194. True Haunted House Stories: Ghost Children, Mimics, and Premonitions

This episode is brought to you by Control Resonance, the new game from Remedy Entertainment. Control Resonance is the sequel to the multi-award winning Control. You're entering the world as the character Dylan. Dylan wakes up from a coma inside the oldest house, headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, only to find that the building's seven-year lockdown has broken. The paranormal forces that were contained inside have spilled out into the streets of Manhattan, and Jesse, the director of the FBC, who also happens to be Dylan's sister, is missing. Dylan has to leave the safety of the oldest house, master his own evolving paranatural abilities, confront his past, and track down his sister before it's too late. This is a melee-driven action RPG, and the combat is aggressive, dynamic, and personal. You'll fight through a warped, living version of Manhattan, not a traditional open world, but a city that's twisting and changing around you. 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So now that we're headed straight into spooky season, I wanted to compile a list of terrifying but true spooky, scary stories from people who lived inside of haunted houses. Some of these stories are from listeners, others are from Reddit, and some I just found on old message boards where people used to write their unexplainable stories. It's a big, scary list. I'm excited to dig into it with you all. But before we dive in, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has checked out Last Trace with Kaylin Moore on Netflix. My Netflix original true crime podcast launched on Monday, and I have gotten a lot of lovely comments from a bunch of you guys. Episodes are going to be dropping weekly for the next 26 weeks over on Netflix. So please check it out if you haven't. Our first episode is actually on the Connecticut case of Jennifer Dulos, who disappeared in 2019 during a custody dispute with her husband. And it's about the trail that was left behind. Again, thank you to everyone who already checked it out. And for now, let's get into it. I've always been fascinated if a place is haunted or if a person is. Like, let me tell you about this creepy thing that just happened to me the other day. So a couple of days ago, I was playing with my son at like 630 in the morning. It's his favorite time to be awake for some ungodly reason. But all of a sudden, he just started staring into the corner of the room like he was looking at something. And he made this face. It was the same face that he makes now when he sees a stranger, like someone he doesn't recognize, skeptical, but kind of interested. And then he just stared into the corner with that look on his face for a good five minutes. Now, that's longer than he'll look at any inanimate object, even if it's lighting up. And I look over at the corner. It's where my computer is set up. It's where my chair is. And there's nothing there. There's nothing that would have caught his attention like this. But then he starts making sounds while he's staring at something. He goes, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Now, that's a noise that he pretty much only does if we prompt him these days. So it made me wonder if he was interacting with something that I just couldn't see. And he was so locked on this thing until all of a sudden his trance broke and he started looking at me and we just kept playing. So it got me wondering, is the place I live haunted? Or was it something about my son? Was there something or someone specific that was trying to visit him? It's something to think about as we get into our haunted house scary story episode today. And I want to tell you this one story first. So this comes from someone who had a pretty horrifying interaction with their mother in the middle of the night. This person writes, when I was around 11 years old, my whole family went on a long holiday out of the city, leaving only me, my mom, and my dad at home. I have a huge house with a joint family of 15 members living together under the same roof. So you can imagine how empty it felt with only three of us there. I've always experienced nightmares and some paranormal stuff. I was so scared in this house that I refused to sleep alone. And I started sleeping with my mother while my dad slept alone in another room. One night while I was sleeping with my mom, we were talking and she was sharing childhood stories with me. And suddenly she looked at the slate and she said, I don't know what to do. I don't know open door of our room. And she asked in a frightened voice, who's there? I clearly remember how terrified she looked. I asked her what happened. And she told me that she saw someone with big round eyes peeking through the door. Later, she dismissed it as her imagination or her eyes playing tricks on her in the dark. We both forgot about it. And eventually we fell asleep. But then I woke up at around 2 to 3 a.m. after I had a nightmare. I was pretty scared. So I asked my mother who was sleeping beside me to recite a prayer for me. This used to happen pretty frequently. I would wake up from nightmares and my mother would recite prayers to ward off any negative energy. But when I asked her to pray, she replied in a weirdly nasally voice, I'm sleepy. Now this was in a completely different accent from the way we speak at home. I turned around to look at her and she appeared to be sleeping with her eyes wide open and her mouth open too. It was dark in the