By Ciera Terry
There are plenty of people in the world that are skeptics when it comes to the paranormal — I am not one of them.
In my experience, scary incidents happen quite frequently to me.
Around the age of eight, I had one of my first paranormal run — ins.
My stepfather at the time had been hospitalized, and I’d been staying in the hospital with him. The one device I had to keep me entertained was a Nintendo DS. I would frequently take pictures of myself and the hospital room.
At some point when it was time for me to go back home, I’d find myself going through the images that I had taken from my small time there, and in one of the photos I had taken I found something odd. A person stood behind me.
The person was young, maybe a couple years older than I was and very fair-skinned. I remember as a kid, thinking that she looked really sick.
She didn’t have any hair and the only thing she wore was a hospital gown. She stood there staring right into the camera.
I had never left the door open, and I do not recall ever interacting with another human being in that room, other than my stepdad.
I immediately started crying and showed my mom the picture and while she was preaching about how we could get famous and how we should submit it to a famous ghost program.
I was petrified.
Later that day, I used a special feature on the DS to warp the image and destroy the photo.
Another one of my paranormal experiences happened to me in my childhood home. My sister and I both woke up to get a midnight snack from the kitchen. Neither of us thought anything of it as we both got up and slowly walked down the hallway toward the kitchen.
I forced her to go ahead of me as the dark used to scare me. Just as we were about to enter the kitchen, we both heard a noise. It had sounded like a snore, so we both stopped and looked at each other and decided it would be best if we just peaked our head around the corner.
We thought maybe one of our other siblings had gotten up or one of our family members was awake. We both didn’t want to get in trouble, so we both slowly peeked our heads around the corner.
The first thing that I remember seeing was somebody standing over our aunt on the couch. And not just anyone, it was somebody small, somebody young.
There was nobody in the house who was younger than me and there were no family friends over either. As we peeked over the corner, baffled by what we were witnessing, the small child looked over at us and laughed.
My sibling and I both ran back into our room and then hid underneath the covers for the rest of the night.
The following morning, when we asked our aunt if she remembered anything weird, she recalled having sleep paralysis and feeling like there was something pressing against her chest.
This wouldn’t be the first time I found myself witnessing the paranormal, and it wouldn’t be the last either.
When I was about 14, we had to move into a new house.
It wasn’t far from where we originally were.
A fresh start some would say; however, not long after we moved in, weird things started happening again.
We only lived in the house for about two or three months at this point before everyone in my family started to experience peculiar things.
We would all constantly hear knocking on doors and windows, but when we would open the doors or check behind the curtain, no one would be there.
It started off small, maybe happening only once every couple of days or every couple of weeks, but it reached its peak when it started happening at least maybe 10 times a day.
At some point, my aunt was tired of it and waited by the door to hear the knock again, as she genuinely thought that there was somebody outside who was playing a prank on us, but as soon as the knock happened, she pulled the door open, and still nobody was there.
For peace of mind, I ended up spreading sage around the house and just informed any ghosts within the house that I meant no harm — only then did the knocks finally stop.
These aren’t all my scary ghost stories, but they’re the ones I remember the most. Skeptics could say that these are all made up and explanations could be provided for all of them, but who knows?
The one thing about the paranormal is that no matter how much it’s disproven, something can always happen to change a person’s mind.