I know that not everyone believes in the supernatural. I believe because I have seen. Are the things I have seen and heard simply a "recording" of events from years past? Or are these things intelligent, interacting with a world they still long to be a part of? I believe a mixture of both occurred in the home I grew up in...
The summer before I started the fourth grade, my parents bought a duplex that was built in the early 1900's. Within the first week of getting settled in, my younger sister, 5 at the time, refused to sleep in her own room. My parents figured this was just nervousness at her being in a new place, and they relented and let her sleep in bed with them. However, they still couldn't get any sleep because she would keep talking about seeing the "black shadows" on the ceiling.
I, on the other hand, only had an extreme feeling of fear that I could not explain. Throughout the next few years, numerous events would occur in our home, most of them noises. It became very common for us to hear someone coming up the hallway stairs towards the back door. Everyone in my family could hear it, a few times it happened when we were all sitting at the dinner table. Someone would go and open up the door, expecting someone to be there, but there was no one.
My younger brother, at the age of about 7, was by himself in the upstairs apartment, which was not being rented out at the time. He had the radio on and was singing and dancing, pretending to be a superstar like many of us do when no one is watching. Except...when he spun around, there WAS someone watching! He saw an older man sitting on a sofa looking at him. The old man was apparently very amused by my brother's antics, but my brother was not at all amused. He ran down the stairs at top speed and gasped out his story about the silently giggling old man to my Mom and Dad, who went upstairs to look around in an effort to convince my brother that no one was up there. He never went upstairs by himself again.
Once I hit my mid-teen years, a spurt of strange events began to occur. I awoke in my basement bedroom one night to see an emerald green mist floating above my head. It was a globular mass with what I can only explain as tendrils extending all around it. The mist, along with it's tendrils were constantly in motion, moving like smoke caught in a jar. As I awoke and became frightened, (I tried to scream, but nothing came out), the object seemed to "panic" and immediately started to move away from me. From the movement of it's tendrils, it seemed as if it was attempting to move quickly, but it could only go so fast. I watched it move away from me, and though you would expect something like that to go through the wall or something, it actually floated out my open door, and I watched it go around the corner. I was terrified for weeks after that.
Another night, within that same time span, I was watching some scary movies with my siblings and a few of our neighborhood friends. We started a conversation about what we would do if a ghost walked into the room. During this conversation, a movement in my peripheral vision caught my eye, and naturally, I turned to look. I couldn't believe what I was seeing... it was a shadow man, complete with wide brimmed hat, like a farmer would wear. I watched as it came out the door from the basement into the kitchen, and glided right past the doorway of the room we were in. It shocked me, but I was not afraid. I started to tell everyone, but in light of the conversation we had just had, I knew none of them would believe me, so I kept it to myself. About two years later, I was renting the upstairs apartment from my Dad, when one day, my sister called me on the phone and told me that she had been lying on the floor, talking on the phone with her boyfriend when she noticed the image of a shadow man in a hat walk past a small, circular mirror hanging on the wall. She had only seen his reflection in the mirror, and she only saw the head, as the mirror was hung about head level. I had never mentioned to her what I had seen that night, and although she was clearly taken aback, she was not left feeling frightened by the event, just as I hadn't been.
I could fill a small book with the events that occurred while we lived in that house, but I think these incidents show that some of the things we witnessed, like the laughing man and the green mist, were definitely able to interact with us, while some of the things simply seemed to be a recorded image being replayed again and again, like the shadow man, always walking past some point in the house, appearing to be on his way to somewhere.