room, so I couldn't see her clearly. I got terrified and I asked her again to pray for me. But she replied one more time in the same strange nasally voice, I'm sleepy. Let me sleep. At first, I thought she was trying to prank me, but I was scared as all hell. I asked her to take me to my dad's room because I didn't want to stay there with her anymore. She refused again in that same creepy voice. I asked her to take me to my creepy voice. I started begging her and I was crying. And then she finally said to me, yes, but I won't go anywhere near him. But what was weird about this was she said it in the regional language of the city where we live. We do not speak that language in our household. My mother was born and raised in a completely different part of the country, so she neither spoke nor understood that language. Now hearing that made my whole body go cold and I ran out of the room crying. Loudly towards my dad's room. As I was running, I heard my mother shout, why are you running? But this time it was in her normal voice and her normal accent. I still ignored it and I just kept running. I climbed into my dad's bed crying. He assumed I had another nightmare and cuddled me until I fell asleep. The next morning, I told my dad about how my mom was scaring me during the night. And that's when my mother told us her account of what happened that night. She wasn't in the room when all of that happened. She had gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night and when she was returning to our room, she saw me running out crying. So she shouted out at me, why are you running? Which I heard, but I ignored. All three of us were so frightened by this incident that we started sleeping together in the hall until the rest of our family returned. Mind you, I'm pretty sure I was not dreaming or hallucinating. I was completely awake and I even pushed that entity. away from me before I ran out of the room. I remember still the feeling of touching it. To this day, I still don't know what it was. I don't think it was a ghost since I don't know if we can touch ghosts, but I definitely felt like it was some kind of entity I can't explain. I know some people may not believe this experience and honestly, I still don't fully understand what happened myself. I'm only sharing it because it has stayed with me for years and remains unexplained to me. So was it the house that was haunted or was it something with the mother? Was something inside of that house pretending to be her? I get so many stories from listeners who have strange mimic and doppelganger stories. They're honestly some of the most common ones that I get. And each time I wonder what that entity is and what it wants. Now, this next story that I have for you comes from a snowy cabin where something was not quite right. This poster writes, I used to think I've only had one paranormal experience, which happened recently. But thinking back, I actually had two. So back in the 1990s, my parents owned a cabin out in the Virginia woods. My mother and sister would go there and stay. My mother and sister said the cabin was haunted, but I never believed it. They claimed that in the middle of the night, something would open the locked doors and they would wake up to the doors being wide open. My mother said either someone had the keys to the place, and was tormenting them, or the cabin was haunted. I just laughed this off. I never believed in the supernatural. Then, one winter, I had bought a four-wheel drive and it was supposed to snow that night, so I thought it would be cool to drive out to the cabin and camp there during the winter snowstorm. I got there and it was so cold that I lit a fire, but it wasn't really warming the cabin at all. Remembering the stories my mother told me, I locked the doors and I double-checked them. I went to bed with my clothes on under a heavy blanket. I fell asleep and I had this terrible nightmare. I dreamt that I woke up and there was wind blowing in the bedroom, so I walked to the main room and the door was wide open with snow on the floor. As I walked into that room, I turned and there was a tall, demonic creature with shiny black skin and glowing red eyes standing to my right. And then I woke up. I laid in bed for a few minutes and realized that it seemed like it had gotten colder inside, so I decided to go and just check if the fire had gone out. I walked into the main room and the door was wide open and the outside porch light was shining, illuminating the snow that had blown in on the floor. Suddenly, I realized that the dream was coming true and I panicked. I turned to my right, but it was pitch black and I couldn't see anything. I fumbled for the light switch like a crazy person and when the light came on, there was nothing there. I walked over to the open, door and looked out and there were about two inches of snow on the ground. There were no footprints to be seen. The fire was out, so I decided to pack up and go home. I never spent another night there. Now, I'm a big believer in predictive dreams. You've probably heard me talk about them on this show before, but I am always surprised at how many people have dreams that ended up playing out in real life. If you've ever had this happen to you, you can always reach out to me, heartsarespending.com. I have a forum there where you can send in your scary story for me to read and maybe read on the show. And speaking of that, next for you, I have a story from one of our listeners, Sable, who shares a story they titled, The Boy in the