I grew up in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, with my parents and 7 older siblings. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, we lived in a house my dad had built in the late 1950s. Growing up, I was always afraid in that house.
I had never seen or heard of anything bad happening in our house, but I always felt uneasy when I was alone or moving throughout the house at night. I was a well-rounded child, a fast learner, never gave my parents any problems, had friends, and did well in school.
However, around 9 years old, I started wetting the bed and my family couldn’t figure out why. So, my mom told my older siblings to wake me up and take me to the bathroom whenever one of them woke up during the night.
What nobody knew was…I woke up every night like I always had, but I wouldn’t go to the bathroom because of what I was seeing. Each night, I would wake up and look towards my bedroom door, and see a lady standing there, looking at me.
She appeared to be of average height and size, wearing a nightgown or flowing dress, but I could never see her face. At first, I thought maybe it was my mom checking in on me, so I would whisper, “Mom? Mom?” I wouldn’t get an answer, so I knew it wasn’t my mom, so I would pull the covers over my head and lie there, afraid and sweating.
Sometimes, I would need to use the bathroom so badly that I would relieve myself in bed. My family thought I was wetting the bed while I slept, but I was awake, I was just too afraid to get up. I don’t know why I didn’t tell anyone what I was going through, but I didn’t.
Around 13 years old, I stopped seeing her, but I continued to have that eerie feeling that I’d always had. By the time I was 15 years old, I’d learned to ignore that feeling. Still, I never told anyone what I saw, but they knew I was afraid, they just didn’t know why…or so I thought.
Fast-forward to 1993, my siblings and I were adults and out on our own, and my dad had that old house torn down and built my mom a new house. My mom was happy and loved her new house. Less than a year later, Dad had a heart attack and fell dead in the bathroom.
One of my sisters moved in with my mom so she wouldn’t be alone. It wasn’t long before my sister started telling us that she was having an uneasy feeling in the house because she would hear sounds in empty rooms, and things would get moved around. In 1998, my sister moved out, and I moved in with mom.
For years, I was comfortable in the house…never saw anything or had any uneasy feelings. All was well, and Mom and I were happy. In 2000, I had my daughter and the three of us were happy until my daughter was almost 3 years old. She would be playing in her room, then run out and sit next to me.
When I asked her what was wrong, she would point down the hallway and say, “Him.” I would walk down the hall and into her room, and tell her to show me, but when I was there, whoever he was, wasn’t there. Whatever she was seeing, he only showed up when she was alone, and only at night. Fast-forward to 2004, when my daughter was in pre-kindergarten.
I would drop her at school and go visit my sister, Dawn, until time to pick up my daughter from school. One day, I started telling Dawn about my daughter and what she’d been seeing. That’s when Dawn told me that when she was a small child, she used to see a lady standing at the back bedroom door almost every night.
I was shocked because I had never told anyone about seeing the lady when I slept in that same bedroom as a child. I sat there, listening to Dawn, who was 12 years my senior, tell me how afraid she was in that house as a child and how the lady visited her at night. When she finished, I told her that I’d experienced the same thing and that’s why I started wetting the bed.
Now, years later, in a new house, my young daughter was experiencing something similar. Dawn and I speculated on what could’ve been happening, why, and who these spirits were. We talked about the woman possibly being our grandmother’s spirit, watching over us…and the man being my dad, watching over my daughter.
Of course, we don’t know who, what, or why…but we eventually found out we weren’t the only ones who had seen the lady. We found out when our cousin, Devin, told us that when his mom would drop him at our house on early summer mornings, it looked like a morgue in our house because everyone would have their heads under their covers.
After that, I talked to my other sisters about it, learning that 3 out of my 5 sisters had seen the lady in our house as children…and we’d never told each other. To this day, my daughter and I live in the house that was built in 1993, and we still witness strange things happening in this house, but thank goodness, we no longer see anyone.