Old farm

I'll say this to start off, I am an avid goodwill shopper, half the furniture in my room and my closet are from goodwill. That said, nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and in the year that it's been since this happened, I've had no experiences.

I was shopping casually one day when I came across something I thought was cool— a framed pressed flower on an old-looking piece of paper, with faded, elegant handwriting below it spelling out the scientific name for the flower. The picture frame looked like it had been painted over with purple nail polish, and was much MUCH larger than the paper, in a way that was eye drawing but kind of off-center. I would've put it back down, except the flowers looked like forget-me-nots, which are my all-time FAVORITE flower. So I spent the three dollars on that, as well as three dollars on a smaller, more modern-style picture frame.

My original goal was to put the flower and paper into the other frame and hang it up, but as soon as I arrived home, it became apparent that wasn't going to happen. The brown paper on the back of the purple frame was ripped already, and so when I finished ripping it off, it realized the picture frame was not only stapled shut, but NAILED. yeah, I guess I could've spent the extra 45 minutes digging out all the nails and staples, but I didn't. I'm lazy. I just hung it up the way it was.

For two straight weeks, every single night, that picture frame would fall off the wall. It didn't matter how I hung it up. Stick-on hook. Thumbtacks. Actual hooks. Even nails. It would be on my floor by the morning, occasionally waking me from my sleep when it fell.

Some of the times when I woke up, I would hear rustling in the walls. Like an animal was moving around in there. I would get up and put my ear to the wall, trying to follow the sound so I could tell my dad where to look in the morning. My dad never found anything, but I was so sure something was moving in there, he called a professional pest guy. The pest guy didn't find any droppings or signs of life, but he agreed to leave a couple traps in the attic.

Before I explain this next part, let me lay out my room for you guys. It was a pretty big room, and considering I only had a twin bed pressed against the wall farthest from the door (despite being 5'10 lol), the room seemed even bigger. The window was directly over my bed, and I liked to keep my blinds open because I like natural light and looking at the moon when I sleep. There's also a sister bathroom attached to another identical room on the same wall as the entrance. If you go deeper into the bathroom, where the toilet is, there's a door to the attic. There's a fair amount of space in there, but I only went in there when I had to, because there were little tunnels and pockets of darkness that lead into the walls of the house. it creeped me out.

That's where the pest guy set the traps, and yet, I would check them every morning and find nothing. It was even more frustrating when the noises started happening earlier in the day or at twilight, increasing in frequency. And there was this horrible stench I cannot explain that seemed to be coming from the walls now too.... and to be honest, about 11 days in, I adjusted and grew noseblind to it and it only bothered me a little. I only remember how bad it was when someone else entered my room, because they would recoil or comment on it, and they typically didn't stay for long.

Around the two week period mark, I realized I was dealing with raccoons in my wall. I'd woken up to a knocking sound this time, like someone was banging on my door in the middle of the f'ing night. I yelled out to "just give me one second" and put on some pants, and the almost panicked-sounding banging stopped.

I opened my bedroom door to... no one. And despite being a scaredy-cat through and through, I was so sure it was someone in my family that i checked the whole house, turned on every light, and woke up my dad and sister, who were apparently sleeping soundly, to ask what was wrong.

Then I double checked the locks on the doors, grabbed a knife (scaredy cat okay???) and went back to my room cautiously. Something about even stepping into that room made the hairs on the back of my neck stand, triggered my fight or flight, so try as i did, I could not fall back asleep. I sat stock still listening for anything.

I finally allowed myself to lay back and get comfortable. Not ten minutes later, I heard it: a fainter knocking. It wasn't coming from my door, though. No. It was coming from my walls.

I did not stay in there long enough to investigate after that realization. No siree, I flew out of that room. I went and slept with my little sister in her room. She was freaked out already from my shaking her awake and didn't mind me sleeping in there anyway.

The following day before school, I had to go back in there to change. It smelt worse than I remembered, maybe because i hadn't slept in there. I ignored the smell. I ignored the rustling. I spent about 3 minutes getting ready and then booked it.

By the time I got back from school, I wasn't just scared. I was ANGRY. if that was some kind of spirit, like I thought it might be, it had no business kicking around in MY room like it thought it was the boss. It couldn't hurt me if I wasn't afraid. Probably.

So as soon as I got home, I went straight to my room. I cleaned up for a bit, I rehung my flower, and then i turned off the light and I sat on my bed. Waiting. I waited until it started for about an hour until something made me sit up. I couldn't tell you exactly what. It's not like it got colder, or even darker. It was only just reaching dusk and my window still illuminated my room completely, and I had fairy lights hanging over a desk in the corner. But it felt darker, if that makes sense? The air felt heavy.

I sat up and strained my ears until I heard a faint knock. First on one wall, then a second one closer to me, and then one farther away by my desk. So I did the most stereotypical thing you can do and was like "hello????" Nothing. "Is anyone there" nothing. Even the knocking stopped.

