Baby

Geraldine knew there was something wrong with the house in Sussex a mere two days after she moved in. It was not anything she could see as much as it was something she could sense. But having just been done with a long divorce and winning the custody of her four year old son, she was quite satisfied being able to move into a house of her own at all. Not mention that she was living right down the road from one of her best friends; it had been her idea that she move there in the first place. Tyler had just begun speaking to an imaginary friend name 'Jory'. The intricacies of his conversations were starting to bother Geraldine, but when she asked her friend who had a son the same age she had said it was very normal.

Now Geraldine had come home from work one day and had parked the car in the garage. The baby-sitter, having heard the car, came out and stood in the doorway with little Tyler, who ran into his mother's arms and kissed her on the cheek. All of a sudden, the three of them turned to the garage to see what had made the strange noise they had all heard. They saw the garage door opening by itself. Now the door could either be operated by remote or opened from the inside. Geraldine looked at the remote in her hand and then at the baby-sitter who shrugged. She pressed the button, which closed the door, and then began to talk to the baby-sitter again. Once again, the door opened on their right. More suspicious than scared, Geraldine told Tyler to stay there while she went to see if anything was wrong. Peering into the garage she asked whether anyone was there. A jar of paint dropped in response and then there was silence.

She searched the entire place and found nothing. Tyler suddenly looked at the driveway, waved and said goodbye to Jory. Geraldine simply looked at him, took a deep breath and walked into the house. Three months after being in the house, it was not only Tyler that became acquainted with 'Jory'. Amy, her friend down the street would bring her five year old James over and he too would talk to the non existent entity they now referred to as 'Baby'. Amy thought it was cute. Geraldine found it disturbing. Geraldine had started to hear crying coming from the spare room upstairs. She would hear it when Tyler was at home as well as when he was in school. The crying did not seem to bother him when he was there. it bothered her though. But she did not decide to move out till one fine day when Amy came over with James. The two boys were upstairs while the mothers stayed down in the living room. All of a sudden, they heard Tyler scream. Both parents ran upstairs to find out what was wrong.

James was crying softly and when Geraldine tried to carry Tyler, he started kicking and screaming 'DIE BABY DIE!'. It was only after the four got down that the two mothers saw the bite marks on Tyler's head. 'Your house is haunted Geraldine!' she said in a panic. 'No shit, Sherlock', she muttered under her breath, trying to remember where she had kept the Bible. Finding it, she opened it to the first place her fingers led her and began to read loud. The four of them heard a faint crying noise coming from upstairs. Afraid, but extremely angry, Geraldine, began to read even louder. As if on cue, the crying became louder. They could feel the tension in the room building up. Within the next five minutes, she was practically screaming verses from the bible for the 'Baby' upstairs to hear. She yelled them with all her might and all her strength until finally and suddenly, the crying died. After attending to her son, the four of them all went to Amy's. They stayed there for the next three days.

After that, Geraldine made plans with her aunt to move into her house where she stayed for the next month when she had a new place. That was the last time Geraldine heard of 'Baby'.

House Visit

When Joseph's grandmother, Marlena, was eight, something awoke her in the middle of the night. When she opened her eyes to see what it was, she saw a shadow on the wall which could not have been caused by anything in the room... it was the shadow of a large, looming figure. Being next to the window, she opened it and looked out into the garden, where she saw no one. Sure that it was the figure of a man, she decided to get up and take a closer look... And to her shock, she was slapped across the face. Hiding under the covers till the sun began to shine in, she woke up with a dark bruise on her left cheek and a heart full of fear. This is the story she tells with the most emotion: she seems to remember it with crystal clarity.

Soon having two children of her own, other things began to happened repeatedly. Twice a week, something would visit them. It would bang on the back door till the sound and movement reverberated throughout the whole house. This happened twice a week on a regular basis for half a year. Marlena's daughter, Mary, never got used to it. No matter how many times it happened, knowing that she would not see anyone there, she would stand behind the kitchen counter with the shotgun, waiting for someone to appear. When Joseph himself was six, he saw one of those solid, steel irons roll around the floor by itself. It was one of those irons that had to be heated manually and weighed about ten pounds. There was no way it could have done that by itself. As he got older, Joseph began to hear things. His sister, Judy would see things constantly. once when he came home from work wearing his favorite brown suit, he came back to see both his sister and his mother waiting on the front porch, looking very upset. he had gotten home around seven in the evening, and when he asked why they looked so anxious, Judy asked if he had been back earlier to change his clothes.