Photograph. Sable writes, This story began in the summer when I was around eight or nine years old. I was spending most of my days at my then babysitter, now stepmom's house. The neighborhood my stepmom's house was in was directly across the street from a historic, antebellum plantation house called Wheatlands. And the land the neighborhood had been built on was once a part of the plantation's property. It was beautiful. It was perfectly preserved and it was protected by the local government as a historic landmark. However, I always felt very unsettled whenever I looked at the house or if I got too close to it. During my summer here, I had several spooky, hard to explain experiences. For example, one day while I was playing outside, I saw a man in old, tattered clothes digging a hole in the yard of one of the nearby houses. It seemed normal enough at first, but when I went inside to get something to drink and came back out, I found that the man was gone and the ground where I had seen him digging was completely undisturbed with grass growing as if nothing had happened. But none of those experiences compared to the one that I had the night I spent in my oldest stepsister's bedroom while she was away on vacation. In the night, I was woken up by the feeling of the blanket being moved on top of me as if it was being tugged by someone. I remember waking up bleary-eyed and sitting up in bed. When my eyes finally focused, I saw a young boy, younger than me, standing at the foot of the bed. He had blonde hair, a soft face, and he wore a blue pinstripe shirt with dark pants. I've never really been fearful when it comes to paranormal experiences, so although I am not sure if I immediately believed the boy to be some kind of apparition, my first instinct was not fear. I remember scolding him. Quit that! It's not nice to pull the covers off people while they're sleeping. I watched as he looked at me, then turned his back to me and walked to the corner of the bedroom near the door. He sat on the floor then, facing the wall, and he hugged his knees to his chest like he had been put in timeout. I looked at the clock on the bedside table. If I remember correctly, it was around 2 a.m. And when I looked back, he was gone. I went back to sleep and nothing else happened that night. Days later, when my stepsister returned from vacation, I told her about what had happened. And before I could even describe the boy to her, she told me that she had seen him too. She had been seeing the same little boy several times over the years, always in her bedroom in the middle of the night. I remember asking her what he looked like, baffled that we could have seen the same boy. And her description matched what I had seen exactly, right down to the block, the blonde hair and the color and pattern of his clothes. She told me that he would often mess with her in similar ways as well, tugging at her blankets, messing with the lights in her room, one time even turning on her CD player in the night. For the rest of the summer, I never saw him again, and I'm unsure whether my stepsister did either. Not long after, my dad and my stepmom officially got together, and she and my stepsisters moved in with us. I never went back to that house after that. And I thought that the story ended there. That is until years later, when I was 18 years old and in my first year of college. I was volunteering at my local library, earning community service hours for one of my scholarships. I was working in the library's history department, sorting through and cataloging donated historical artifacts. Among the boxes, I came across one that was labeled as having come from that plantation house. I was fascinated. The house had always unsettled and intrigued me, and now I was being allowed to sift through physical pieces of its history. And inside were all kinds of photographs and drawn portraits of family members spanning generations, pictures of the house itself, financial documents, letters, and artifacts. Among them, I even found what appeared to be human teeth still connected to part of a jawbone, covered in remnants of dirt, as if it had once been buried and later unearthed. I immediately alerted the library employee supervising me, who took it to be further inspected. I never learned what became of it, but somehow, that wasn't even the most interesting thing I found that day. As I continued, I happened upon another of the family photos. This one showed the family standing in the yard in front of the house as they posed for the photograph, and there he was, undoubtedly the same little boy that I had seen in my stepsister's room that night. He appeared to be about the same age as he did when I saw him, and he had the same height and build, the same features, and the same blonde hair. The only difference was his clothes. I immediately felt a chill shoot up my spine. Through other photographs and documents, I was eventually able to identify everyone else shown in the picture, but I could not find anything about the boy. No name, no other photographs I could identify him in, and no mention of him in any other documents. I even tried to look through online archives after going home that day, but I was still not able to find anything about him. I never found out who he was. What happened to him, or why he seemed to be hanging around my stepsister's bedroom all those years later. In fact, I never found another trace of him after that day. The only thing I know for sure is that years before I ever saw his photo in that donation box, I