In 1989, we purchased our first home for an extremely great price. We could not believe the low asking price for the beautiful home. It was the dream home that we had always wanted. Being newlyweds, we were proud of our great find in the quiet little town. It was a charming house in a friendly neighborhood like those out of a 50's sitcom. It was a two story home with a white picket fence and a mailbox in the front with our name on it. I had a flourishing garden in the back yard where I spent many sunny afternoons. During the first month at our new home, we redecorated and started to settle into our happy space. Our happiness was short lived as things began to change around the house. It was small things at first. I was the only one that noticed them. My husband thought it was just the stress of having a huge new house and the adjustments of married life that making me tired and cranky, but I knew it was more than just stress. I knew that something was happening and it was not normal.

At first, I felt as if I was not alone in the house. My husband worked from early morning until late evening. I spent most of my time alone in the house when he was working. Every time I would start unpacking or cleaning, I felt as if I was being watched by someone or something. I would feel as if someone was looking over my shoulder every time I washed my dishes in the sink. I would turn around only to see nothing in the room. I would pass it off as just not being used to being all alone in a new house. Sometimes the sound of the wind as it blew through the windows would frighten me. The wind would make a whistling moaning noise as it blew the curtain back and forth in the window. Many times I would slam the window shut to make it stop and walk out of the room.

My sense of something in the home started a cleaning frenzy. I would spend much of my days trying to busy myself with cleaning. I would go from room to room cleaning and rearranging furniture until it was all perfect to keep myself from thinking about what may be in the house. Around mid-afternoon, I would take a break to enjoy some tea to relax. The first time I experienced something physical I was relaxing in the kitchen with my cup of tea. I had just sat down when the phone rang. I stopped stirring my tea, placed the spoon on the saucer and went to answer the phone. After my phone conversation, I went back to the table to enjoy my cup of tea. I looked at the saucer. My spoon was gone. I looked on the table, under the table and in the sink. It was no where to be found. I knew that I had placed in on the saucer when I went to answer the phone and now it had disappeared.

Over the next few weeks, the kitchen started to be a hot spot for unexplained activity. Silverware would disappear or move from the place that I would place it on the table. Many times, I would set the table only to come back and find it all rearranged from the spot I had placed it. I had a habit of placing my ashtray on the counter upside down in the dish strainer to dry after washing it. I would leave the room and come back to find the ashtray upright on an opposite counter. My husband would tell me that I was working too hard and forgetting where I had placed things and just confused about what I had seen. I thought at first maybe he was right, but after the second month of seeing these things I knew it was more. Something was in the house and it was letting its presence be known.

Everything changed one cold night in December. I had a problem sleeping so I decided to watch television after my husband had went to bed. Around 2:30 in the morning, I decided to try and get some rest. I turned the television off and started to check all the doors. I went to bed and started to drift off to sleep. I was startled by a noise in the kitchen. I figured it was just the wind and turned over in bed. As I started to close my eyes, the sound was getting louder. I looked at my husband. He was in a deep sleep. The sound seemed to be moving down the hall way toward our bedroom. I sat up in bed and stared at the dark doorway. I could hear the loud sound of my breathing as I watched and waited. It felt as if the next couple of seconds lasted hours as I waited and listened to the sound getting closer to the door. I did not know what it was or what to do.

I noticed a smoky figure walking in the hall outside our bedroom and moving towards the kitchen. As I gasped loudly, the figure slowly turned in the doorway and looked at me. The figure in the doorway was an elder man. His face and body were transparent. I could see the faint outline of his head and shoulders, but he did not have any hands. His upper body was skinny with a tiny waist. The only outline of his lower body was his upper thighs. He did not have any legs or feet. I sat there in bed frightened beyond believe as the old man floated towards me. I closed my eyes tightly and tried to get my husbands attention. I struggled to scream, but all that came out of my mouth was a weak whimper. I opened my eyes. The man was at the end of the bed. I clamped my eyes shut and tried franticly to wake my husband by poking my elbow into his side. My arm only moved an inch. No matter how hard I tried to move my arm it would not move. I felt as if something was holding me down in bed and not letting me move. I was too frightened to open my eyes to see what was there. My chest began to feel tight as if something was pressing down on it. My breathing became shallow and rapid as I struggled to fill my lungs with air. I was suffocating and my husband was deep asleep. The thoughts of my dying next to him without his knowing raced through my mind. I squirmed and wiggled in bed and tried to get away from what was holding me. Finally, my small movements in the bed had woke my husband. He grabbed me and shook me. He thought that I was having a nightmare. As his big hands grabbed my trembling shoulders, I screamed.

I opened my eyes for a second and closed them again and began to sob uncontrollably as he asked me what was wrong. I tried to answer him, but all I could do was cry and mumble nonsense sentences. I keep screaming that someone was in the room. I begged him to turn on the light. My husband kept telling me that no one was in the room as I held onto him. He got up from the bed and turned on the bedroom light. After a couple of minutes of my hysteria, he shook me to snap me out of my ramblings. I opened my eyes and gazed around the room. The man was gone. I wiped the tears from my eyes and told my husband what I had seen. He tried several times to give me a reasonable explanation about what I had seen, but I knew what I had seen was real. I cried and begged him to leave the house. He tried to calm me, but nothing was working. I shouted at him that I was not spending another minute in that house. He could stay in that house or leave with me. He looked at me with a puzzled look on his face. He knew that I would never say anything like that unless something serious was wrong. He agreed that we should leave the house if I was that upset about it and started to dress. I sat in my nightgown too terrified to move from the bed. He sat down on the bed to put his shoes on his feet. As he started to place his left shoe on his foot, we could hear a rumbling sound. It seem to be coming from the bedroom. We sat there staring at each other.The rumbling sound became louder. A chair that was in the corner of our room suddenly scooted across the floor. We both jumped and ran out of the house screaming. We drove for hours to his parents house. We sat in silence the whole trip. We were both too terrified to think or even talk about what had happened in that house.

After a few days, we contact the real estate agency that we had bought the home from and confronted them about what had happened. The agency hesitated at first, but later told us that rumors of the house had been floating around about the house being haunted, but they had not believed them. They told us that the previous owner was an elder man that lived alone. He had died in the house and it was two weeks before anyone discovered his body. The man spent most of his days in the kitchen that was down the hallway from our bedroom. One day, a concerned neighbor went to check about him and found him dead at the kitchen table with his coffee cup on the table still full of coffee and an unlit cigarette resting in his ashtray. The man had taken his own life and died alone just as he had spent most of his life.

We went back to our dream home and packed up our belongs. We put the house on the market and sold it. We made sure the new owners knew the house's history and our experiences in the home. We decided to take some time before our next purchase of a home. We moved into a small apartment and started to rebuild our lives after our first experience with the paranormal. We hoped that this was the only encounter we would ever experience with the paranormal world. The marriage ended several years later, but paranormal encountered followed me. The paranormal encounters that I have experienced since that night have not been as frightening. Most have been small things and not harmed me in any way. In time through learning about the paranormal and understanding the paranormal world, I have accepted that we are not here alone in this world. I have learned not to fear things from the paranormal world, but to try to understand it and to know with prayer around me that I will be safe.