Grew up in a ranch house out in the country. It was always a little creepy, more notably at night, but sometime during my adolescent years it suddenly shifted into what I (and the rest of my family) would define as haunted. This seemed to coincide with marital problems between my parents and a general lack of getting along between much of anyone. There was a lot of strife within the household, and weirder and weirder shit began to happen over time. The following are just a few examples of many.

Objects in the bathroom would reliably fall around the same time each night, whether it was shampoo bottles or the entire shower curtain.

My brother and I were alone one day and heard knocking on a window. We went to inspect, and the knocking immediately moved to a different window on the opposite end of the house. This continued around the house for a time. The exterior was searched and nothing was found. Many of the windows being knocked on were surrounded by thick flower beds, and were not easily accessible from the ground.

Sometimes you’d just be chilling alone at night and would become all at once overwhelmed with a presence that felt gigantic, almost as though a fucking bison just walked through the door. On one occasion, in my peripheral, I thought I saw a cougar coming down our short steps into the rec room. I turned and there was nothing. A moment later my parakeets, who were sleeping quietly beneath a sheet-covered cage, went absolutely berserk inside.

We had a very old, muddy basement with a pump in it, and standing water maybe three feet high, accessible by a single hatch beneath the deck. My mom and I heard a dog crying down there one afternoon by way of the vents. It went on for an hour or so before my dad got home and went down there with his waders and a large flood light. There was absolutely nothing down there, above or below the water. As you could likely predict, the whimpering stopped and never happened again.

After my dog died tragically, my bedroom (where it always slept) became perpetually cold until the day we officially moved out. My dad inspected the vents beneath it multiple times and never found anything amiss. Not a smoking gun, but weird nonetheless. I don’t recall whether this happened before or after the crying dog in the vent incident. Hopefully before.

When we were in the process of moving, my friends and I snuck into the house one night to drink and party in my old bedroom. We came back the following night and found my bedroom door wouldn’t budge. We were able to get in through a window, and were horrified to discover all of the picture frames and other large objects being stored in that room had been piled up against the bedroom door from the inside.

Fortunately, nothing particularly unsettling happened in the next house, nor any houses since. Last I had heard from a chance meeting with an old neighbor, one of the more recent occupants killed herself in her bedroom. I’m sure that helped.

For years I had dreams about returning to that house, in this dark, unfurnished state. I would explore it reluctantly with this horrible feeling of repulsion and apprehension. Sometimes there’d be bizarre spirit cats dwelling within. Eventually I found myself dreaming about it again, and whatever was there before was just gone. I saw that it wasn’t frightening anymore and I haven’t recalled a single dream about it since.