The Skeptics Ghost Story

I figured that door must just be stuck. I mean, it was an older house, doors swell with the heat and houses new and old will move and settle over time. Well, after a couple of minutes of unsuccessfully trying to open the door, I asked my niece to go get a butter knife from the kitchen so I could try to pop the latch on the doorknob. Suddenly, just a split second after asking for the knife, the door knob rattled slightly and a loud audible click was heard. My niece just looked at me with her wide blue eyes and said, “They just unlocked it.” I turned the knob and the door opened easily. I found my nephew huddled in the far corner of the closet, physically no worse for the wear, but clearly shaken over the ordeal. I knew by the look on his little white face that he had not been playing a trick on us. He had been genuinely stuck in that closet. It was obvious that he did not want to be in that closet with whatever he said would not let him out of it. After a big reassuring hug for my nephew, I shooed the kids from the room to go play outside. I stood in front of that closet for a few minutes, closing and opening the door several times, even stepping inside the closet and shutting the door trying to get it to stick shut again. The door opened easily every time and before leaving the room, I noticed that the room was no longer chilly.

To this day, I still cannot explain why the door to the closet would not open or why all of a sudden on its own it would rattle and click as if being unlocked when no lock is on the door. I do know however, that whenever the kids played hide-n-seek after that, none of them would go near that closet.

Now, as you might have gathered by now, I am not the ‘run from the room screaming’ kind of person but after that day, I no longer doubted when my niece told me of the things that happened in her room. Over the course of the next few years (she is now in her early twenties, married, and has a home of her own) she became fed up enough with them pestering her that every time the bed shook she would just tell the ‘ghosts’ it was time to be quiet and to leave her alone and let her sleep. She said the noises and the shaking of her bed would stop. At least until the next time they got restless and wanted some attention.

I never mentioned any of the incidents that happened in that house to anyone for a few years. Not quite believing in what I experienced myself, as being real. I finally did tell my niece of the shadow figure I had seen, but not until she had moved out of her parents home. When I did tell her of the incident, she told me that she used to see many shadow people watching her all the time from that floor of the house. Even as un-nerving as they were, she told me that by the time she hit her teen years, she had just learned to live with them since other than shaking her bed and keeping her awake, they never harmed her in any way. I guess they were just letting her and anyone else who witnessed them, that they were still there and weren’t ready to go anywhere else.

© Shay White