First time sharing my personal experience with the paranormal.
This is a telling of real events that happened during my adolescent years living in my family’s home. It was a reoccurring event with multiple other witnesses, and all these years later, I still don’t fully understand what we continued to see.
Before I dive into the story, let me first say a few disclaimers:
The story is true and only includes factual details
I’m NOT a paranormal investigator and know very little about the field
Up until the event, and even after, I was a skeptic
Only years later my own sighting solidified my belief in the paranormal
I tell you those things, so you understand that context around what happened. I was not a paranormal enthusiast who sought this kind of stuff out. In fact, I was the opposite: a skeptic.
But even being a skeptic didn’t stop me or my family from experiencing a reoccurring paranormal haunting making believers out of us all.
My Story
The house I spent most of my adolescents in was a manufactured home that my father moved onto a lot of wooded property he bought in rural Indiana. We moved to this location after living in an older two-story house for almost a decade prior.
The manufactured home was not originally on the property. We moved it there, and for the first few years, we didn’t experience anything out of the ordinary. Nothing strange to even remark about or to lead to us to think anything strange was occurring.
We did lots of work on the house: adding a bedroom, an attached garage, a deck off the front porch, and put on a new roof. Over these years of working on the house, there was no indication of what would come later.
I can’t even recall when it began.
Having only been a teenage for a few years, sometime in the early 2000s, is when I began to notice something. When in our living room watching TV, I would notice a shadow move between our kitchen and the hallway—quickly across an open walkway that could been seen from where I was at in the living room.
Occasionally noticing it, always only catching a glimpse, I didn’t think much of it. To be truthful, it barely registered. Thinking back, I must have brushed it away in my mind as being a shadow or reflection from a passing car outside. The way headlights bounce through tree limbs casting shadows and reflections. Surely that was the explanation.
But it continued to happen and at all different times of the day. After months of it, I certainly began to take notice. It registered in my mind. I thought, what was it? Once again, I told myself it was likely just light coming in through the window.
However, that explanation held less and less validity as watching the shadow move down the hallway became such an occurrence there was no way it was lights form a car or similar explanation.
The sightings moved beyond half-glimpses, and I began to get better looks at what I was seeing.
When in the living room, I would see out of the corner of my eye, as if the shadow was taking a half step into view and then back again, hiding behind the wall. It was almost playful or curious. When this would happen, it gave me a half-second to respond, I was then able to quickly turn my head and look, clearly getting a glimpse of it on multiple occasions.
The best way I can explain what I was seeing was a person who was made of a shadow. It had a form but not volume. One could see it, but it was semi-transparent—as a shadow is—but I could clearly make out it had the shape of a person.
I was never scared. Never any sense of dread or negative energy. I will admit it was a bit unsettling the more and more it occurred. Once it became evident that I was seeing something unexplained, I started to feel a little bewildered.
As time went on, I slowly rode the whole thing off, not dwelling on it. Still, despite my very own eyes, I assumed I was merely seeing something with a mundane concrete explanation. That or my eyes were playing tricks on me. Never mentioning what was happening to anyone—not friends or any of my family members.
Despite this, I continued to see the shadowy figure. During the day. In the evenings. Late at night, once everyone had gone to bed. It continued on a regular basis. Always moving from the kitchen and down the hallway.
Then a conversation took place that would solidify what was happening forever.
One evening, my father, my brother, and myself were all hanging out in the living room in early evening. The sun was still up. My father was on one couch, I on the other, and my brother reclining in the chair.
While watching TV, with nothing strange occurring, my father suddenly blurts out, “Hey, there goes that ghost again.”
That one sentence changed everything.
My head jerked to look at him. Then at my brother. All of us stunned for a moment.
“You see it too?” I said to both my father and brother.
“Yes, of course,” my brother responded. “So do you, huh?”
We exchanged puzzled questions back and forth for a few minutes as things began to set in. All of us coming to the realization that we weren't alone in what we were seeing.
I remember that day in the living room as a moment of validation. It brought relief that I wasn’t crazy. That I wasn’t just seeing hallucinations. Something was actually there.
For the next hour, the three of us sat in the living room exchanging stories and details. How and when we would see it. What it looked like. How it moved. Everything we could think of.
We came to several conclusions. The first was that it was likely friendly, as none of us ever felt scared or frightened. Just a little unnerved. We also all agreed that it was in the shape of a man. At least, the best we could tell, and he appeared to be made of a shadow.
We all explained how we started to see him more and more over the past year, and how it went from only seeing him quickly flashing by the doorway, to him slowly walking through it. Eventually we even saw him go down the hallway and then back up again.
The whole conversation was a cathartic experience for all of us. It was self-validation, and there was comfort in confiding in each other what we were experiencing.
After that, we all continued to see it, but now, we would often say something aloud like, “oh there he goes again.”
Not too much longer, I moved out to college. My brother had already moved out a year ahead of me. Once we were gone, my father sold the house and property not too shortly after. Since then, I moved out of the state and spend little time back in my Indiana hometown.
But I’ve always carried that experience with me. Mentally I would return to it many times after to ponder what happened, and to this day, I still don’t know what we saw.
What do You think?
What are your thoughts? Have you ever seen or experienced anything like this before? Or heard of anyone seeing something like what I described?
For the longest time, I believed once you are dead, you’re dead. There is nothing else, but now, after seeing what we saw, I’m not so sure anymore.
There is so much to this world we don't understand.
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