographs, especially the ones taken in my parent’s bedroom and of the smallest dog, would often have bright orange orbs and streaks. Not many white ones, though, mostly orange. One time I took a photo of the small dog IN my parent’s bedroom. There were so many orange orbs and streaks you could barely see him. The big dog never had orbs in her pictures, so I guess the entity(ies) preferred tiny Pomeranians to big Mountain Cur Hounds. After a couple of years the shadow people arrived. There was one massive one that would appear in my bedroom at random hours of the day, always positioned as though it was looking out my window into the forest. This was the same window where knocking would occur the most often. To this day I have no idea what it was trying to communicate since we never found anything out there in the direction it seemed to be looking. It scared the poo poo out of me at the time but today I’m more confused than anything else. There was another (maybe the same one?) that didn’t allow itself to be seen as much as felt. It liked to haul itself quickly up and down the T shaped hallway that led to the bedrooms. I hated going through that hallway because I could sometimes feel someone rushing past me. It was the worst at night because it would run quickly up behind me and stay there, standing very close behind my back as though it wanted me to move out of its way. It all culminated one evening when I was home alone as a teenager. My parents were out to dinner and I was watching tv on the couch when I got up to use the bathroom. It was dark out so I left the hall light on because I hated feeling that thing run past me and having a light on made me feel safer. I shut the door to the bathroom out of habit. No sooner had I taken a seat when loud heavy footsteps stomped in an “I’ve lived here for years and am not in any hurry” pace from the entrance of my parents room (the place where most of the orange orbs were photographed) into the hallway and stopped right in front of the bathroom door. Since the light in the hall was on I could clearly see the shadows of his rather large boots. After a couple of seconds he sighed loudly, as though frustrated about something. He had the voice of a middle-aged man. He didn’t sound mean or threatening, just irritated. He took two more steps away from the door towards my bedroom and all sound vanished. I very slowly pulled my pants up and huddled in the bathtub for the next two hours, staring at the gap under the bathroom door until my parents came home. I don’t think I’d ever been so scared in all my life up until that point. I had no idea if that was a ghost or an actual intruder who was standing right outside the bathroom door, waiting for me to come out. I now know it wasn’t an intruder – there was no sign of entry and nothing was missing or broken. Besides, the dogs would have freaked out. They didn’t react at all to the loud sigh or stomping (also very weird). I now think that the man I’d “met” that day was the same shadow person I would see in my bedroom looking out the window. Maybe he was a miner who had died on the job and had been unceremoniously buried alongside the path somewhere on the property. He also apparently really liked small dogs. I’ll never know for sure, because he stopped making himself known a few months after the bathroom incident. He gave one more hard knock on the window when I was in my room doing homework and I suddenly didn’t feel a presence anymore. I guess he figured we couldn’t do anything to help him and decided to move on. I sure hope so.
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Dec 20, 2015 23:11
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 00:40 |
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