She had heard the car drive up and just as she had expected, the door had opened. Joseph had walked in, wearing his blue suit, given her an irritated look and walked up the stairs. Wanting to use the car, she had gone out to find that the garage door had not even been opened. Rushing up the stairs, she found out that Joseph was not there. Unable to take the things she often saw darting in the corner of her eye, the incident oh 'Joseph' was the straw that broke the camel's back. She stayed at her sister's for the next two weeks. Joseph and Judy still live in the house now. Surprisingly, Judy is not really bothered by it anymore. Joseph on the other hand is waiting to move out. Joseph, the writer of the story, did not lament over what has been happening in his grandparents house for the past fifty years or so. In fact, he talks about it rather nostalgically, as if it were a treasured memory, which is slowly fading. The occurrences in the house have not only been experienced by him but, and this is why he know the haunting has been going on or the past fifty years, by his grandmother as well.

The house in Texas, USA is a simple wooden frame house; a six room structure which stands right up to today. It used to be located in the city cemetery till the cemetery was covered up and rebuilt on.

Mystery Men

Jacob looked outside at the rays of the sun which played on the puddles surfaced. The rain had died down to a drizzle and he supposed he would be able to leave the house in about fifteen minutes. He took off his clothes without even bothering to close his curtains and put his towel around his waist. It was not that Jacob was one of those people who hated getting wet. It was just that as of late, every time he went out in the rain, he would break out into hives. It was a strange phenomenon indeed, one, which had recently caused him a lot of inconvenience when it came to being sociable... it was the rainy season you see.

He walked out of the house and into the corridor. His house was laid out in such a way that his room was at one end of the corridor and the main bathroom at the other. His parents and sister's rooms faced each other in the middle and everything else, the kitchen and so forth, was downstairs. So when he stepped out of his room, he was directly facing the toilet door, with nothing in between. He stopped after his third step and looked at the door and blinked, not believing what he saw. On the door, emblazoned with sharp lines was his sister's silhouette in a shadow form. Now Jacob, aged thirteen, had spent a good deal of time with his fifteen years old sister because till three days before, he had stayed in the same room with her all his life. It was only now that his parents could afford a bigger house that he stayed in a separate room. He looked at the shadow and its long flowing hair. There was nothing in between him and the door that could have been playing this wicked game of light. It did not only matter that he saw the shadow on the wall. It was also that his sister was away for the weekend. And that fact burnt in his head. A sensation of fear shook him, and his palms shivered.

Not wanting to go to shower anymore, he was not sure what to do. It was while he was pondering that the shadow began to move. It did not pop out of the wall or anything like that; it was not a being,just a shadow. It began to scroll down the wall like a computer prompt and disappeared below the door as if there was a slit in the floor, which enable it to. Can you imagine a creature that can slide alongside the wall? And something else was scrolling down above it. It was attached to the head of the first shadow and only when the first one had scrolled down all the way did he realize that it was an identical one. A third one soon came down, followed by a fourth and  fifth. This was all very frightening, if that's how you would put it. What was he supposed to do? He wanted to scream, but fear made him silent. He wanted to run away, but his fear transfixed him transfixed. He began feeling nauseous with the intense fear she was feeling, but could not express. Jacob was beginning to feel sick in the stomach. It was as if this trick of physics was a perversion of nature. The feeling got worse as the shadows came down faster and at one point, he thought he was going to throw up.

Faster and faster and faster... the images of his sister were just a blur of black and white rushing before his eyes. Who was doing this? What did it want from him? He collapsed from dizziness and from fear. Wanting either his father to come home from work or his mother to come home from her friend's house, he dropped to the floor and curled up into a ball. Shutting his eyes as tight as he possibly could, he tried to forget where he was and what he was doing. Till today no one believes him and he makes it a point never to be alone in the house. As he went to college, he stayed far away from the home.

Rail Track

Five year old Alice was playing with her Barbie Dolls in Fayetteville, Baldwin, in the later stages of dusk. The shadows which sunset brought stretched across the lawn and the colours of the sky were reflected on the drops of water, which were sprinkled across the lawn. Even though her parents were a quarter mile away in the chicken houses and her sister was out riding her bike, she had the very strong feeling that someone was watching her, and that whoever it was, was very close by. She looked up to see a face in the front window. 

Not really knowing what she was doing and working purely on intuition as most children do. she put her dolls on the house porch and went into the house to investigate. They lived in a small area, which was populated by few people, and so when they were away at the chicken house or somewhere nearby, they rarely kept the doors locked. Upon opening the door to what would be the hallway and getting a clear view into her sister's room, she saw a figure dressed in period clothing. He was tall, but she was not near enough to see any of his features. She was so scared that she ran out of the house and to where her parents were, leaving the door wide open. Her parents were so concerned to see her burst into the scene, panting for breath and white faced, that they drove all the way back with her to find that there was no one in the house. All that was left were the scattered Barbie dolls which lay at the entrance of the house. About seven years later, Alice sat in one of her high  school classrooms and looked out the window. Bored, she sat back in her seat and looked at the book in front of her. Only having just bought it that day, despite the fact that she had been taking the subject for the past four months, she flipped through it, looking at the pictures. The teacher's voice did not seem to exist in her reality.

