Subject: My Story
From: "Matt
Date: Sat, June 30, 2018 11:32 pm
To: The Official Shadow People Archives
When I was about 5 or 6 years old I would have nightmares frequently about an old lady in a rocking chair. The nightmares almost always began with me walking upstairs in a house I had never been to. I would walk up, turn right at the top of the stairs, and then go into the attic. When I got to the top of the attic stairs, I would see the old lady in a rocking chair. Sometimes she was facing me, other times she and the chair were facing away. I told my parents about her and they would, of course say, it's just a dream. I had this nightmare on and off for years. I don't remember her ever attacking me or anything in the dream. She just gave me a very bad/uneasy feeling. When I had these nightmares, we lived in a very small duplex back in the mid-80s.
Around 1988, my parents were looking for a home to buy. They would drop me and my two sisters off at our grandparents when they went out looking for a house. One day they told us that they bought a new home. We were super excited. When we saw the house, it looked huge; almost like a mansion compared to what we were in before. We were taking a tour of the house and then my mom said, “Lets go upstairs so you can pick your bedrooms.” As we started walking up the stairs, I froze. I pointed to the right side of the hallway and said, “Is there a door over there that goes to the attic?” My mom said, “Yes, how did you know that?” I told her this was the house I had nightmares about.
In my nightmares, I only ever saw the stairs leading up to the 2nd floor, the upstairs hallway and the attic but they were exactly the same as in this house. My mom looked shocked and it seemed that she believed me but what could she do? They already bought it and it was just dreams anyway. I was only 8 or 9 at the time.
Once we moved in, nothing really happened for a while but one morning when I woke up, I noticed that my closet door was open about an inch or so. I thought it was closed when I went to bed but maybe it wasn't. That night I made sure it was closed before going to bed but in the morning, it was open again. This is the type of door that cannot be pulled open without turning the knob. After several days of this happening, I asked my parents if they had been going in to my closet at night. They said no, why would we do that?
I started stacking books in front of my closet door at night but again it would be open in the morning. I then wedged shoes under the bottom of the closet door and put stacks of heavy books behind them. I couldn't physically open the door myself using all my strength, so I thought there is no way it can open now. In the morning however, the closet door was open about an inch. The shoes were still wedged under the door and the books behind them but they had all moved with the door. That door opened every single night for about 10 years.
My dad used the attic as a weight room. There were two workout benches and a lot of weights laying around. Some were the solid metal kind, there were free weights, dumbbells and all sorts of exercising equipment up there. My dad, uncle and a couple of his friends would work out up there at night. They came over a couple times a week for a while. When they put the weights down it would make a loud noise every time. Since the attic was directly above, me going to sleep with all the noise was kinda hard.
One night, the noise was just too much. I kept hearing the weights clanging and dragging on the floor. I looked at the time and it was after 1 am. I got up and went over to my parent's bedroom to tell my mom that they are being too loud, but both my parents were in bed asleep. I looked, and both of my sisters were in bed asleep too. The light to the attic was off. Nobody was up there. This really freaked me out because it wasn't one or two noises. It was constant clanging and banging for hours that I had been hearing. I told my parents about it in the morning and they said nobody had been in the attic at all the night before.
My parents lived in that house for over 20 years. The whole time I lived there (a little over 10 years), I experienced things like that. Nobody else in the house ever did. My parents believed me but didn't know what to do about it. I wasn't threatened or being hurt but many, many unexplained things happened all the time. Sometimes there would be cold spots in my room. I mean cold, as in I could see my breath. I remember we had these dinosaurs that came in a box of fruity pebbles. The dinosaurs would change color when you put them in the freezer. One night there was a very cold spot that moved through my room cold enough to change the dinosaur's color as if it was in a freezer.
One night, I woke up and I couldn't find my pillow. I looked all over. I thought it must have fell beside my bed or something, but I got up and turned the light on and it was nowhere to be seen. I was so puzzled that I woke my parents to see if they knew where it was. They told me to go back to bed. My bed had two drawers built in. My bed is in the corner of the room. The front of the bed and the side that has drawers are flush with the ground. I ended up finding my pillow wedged under one of the drawers. There is absolutely no way for that to have just fell under like that. The only way to do that would be to pull the bed away from the wall and then go under the bed and push it under there. To this day I have no idea how that happened. I was at least 12 years old when it happened too.
Sorry for the super long email. I won't tell everything that happened for the sake of brevity but this is by far the worst thing that happened.
Remember the closet door that would open every night? Well one night I finally saw it happen. I was 15 at the time and was laying in bed and just couldn't go to sleep. I felt wide awake even though it was after 1 am. I just laid there with my eyes closed hoping I would fall asleep and then I heard it. The closet doorknob clicked as if someone twisted it and then let go. I opened my eyes and watched as the closet door slowly creaked open. I could then hear what sounded like chains moving around in the closet. At this point I experienced a lot of things in this house. It felt like something was trying to scare me all of the time. When I heard the chains, I sat straight up and yelled "just leave me alone". The door then swung open and a dark shadowy cloud came flying toward me from the closet. I laid back down really quick and pulled the blankets over my head. Then I felt something tap me on the head 3 times. I flung the blanket off me and jumped up. The dark cloud went flying back into the closet and the door slammed behind it. I then heard creepy laughter coming from the closet. I ran out of the room and told my parents what happened and they said it must have been a nightmare but I was never asleep. I went back into my bedroom, turned the light on and looked into the closet but of course nothing or nobody was in there. I don't have any chains either. I never turned the light back off that night. A few weeks later I had a small patch of white hair on my head right where I got tapped on the head. It was the strangest thing. I have dark brown hair but there was a small patch of white about the size of a silver dollar there. It eventually grew out on its own. Meaning dark brown hair grew from the spot that was once solid white.
I moved out of my parents house in my early twenties. I'm now 36 and have never experienced anything paranormal since moving out. In fact, I have never experienced anything like that outside of that house even during the years that it happened. I spent the night at friends’ houses and never saw anything. Nobody would sleepover at my house though because of all the stories I told about what happened there.
Just to give a little information about the house. When my parents bought it in the late 80s it was about 100 years old. All of the doors had skeleton key locks. One skeleton key could lock or unlock every door in the house except my bedroom closet. For whatever reason I could not get it to lock. Though thinking back on it, locking that door would probably not have stopped it from opening.
