Hauntings - Katcha's Mom's House

We started having problems almost as soon as we moved in. The first incident I recall was my brother seeing an elderly woman in the kitchen. As he now recalls it, she was hung, but at the time he simply said she was flying around the one spot on the ceiling. My mother paniced and had the pentecostal church anoint the house with holy oil.

Probably the next incident was the "little men" in the oven. I was baking cookies for a school project when I first saw them, jumping up and down in the oven on my baking sheet. I saw them several more times, both in the oven and in the yard. No one ever believed me, though. Always assumed I was drunk or something, though I didn't drink at the time (I was 12).

As I got older and became more involved in the occult, more things happened. My first experience with "magick" was when I was 14. I didn't start out wanting to practice white magick, so my first experiment was to try and summon some upper level demons. Not good when you have absolutely no experience at anything. I was in the back yard in the middle of the night. Something did answer and it wasn't nice. I freaked out and ran for the house. Remember, my mother kept the house annointed with holy oil pretty much at all times back then, so they didn't come inside. I'm still not sure if it's because they couldn't or because it was more fun to mess with me. Anyway, just because they didn't come inside didn't mean they left me alone. I would hear tapping on the window and see faces looking in (I was on the second floor). I saw bodies hanging in the trees outside. Not pleasant.

You think I would have learned my lesson, but no. My uncle was also into darker things and decided he wanted to open a "gateway to hell" through a mirror. He choose my bedroom mirror, however he messed up somewhere and opened up the portal to where ever in my closet. This was enough to keep the holy oil from working. Though most of the time you couldn't tell anything, there were times when you could see a red glow coming from the closet and various beings emerge. I sometimes thought I was crazy, but even a pagan priest confirmed that there was some sort of doorway open in there, though wether it went to hell or not is still in question.

With that, things became a lot more active. One night I was lying in bed. The upstairs was actually built in the atic, so the ceilings slanted and my bed was right underneath the slanted part of the ceiling. I woke up to see a giant spider (and I'm terrified of spiders) sitting on the ceiling above me. Now by giant you may think I mean tarantula size, but no. This was as big as a basketball. There was no way to get out of bed without it jumping on me, so I covered up my head and tried to scream with no luck. I then felt it jump on my stomach and heard it hit the floor as it jumped off the bed. I was then able to scream and got my mom up there to find and kill this giant spider. She said I was dreaming. No spider could be that big in our house, and besides, where did it go. Remember this story for later.

It was pretty much believed that the spider came from the closet, but my mom wasn't willing to believe it. I then found that I could summon imps from the closet. This became one of my favorite things to do, as imps are so mischievious and fun. My mom started having problems, but still wouldn't believe that they had anything to do with the closet.

Well, as I already stated, the upstairs was built in the attic with slanted ceilings on one side. The closet in my room was built after the room itself, so it made the room into kind of an L shape, the closet on the opposite side than the slant. My dresser and mirror set against the outside of the closet wall in the small part of the room, with a large built in ledge and pull open windows along the adjacent wall. The front of the closet was pretty much open and a long window was in the wall adjacent to the front of the closet. The next wall (across from the closet) had the slanted ceiling and my bed was placed along it. The final wall of the room - the bottom of the L - had the door to the hallway, just after the slant ended and an old antique vanity and mirror across from my dresser and mirror. There was a second bed in the middle of the room in front of the long window and a desk at the foot of the bed. The vanity and mirror weren't added until I was about 15. The layout of the room is important.

Anyway, when I was 16 I dated this boy named Jason. My dad and uncle had worked with his dad years before. Like most teens back then, I had his letterman jacket and I would sleep with it every night. One morning I awoke to find it on the ledge in front of the windows. I was upset. Who came into my room and moved it. Well, I go downstairs and my brother is freaking out. He's telling my mom this story about a man in the hallway the night before. Said he could hear him in my bedroom talking to me, but I was apparently asleep and not responding. He said that he then heard the door open and the man walk out into the hallway where he could still hear him talking. Said he kept repeating "He's going to hurt her" and then it just stopped. No more talking, no more sounds. The man was gone and he hadn't went down the stairs. Was it my dad? I don't know.

Well, I got married to my first husband when I was 17 and when I moved back in with my mom I was pregnant with my daughter. We changed the room around. Took down the second bed, turned the one so the headboard was under the slant and placed a crib in there against the same wall under the slant. This was supposed to be our room, but she never spent a single night in there. When I was pregnant I would be trying to sleep and be awoken by what seemed like an earthquake (in Missouri?), only to jump out of bed and discover it was only the bed shaking. I had things grab my ankles and try to pull me out of bed. For several nights in a row I would be lying in bed when the door would open. The black shadow of a man would enter (he reminded me of my dad) and pace the floor at the foot of my bed. I had a lawn chair that set between the two mirrors, and eventually he would go and sit down in it, and turn like he was watching me. Finally he would get up and walk out the door. The last night I spent in that room, however, I was awoken by someone shaking my leg. I looked up and saw a man standing at the foot of my bed. He had on black pants, a white shirt, and a black vest, but with that I was so terrified I never looked up to see his face. I was frozen in fright, unable to scream or even move to cover up my head. I finally managed to close my eyes and waited for the worst. When I reopened them, he was gone, without a sound. I ran out of the room, down to my mom's room and never spent another night in there.