History was not exactly the most stimulating subject in the world. She flipped through the book a little slower, hoping that maybe, looking at the pictures more carefully would make time go by even faster. She stopped somewhere in the middle of the textbook and looked at the picture of the man who wore the exact same thing she had seen on the strange figure she had seen when she was eight.  She went to her local library the same day after finding out that the outfit was one which would belong to a rail worker from the Jesse James days. She went immediately to the periodical, which told stories of the town's history and gave timelines of everything that had ever happened there. She had taken note of the period of time from which the man had come by reading the section in her textbook.

Her heart stopped when she read the words on the page. A railroad had run directly through the land, which her house was built on. It ran through her bedroom and her sister's room where she had seen the figure. She slammed the huge book shut, causing the thick layer of dust to take to the air. Some people turned around at the thudding sound it made and shushed her angrily before returning to whatever it was that they had been reading. She did not care. She had found out what she needed to know and there was no reason to stay there any longer. She left the library, the recently resurrected ghost of her past dying to her once again.

Sweet Voice

Seven years ago, a young lady named Sally came all the way to Hartford, Connecticut from Puerto Rico to live. Her mother, stepfather and she lived in a small old house, which had been built in the 1800s. The three storey building had been divided into four apartments and so was rather short on space. The three of them lived in what used to be the attic. It boasted a bathroom, bedroom, kitchen and living room. Sally, excited and wide eyed about coming to America had been content to make the couch in the living room her bed while her mother and stepfather slept in the sole bedroom. She slept with her head at the window and her feet pointing towards the kitchen.

One night, she lay awake, listening to her parent's snores, unable to get to sleep for some reason. She tossed and turned and wiped the sweat away from the back of her neck. Sitting up and feeling very irritable, she yawned and wondered why this was happening since she slept fine on the couch for the past two weeks. She looked at the living room clock, which said that it was just past midnight. She was rubbing her eyes and yawned again, and was about to lie back down when she saw something at the corner of her eye. Turning to the kitchen, she saw a bright, even though it did not stretch very far, white light emanating from behind the counter. Trying to blink away whatever sleep she had been trying to attain, she stared at the sight in amazement, trying to figure out what it was. Scared to move, knowing that someone, or something, had to be causing the light, she stayed frozen in her seat. The light began to grow brighter and with its growing intensity came something that sally remembers seven years later as if it happened yesterday.

She heard a voice, At first it sounded like music; a tune which was coming from a radio far away. But as it got louder, she realized that it sounded like a woman singing. It was coming from behind the counter. All she knew to do was to lie down and close her eyes. She did not know when the music stopped or when she fell asleep but she remembered what happened the minute she woke up the next morning. 'Sally', her mother had asked, 'What were you doing at four in the morning?' Confused, she told her mother that she was asleep. 'You are not lying to me are you?' She probed. 'Because I could have sworn I heard you singing in the kitchen.'

Chill

The night was young and the weather was warm. In fact, it was almost hot. Jill sat in her house in Canada, watching her television and boiling water on the stove. There was no one in the house except for her and her lazy cat. Despite the hot weather, the window was closed. She always kept her window closed at night because she was afraid that some strange breed of insect would come in and build a nest in her home. So she sat there in front of her television, almost perspiring, when suddenly the temperature dropped. She felt a shiver ran down her spine and looked up immediately. She instinctively looked at the window and saw that it was closed. There was no doubt that the draft had been there; she was still rubbing her arm, smoothing the hair that was standing on it, back down.

Her little paralysis broke when she heard the kettle whistling on the stove. The whistle was loud and clear now and she realized that it must have been going on for a long time without her noticing it. She saw little gushes of water spurting out from the kettle's spout. She walked straight over to the kitchen and felt something come from behind her. She froze in her tracks when she felt yet another draft of cold air - or could it have been the same one - from behind her and blast into her and move towards the kitchen. Her eyes were fixed on the stove, basically because that was where they had been when she had felt the cold creep up on her. She was looking at the stove when the kettle simply dropped. It did not tip, nor did something accidentally bump it off. It had been on the innermost compartment on the stove. It looked as if something had pulled it off the stove at lightning speed and let it drop onto the floor. Jill stared in dumbstruck horror at the water, which seeped out of the spout quicker that she felt comfortable with.