And then I did something I regret a little, because it confirmed my theory that it wasn't an animal. I said, "if someone's there, turn off my lights."

I pointed to the fairy lights but didn't see anything happen at first. Then, just long enough to make me roll my eyes at myself, they turned off.

I told the spirit to leave, that this was my room and they weren't welcome there. It actually made me feel better, made the air lighter. I went downstairs and ate dinner.

When I came back to go to bed, the picture frame was on the ground. This time the fall had broken the glass and frame pretty bad. I cleaned up the glass, propped the thing by my wall and chilled in there until I didn't feel afraid anymore. Eventually I went to bed.

That night was the first and last time I have ever experienced sleep paralysis. I woke up in the dark, sleeping on my stomach. My face at an angle, facing the bathroom door and my desk. I couldn't see the door to my room, or the wall where I hung the picture. I wasn't panicked at first. I knew I couldn't move, but I was relieved I had escaped my dream, though I can't remember what it had been now.

And then I realized I wasn't alone. I couldn't see anything, but I knew I wasn't. I could feel the presence, distinctly male presence, and I could feel the darkness in the room intensify, the shadows cast from the window move on my wall at it/him approached me. I stared at the bathroom door, knowing if I could just move my fingers or my toes, could just jumpstart my limbs into action, I could get away. But I couldn't.

The bed pressed in on both sides of my bed by my feet, like someone had put their hands on either side of my feet. then, bit by bit, I felt those invisible hands crawl farther and farther upward, could feel warm breath on my calves while I lay frozen in terror. I saw the bed move with my own eyes right by my tilted head. It compressed like someone was putting pressure on it, but there was nothing there. The warm breath expelled straight onto my neck.

It touched my hip, it's hand bigger than the span of my back, bigger than any hand I've ever seen. It's wasn't sexual or anything, but it was something pretty close to it.

It was possessive.

I couldn't see the thing, but I could feel it. I could feel it's intent. It didn't feel aggressive or violent, but it felt evil. Malicious. And most of all, it felt smug. I think if I had seen it's face it would've been smiling. And that scared me so much that finally I jerked away from its hold, stumbled to the bathroom, to the next bedroom, literally unable to stop screaming until I was down the stairs. My dad and both my sister rushed towards me, freaking out, and I immediately burst into tears. I told them what happened when I finally calmed down enough.

My oldest sister was quick to say it was just a dream, a scientifically explainable occurrence, but my dad and my little sister were a little more willing to believe it was a ghost. We'd grown up hearing scary stories about my dads haunted house, and we, to this day, are all believers.

I threw away the picture a week later, a solid week of sleeping on the couch. I had thought long and hard about when it started, but it didn't take much deduction to conclude whatever spirit was haunting me was attached to that frame. As I threw it away, I noticed the entire inside of the frame was coated in this sticky, slimey red substance. And it smelled horrible, just like my room had. It was impossible to wash the stuff off too, I took me a good ten minutes and a lot of wasted water.

Some other creepy stuffed happened, even after I moved out, but it wasn't nearly that bad. And as much as I hate to be that person, as soon as got interested in Quakerism and became more religious... all of those problems stopped entirely.

What I do think is interesting is why I made this post.

I moved out of my dads house with a friend, and had to move back in at the start of covid. About four months into it, I became more religious and it was like a weight was lifted off my chest. At the same time, 3 things happened that I think are worth noting, even though they didn't scare me. The last one I found out today.

1- my dad and his employee turned my old bedroom into an office when I moved out. In the same week that I started feeling more like myself, Ben (let's call the employee Ben) came down the stair looking extremely uncomfortable with a stack of papers in his hand. It was a stack of printed paper that had apparently come out of the printer. It was a slide show my little sister had made for school back in 9th grade. It was printing out the pages in a loop, over and over again. Ben had turned off the printer multiple times but it just kept turning back on and printing the pages out. Apparently it had been doing that all week, he said. And it was starting to scare him.

But the funny thing is, that printer has been broken for almost a year. We could never get it to work or even turn on, and we even had another printer at that point. My dad just never got around to throwing it away. It was also late summer by that point, and my sister was just about to enter tenth grade.

2- not five minutes after he said that, we hear a loud crash and two screams from upstairs. While my sister and her friend were in the bathroom, somehow her 50 lb giant mirror had crashed onto the floor and shatter into a million pieces. It had been leaning against the wall, and it would take a lot of strength to knock that thing over. It's not something that happens on accident.

Both Ben and the friend left pretty quickly after that, freaked out, though Ben did a better job of concealing it.

3-my dad has had sleep paralysis too. Once and only once. He just told me about it. And as he told me, I got this unsettling feeling.

it was within a two week period of the mirror incident.

So what if I never really got rid of the spirit? What if it had followed me, lost its grip on me, and was looking for a new host? My sister is the most depressed she's ever been in her life, just like I had been when I had moved out. I felt like I was going crazy.