had met him standing at the foot of my stepsister's bed, tugging at my blankets, and sitting in the corner when I scolded him for it. That story gives me chills, but perhaps the most surprising part of that story is seeing someone just, out there digging a hole in front of their yard in the middle of the day, and thinking nothing of it. I don't know why that part stopped me in my tracks, but I think I would have maybe thought it was strange if I just saw my neighbor digging a hole in their front yard. I don't know. Regardless, this next one that I wanna share with you is a short one, but if you ever hear a random knocking sound in your house, you might think twice. This author writes, "When I was little, I had a loft bed with a desk underneath. "I've always been a pretty heavy sleeper. "I could fall asleep at a concert, "so it was strange when I began waking up "at three in the morning every morning. "What was even more strange "were the noises coming from the attic. "Shuffling, knocking, sounded like boxes moving. "My nine-year-old brain rationalized it "as an animal or a bird that had gotten in. "After a few weeks of not sleeping well, "I decided to knock back on my ceiling, "that shave and haircut pattern you hear sometimes. "I did this because I was bored, "and I hadn't interacted "with whatever was in the attic. "I waited in silence for a few minutes "until I was about to fall back asleep, "and then I heard it. "From the ceiling, one foot away from my face, "it knocked back the pattern. "Every night after that when I woke up, "I would knock, and sometimes I would get a response. "It gradually stopped over the years, "but I still wake up at 3:00 a.m. every single night. "It's weird, but it only happens in that room. "I sleep fine in hotels and other houses. "Thirteen years later, "and now I get weird vibes around the entire house. "I feel like I'm being watched. "I sometimes hear someone saying my name, "most notably before bed, "and whatever said it is very close to my ear. "I can feel their breath as they whisper, "and it freaks me out so much "that it takes hours to get back to sleep. "The shuffling in the attic also started back up again, "but I don't want to knock back anymore. "There's a lot of weird things things that happen in my house now. Things get moved, dogs and cats stare at the same blank spot, but these are just what's been currently happening. I don't really know what to do anymore. Now, when I first read that story, I wanted to knock on something here in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters to see if I would hear a knock back. We have a couple of haunted objects in here, like Gordie, my monkey, and also a doll that my grandma gave me. I think we should try it. Okay, I think we're good, but if you hear anything, comment wherever you listen. If I hear anything weird around my house, I'll definitely let you guys know, but I'm starting to get nervous. This episode is brought to you by Stitch Fix. I'm going to be honest, there are mornings where I do try on four different outfits, decide I hate all of them, and then I walk out and basically the same thing that I wore yesterday. I do have comfort clothes that I find myself wearing six days in a row. That was usually fine when no one was looking at me, but now I'm on camera. I'm trying to be a real person again now that I've had a baby. That is why I'm excited to tell you about Stitch Fix. Here's how it works. You take a style quiz, you share your size, your style, your budget, and you get matched with a real human stylist who just gets your vibe. They send a fix to your door and you can try on everything at home. Shipping and returns are also always free. There's no subscription required and you get a free try on for your first fix. One thing I also love about Stitch Fix is you can swap out pieces. So they'll send you a list of the things that are going to show up on your list. You can also send them a list of the things that are going to show up on your box. And if there's one or two things you want to switch out, you can hit that and then your stylist will find something that works even better for your wardrobe. You can get started today at stitchfix.com slash heart. That is stitchfix.com slash heart. This episode is brought to you by Minky Couture, the original blanket company. September is National NICU Awareness Month, and I want to talk about something that is really special. Through their Heart of Minky program, Minky Couture partners with over 300 hospitals and provides more than 6,000 mini Minkys every month to NICU babies and their families. And as a mom, that's something that's really, really special to me. Knowing that a soft little blanket is telling a family that they're not alone, that really, really makes a difference. Minky Couture was founded by a mom who wanted to bring comfort to her daughter in the hospital, and that mission has not changed. Their original hugs blanket is stretchy, plush, double-sided, and is genuinely the best blanket ever. And we've partnered with Minky Couture to bring our listeners an exclusive 50% off discount. That is right. 