When I finally had Desire` and brought her home, you could hear footsteps on the wood floor in the dining room, pacing back and forth. It sounded like cowboy boots (what my dad always wore) and sometimes you could hear two sets. No one smoked in our house, as I'm allergic to smoke, but you could still smell cigar smoke from time to time. Desire` would lie there and coo and smile for no one. When I would be feeding her, it felt like someone was standing over my shoulder watching me. Desire` used to love looking at pictures of her grandpa, like she knew him, even though he died when I was 11.

Well, we stayed in my mom's bedroom, downstairs. The door was situated just behind the stairs. My brother Jesse got my old bedroom. One night after Dez was about a year old, Jesse was in that bedroom. According to him, he watched the giant spider come out of the closet and being curious decided to follow it. He followed it out into the hall, thinking nothing of it at the time, but hearing the sounds of screams and cries - hands reaching out from the walls and floor trying to grab him. He followed it down the stairs, the same being true for the kitchen as was in the hallway. The spider turned around and ran at him. He screamed and ran, jumping in front of the open doorway to my mom's bedroom where we were all asleep. He tried calling for help with no response. Finally Dez sat up, looked at him without making a sound, and then lied back down. He made it back up the stairs and to the room where everything went back to normal.

At some point in time after Dez was born my mom moved an old mobile home onto the land behind the house for me and Dez to live in. I had a bad feeling about the place, but still tried fixing it up. I'm not sure about the back story on the trailor, but do know that quite often you can smell someone cooking fried chicken or apple pie in there. With it came the dark man (not the shadow man from before) and a dark haired woman in red. The man seems to be a somewhat menacing figure. I would sit out there and listen to my stereo with my cats, Buttercup and Salem. Whenever the man would come in, Buttercup would go bonkers, tearing up whatever was in her way to get out and away from him. Salem (a black male kitten), however would become all affectionate. He would climb on my back and nibble on my ear, etc. It was often believed by my mom that the kitten was himself a demon.

I paid my mom rent for the trailor, even though I stayed inside the main house. When a friend of mine needed a place to stay and I let them stay there for a few nights my mom got mad and kicked me out. Dez was going on two and I had no place else to go, so at about midnight we decided to sneak into the trailor. All the land to the side of the trailor was wooded and behind it was overgrown. We decided to head through the woods to get to the back door. I could hear something following us through the woods as I carried Dez in my arms. My friend walked with us, though we somewhere got seperated. I found myself in a small circular clearing of trees before realizing it was a giant spider web. There was only one opening and the large white spiders had dropped down from the tree to close it up after we walked in. I hated spiders and I was not being their breakfast, so I ran through the spiders and out what was left of the opening. These were about tarantula size. Well, I could hear my friend talking to someone, but I could also still hear whatever was following us so I continued on. I got to the edge of the woods and my friend found their way out as well, only to discover that the back portion of the land was swamp like. About two feet of water with grass growing on top of it. We waded through it, still hearing whatever was stalking us up in the trees. I got to the back door and opened it. Just as we were shutting the door I could hear something running up to it. It threw itself against the back door and let out this horrifying scream. All I can think is it was a cougar or panther. I didn't get any sleep after that. Well, a while before, one of my brother's friends had reportedly committed suicide just two houses down. When alive, he was always hanging out up on that hill. According to my friend, that's who they were talking to.

When Dez was two, she ended up hospitalized with pneumonia. Before I could even call and tell my family, my father visited my brother Jesse. He told him that Dez was in the hospital, but that she would be fine.

More recently Darkholm gave my youngest brother - Jim - a magickaly charged pendant to ward off evil spirits. Rather than wearing it, Jim keeps it hanging on a hook on his bedroom wall. One night Jim was staying at a friends house. My mom and Jesse were downstairs watching a movie. Jesse kept hearing footsteps upstairs, and finally said something after remembering that Jim wasn't home. He went upstairs to check, entering Jim's room first. From the corner of his eye he saw the pendent trying to make a large circle against the wall, but it didn't register at first so he closed the door and checked his room. When he realised what he saw, he went back to Jim's room. The pendent was hanging on the hook next to the door and it was going in circles, but it could only make half circles because it was against the wall. The stone would hit the wall, pull itself across to where it would have come out and make the rest of the arch. He said he gathered his things and went to the trailor with his family for the night (Jesse sleeps in the house normally while his wife and kids stay in the trailor).

Other events would include my nephew being afraid of his room in the trailor because of the "man"; the figure of a blond haired woman that has a fondness for Jesse, but hates me; more appearences of the spiders; the figure of a very hostile man in the basement; a "fog" that creeps across the floor; various smells and noises; things moving on their own; and on and on.

At one point in time, I was needing some dirt to fill in my front yard. This is when my mom was leveling her yard, so she sent some of hers to my house. I put it out thinking nothing of it. We all started having nightmares and things became much more active for a while.