There was no one in the house to run to and she did not know what to do. So she walked over to get a rag to clear it up. She stepped carefully over the spilled water, knowing that it would be boiling hot and got the rag from inside a drawer. She knelt down beside the water ans started to wipe it up. Her hand stopped moving and she hitched in a breath. She opened the kettle top and stuck her hand in to make sure. The water, which had just been boiling was icy cold. When she regained her composure, she turned around and the window was opened.

Lost Girl

In Woodstock, NB, there lies, and still lies, a house, which is located by an old road. The sun shines on its blue roof cheerily every afternoon and lights the path of the people walking to and fro. Anyone who passes by sees the Albert family through the window having their meals, watching television or simply walking around. Things started out mildly. Edna, a beautiful was eight year old girl, was sitting on the porch one day, looking at the bird which was perched on the fence. The afternoon sun felt good on her skin and it was then that she heard a squeaking noise coming from beside her. She turned to her left and found that the door to the sun porch was opening and moving by itself.

She froze where she was sitting and tried to explain to herself that it had been the wind, but simply could not. Yes, the door was light. It was because of that that she knew it would not have been the wind, for the door was not simply blowing back and forth, it was moving very slowly... as if someone was pushing it. When you are eight, fear has a way of freezing you. It opened and closed about twenty times while she was looking at it, and then it simply closed. And stayed closed. She was breathing hard and wondering what had happened, and what had been causing the motion. As if answering her, she felt a cold draft descend upon her and she shivered. She then heard the squeaking noise move to her right. Confused, and very afraid, she found herself looking at the rocking chair, which now seemed to be rocking by itself. This was when she found her feet. She ran into the house. Her hair was standing on ends and her mouth was dry. 'Who's the girl in blue?' her relatives asked as she came in for Christmas lunch.

'What girl? Edna and her mother had said in unison. 'The girl who went into the backyard. She looked at me from around the house. I was gonna say hi but I tripped and when I looked back up, she was gone. I thought she went to the back of the house... pale blue dress... you have no idea, do you?' 'Nope,' they said again. 'Well no harm, she was quite young... I doubt she could cause any damage.' Things went very wrong that day. Utensils went missing, keys mysteriously disappeared and the chicken, which had been put into the oven for quite a while, came out as raw it had gone in. By the time dinner came, there had been so many miniature disasters that no one cared how dinner was as long as they got through it in place. The last time anything happened that year happened six days after Christmas when Edna got up early one morning. She glanced into her parents room, which just off the kitchen. The door was open and what she saw made her blood freeze. At her parents bed stood a young woman.

She was blond and wore a blue dress. She stood at the foot of their bed and simply looked down on them. Edna walked quickly in that direction and the woman looked up, startled. She walked to what would have been the headboard of the bed but which was blocked off by the wall. Edna's walk turned into a run and she stumbled into the room, waking her parents up but finding nothing. It was another year, before she saw her again... in the haunted house. If only someone would believe her.

Ashes To Ashes

Eighteen year old Cammy stirred in her bed and opened her eyes slowly, affixing them on the shadow which stood about three meters away from her. She had just moved back to the US from Europe and her boyfriend and her were staying with her grandparents. She was staying in the upstairs room, which was separated from her boyfriend's room by a large walk through closet. He slept with the adjoining door open on the other side of the closet and would sometimes creep into her room to lie down beside her. Most of the time she would be dead tired and she promised herself she would scare him the next few nights.

As usual, the boy creeped in to lie beside her to hug her in her sleep, which she always liked. he moved slowly and stealthily. She lay down in the bed with her lights off, glimpsing the only source of light, which came from the other side of the adjoining door. She smiled to herself, just thinking about her scream. Her boyfriend came closer to her and lay on the bed and stretched himself. 'John,' she said. 'Yes?' came the loud reply from the other side of the adjoining door. She jerk her head back, realizing that the reply had not come from her room, but from the other room. Her hand went straight for the lamp switch instead as she screamed at the same time. Knocking the lamp down accidentally, she fell out of the bed with it, her hand still searching for the light switch. By the time she got the lamp on, John was already in the room. She looked around and saw no one else but him there.

'Were you just in here?' She asked panic. Confused, he said that he had heard her call him and that he had rushed into the room to find her on the floor. 'What's the matter?' He was shocked when he looked at her. 'What's all this make up on your face? Are you trying to frighten me?' She said that she had seen someone creeping up on her and that she had thought it was him. He said he had been in his room for the past two hours doing an essay for one of his lectures. She was shocked beyond words. She got up, still shacking, and went to pull the comforter off the bed. To their horror, they saw ashes on the bed beside where Cammy had been lying earlier.