50% off. You can use code HSP at checkout for 50% off all full-priced items. Head to MinkyCouture.com, use code HSP, and get into the best blanket ever. Follow them on Instagram for even more deals and cozy inspiration at Minky Couture. Now I want to read another story that comes from a listener. And it kind of ties into a theme of a couple of these stories, which is why it might be worth looking into the history of the place where you live, because you never know what you're going to find. So Catherine writes, the older part of town that still had those old ranches on it. While we moved into track housing, the property was right on the edge of this living remnant to the past. Soon after we moved in, I went into full nobody understands me mode, upset teenager type stuff. I didn't want to go to school. I didn't want to meet new people. I had basically decided that I wasn't going to be happy. Each morning, I would ignore my alarm and wake up in an attempt to be late for school. Only each and every time I did that, a hand would touch my shoulder and would gently shake me awake. And my blinds would open letting the sunlight shine right on my bed. And when I would open my eyes, I could make out this youthful masculine figure standing over me. Think late teens, early twenties. Oddly enough, I never felt frightened by this presence. It was comforting in a way. If I came home crying about something, I could feel a hand stroking my hair. You could catch glimpses on the stairs or in the hallway of a figure who never came into full light. I could feel a hand stroking my hair. You could focus. A few years after this started, I had a dream of a finger writing on a glass that was all fogged up. And it said, hello, my name is A. I woke up before the name was able to be completed though. A? A what? There's like a billion names that start with A. So I started to call him Alex, short for Alexander. I continued to call this entity Alex for the next year. I told my mom about Alex as well. She used to assure me that her house was not haunted. About two years after these events started happening and about a year after I had named the entity Alex, I woke up one winter morning to my window being all fogged up, which is odd because even in winter, Southern California does not get that cold. And written on my fogged up glass was the sentence, my name is not Alex. That's it. Being the sassy now 15 year old that I was, I took to calling the entity not Alex. Later that year, I was wandering around our local cemetery. Teenagers are moody and strange in that way. And I felt drawn to this one particular grave. This was in the original section of the cemetery, which actually had stone tombstones rather than that flat grave plate that we have now. On it, there was no birth date, no death date, just a name, Alan Pierce. With no explanation as to why I came to visit that grave many times over the coming years. My mother loves history. In particular, US history. So people were always gifting her things that spoke of historical details. Someone gifted her a book that had the history of our town. And it spoke about the original families of settlers and the families that came soon after to set up here as well. In this book, there was a picture of a map that had been drawn in the early 1900s, which outlined each family's property boundaries. What we found out when we looked at the map was that our home and all of the homes around us were built on what used to be the ranch property of the Pierce family. In the portion of the book that had a small excerpt about the Pierces, it was mentioned that the family's 20-year-old son, not named in the book, died in a barn fire. I felt in my gut, it must have been Alan. They never said his name in the book. Most likely it was lost to time, but I knew it was Alan and that he had never left the property. I got older and I moved away for a few years to Las Vegas, for work. While I was gone, my mom told me that the strange happenings and sightings had completely stopped. After only two years of being away, I moved back to town at the request of my father. I got married and had three kids. I also got a job working in town, in the house that I had with my now husband and children. I noticed that I was seeing a male figure in the hallways and doorways or on the stairs. My office used to listen to a local radio station, 101.3 KTY, and each Friday they would have a psychic medium come on and answer caller's questions. You could, of course, contact her later on her hotline if you had any other questions, for a fee. And despite what I grew up with my whole life, I was still skeptic. I had told my whole office about not Alex, which is what I still called him. So at their encouragement, I called the radio station to speak with the psychic. I got through on my first try. All I said to her in front of an office of witnesses was the following, or am I? And she replied quickly with, you are. There's a young man who is with you. He means you no harm, but I can't get much else off him. Just something to do with a fire. My whole office went silent. To this day, 20 years later, I still see not Alex. I'll still see him in reflections or in hallways. He remains a gentle and soothing presence, the feeling of calm in a difficult situation, I'm not sure how he feels about being with me rather than at his family's property. I didn't get a home within his family's property lines, but I somehow know he could find his way back if he wanted to. So I firmly believe that not everything that goes bump in the night is trying to hurt you or even scare you. However, you should always be wary of what you invite inside, both into your home and into yourself. Now, I think that is very good advice. Be wary, of what you invite inside. In some ways, we are kind of like houses we can invite energy in. What takes up our energy and our thoughts becomes our reality. And in a sense, those things can haunt us as well. I really do believe that. All right. Now I have some stories of things that feel very relevant in my life, at least, of children seeing scary things. This is now probably my favorite topic. I will be trying to get to the bottom of what the heck my son saw in our house. But this is the next story I have. And this author writes, weird stuff happens in my house. Though weird stuff has always followed me my entire life. So maybe I'm the haunted one. Anyways, my house was built in 2004 and I bought it in 2008. As far as I know, nothing bad has ever happened there. The first year we lived in the house, one night with my wife, myself, and both cats, we were sitting on the couch within about four feet of one another. Suddenly, I heard a loud bang on the ceiling, like someone in the bedroom directly above me stomped on the floor as hard as they could. Weirdest part was that I was the only one that heard it. The cats didn't even pick their heads up, and my wife had no idea what I was talking about. The bang happened two more times over the next few weeks. Once, when I was in the garage late at night, there was a bang on the garage door like someone had run up and kicked it, which, you know, I guess is possible, but would really be out of the ordinary for our neighborhood. Another time, again, with everyone on the couch, there was a bang on the wall right behind us. This time, everyone heard that one, though. Years passed, and my oldest was born and started school. I had a day off in the middle of the week, so I was home alone. I was on the couch watching my laptop, and I saw in my peripheral vision my daughter stick her head out from behind the wall that separates the stairs from the living room. I smiled, and I heard her giggle and pull back behind the wall. It took a few seconds for me to realize that it was the middle of the day, on a Wednesday, and my daughter was in school. I searched the whole house, and there was no one. Later, I was telling her about what I saw, and she told me she sometimes sees the shadow of a person moving in her window, which is on the second floor. So it goes. Years will pass with no activity to mention, then a knock or something out of the corner of your eye. A few weeks ago, my now two daughters, both cats and myself, were in the kitchen talking, and my wife walks in, fresh out of the shower, wrapped in a towel with her hair still wet. She looks at us annoyed and asks, well, what do you want? Confused, we all just looked at her, and she explained that one of us knocked on her bathroom door. Nope, we were all right here. My wife told us that she was drying her hair and heard three distinct knocks on her bathroom door, and when she opened it, no one was there. This episode is brought to you by Cash App. If you weren't up to speed already, Cash App is way more than just a safe way to send and receive money. 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This author writes, we recently bought our house about two months ago now, and I started to notice little things, nothing that was sounding any alarm bells. I've lived in haunted houses before, so I would just go on with my day and essentially ignore it until one night. Around 1130 p.m., I heard whistling. Now, I live in the Appalachias, so whistling at night is a big no-no in my house. So I call out to my fiance and tell him to stop whistling in the house because he's going to invite spirits in. He comes into our bedroom, and I said to him, why the hell are you whistling at night? And he goes pale and says, I wasn't whistling. I'm thinking he's messing with me, so I just say, yeah, okay, and I go to bed. The next morning, I'm in the shower, and he comes in and he says, be honest with me, were you pranking me last night? And I, of course, tell him everything that happened, and I assured him that I was not pranking him. And again, he goes pale, and he just says, okay, and he drops it. Nothing happened for the next two weeks until three nights ago. I was on a phone call with my cousin, and I heard a loud crash. My fiance works night shifts, so I immediately go into protector mode, and I assume into my house. I mean, that's how loud it was. I'm still on the phone with my cousin, and she's witnessing everything that's happening. I call out, and I ask if anyone's there. Now, I know that I'd be the first one killed in a horror movie, but if someone's in my house, I wanted them to know that I was coming and not afraid, even though I was afraid. I get to the bottom of my stairs, and at first, I don't see anything, so I'm starting to feel less on edge until I walk into my kitchen. I notice a candle, the three wick ones that you can buy at Walmart. I look at the entry table where I had it sitting, and a painting that I also have there was knocked over. So my first thought was, okay, maybe the house was just settling and just knocked the candle over. No big deal. So I pick it all up and get it set back to where it was, and I had this thought that it was strange that it just mysteriously fell over, especially because I have a four-year-old who runs all over the house all of the time, and the vibration of that hasn't knocked it off. So I test it and see what it would take to make it fall. I run around, I jump, I do everything to try and make this candle fall over the way it did, and it's not budging. I even hit the table, and it still didn't fall. So of course, I'm a little spooked, but I just decide to go to bed. Last night, as I'm falling asleep, I heard loud banging coming from downstairs. Of course, my fiance is working again, so I have to go down and check it out by myself. I go all the way down, and I get this unsettling feeling. All of the hairs on my body are standing, and I feel like I'm being watched. I don't know what came over me, but I said out loud, I don't care that you're here, but please stop doing things when I'm home alone, and I turn to walk back up the stairs. You know that feeling where you have to run up the stairs because it feels like something's chasing you? That's the feeling I get. I turn around and say, that's enough. I'm not going to be scared of my own home, and I walk to my bedroom. I continue to hear things during the night, and my cat is very on edge, and she's acting as if she's guarding my bedroom door. My son, about an hour later, at 1 a.m., wakes up, and he asks if I'll turn a movie on for him so that he can fall back asleep, so I go ahead and do that. Instead, I hear him mumbling in his room as if he's talking to someone. This is not abnormal for him. He has a very big imagination, and he loves playing and coming up with his own worlds, and he creates stories for them as he goes. About an hour later, he's sitting with me, and he looks at me with a straight face, and he says, Mommy, my ghost brother says I have to kill you, but I would never do that because I love you so much. Now, I'm completely in shock, and I say to him, what did you just say? And he repeated what he said. Then I prodded, and I asked him for more information. He has been going through a phase where he's been more defiant, but again, he's four, so I don't really think anything of it, but he tells me that his ghost brother tells him to break toys, hurt animals, stomp on flowers he wants to pick for me, etc. My son is a very kind and very empathetic little boy, and him saying all of this to me is so out of character for him. He's the child who wouldn't even kill a bug because he wonders if they have a family and if they'll miss him, so I'm in complete shock. I'm not sure if this is a made-up fantasy for him or if I should really be concerned. I come from a long line of people who are sensitive to the paranormal, so something I'm familiar with, but never like this. I'm worried for my son's safety. and well-being, especially if it's something I cannot see to protect him from. If anyone has any advice, please tell me. And then we do have an update from this poster. It reads, hi everyone. I've tried to read everyone's comments and concerns. The amount of you concerned for my son's well-being and giving me advice, I am very appreciative and grateful. I'm going to start off by stating that I've seen all the comments about schizophrenia and I do take mental health very seriously. It's definitely a consideration. I will say knowing my son, and if you knew him personally, him saying outlandish things is not out of the normal. This just shook me, especially since the verbiage he used was not in his normal vocabulary. He's not a neurotypical child. He's very intelligent. He's way beyond his years. I know every mom says this, but I swear it's true in this case. He unfortunately had to experience loss at a young age when I lost one of my best friends. So. He's familiar with the concept, but again, he's four. After talking with him more, I did explain to him what hurting or killing me meant, and he seemed visibly very upset. I also told him that if his ghost brother came back, he did not have to talk to him. Now, with the entity, demon, or whatever it may be, it seems like it does not like to show itself or do any sort of activity when my fiance is home. Last night was quiet, no new activity to report. I'm assuming it could potentially be threatened by a male presence in the house. My fiance is off work again tonight, so Wednesday I could potentially have more of an update. I did try to search up my house in the history, and the only things that I'm finding is that it was built in 1900, which around here in the area I live could mean that it was built way before that, and there's just no record of it dating back. So I'm going to dig deeper into the area rather than the house itself. I want to thank all of you again for your concerns about my son. I know there are skeptics out there, and I'm not offended by those comments. I really do appreciate all of the advice and hearing all of your own experiences, paranormal or mental health related. It's given me different perspectives to view this from, and if anything changes, I'm going to do my best to update you all. That is the last update that we have from that poster, so I don't know what became of her son's visions or whatever was happening in her house. But now I turn it over to all you guys. Do you have any haunted house stories yourselves? You can always reach out to me, running.com. I have a form on my website where you can submit your stories and have a chance for them to be read here. I'm going to be back next week as we kick off into spooky season. I'm so excited. We have more haunted episodes. We have episodes on curses of horror movies. We have episodes on haunted houses gone wrong, scare attractions like McKamey Manor that just had disastrous outcomes. We're going to be digging into all of it this October. I'm really excited to get into it with all of you. I'll see you here next week for another episode. And until then, stay curious. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Red Room Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartsartspounding.com. 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