jan: ok well i wasn't going to get into my experiences but...
strange things happened to me when i was little, particularly in this one house that we rented. i was about 9, so i was aware of the world around me and my place in it by then. some of the things that would happen would be: we would be lying in our beds at night, with our eyes open, and suddenly feel a hand on our face. as if the hand was open and just sort of feeling your whole face. my brothers and sisters all experienced the same phenomena. another time, i awakened feeling very frightened. i lay there as still as a mouse and felt the sheet i was covered with being pulled. i thought my brother was playing a trick on me. but ther was no one there. so i turned on the bathrrom light and proceeded to lie on the floor directly in the doorway and the light. suddenly, the sheet proceeded to fly about, as if someone was fluffing it. i screamed and still it kept going, only stopping when my mom came in to see what was wrong. i told her and she said it was only a dream, but i know i wa swide awake. other things that happened were: one night the whole family was gone. it was just me and my dad in the house. he was asleep in the next room. i could hear him snoring loudly. i didn't feel right in that house, so i laid on the couch to watch johnny carson. i heard footsteps in the hallway. the hallway was carpeted. the footsteps were unlike anything i had ever heard. they were loud and slow and amplified. i could still hear my father snoring away in the bedroom. i kept hearing the footsteps and i forced myself to get up and i ran into the bedroom shaking my father awake, terrified. of course he thought i wa imagining things. after that, i told my older brothers and they said weird things happened in the kitchen at night, like the refrigerator door opening by itself, the stove turning itself on, etc. so one night we waited up til like 2 in the morning and we heard a noise in the kitchen. sure enough, the door slowly opened by itself. that sent chills up my spine. then the dials on the stove all began to turn, again very slowly, until all the burners were red hot. but the most profound thing, which made us move out, was when my older sister began hearing noises in the wall of her bedroom. shoe told us about it but we were afraid to sleep in there. one night she screamed out and we all went in there, my whole family, and she was in the bed saying "see?see?" and sure enough you could hear this loud drumming all around the room, as if something was running around in circles all across the walls and ceiling. her bedroom was really an old laundry room, and it still had the double sink it it. the next night i was going to the bathroom and was just siting there looking at the bathroom rug that came with the house and notieced it had all these gargoyle-type faces in it, with horns and just really creepy. no one had noticed that before. we examined all the rugs in the house and they all looked like that. my mom told the landlord and she said a couple had lived in the house and the wife had murdered the husband and attempted to dismember him in that double sink in the back room. we didn't stay another day in that house.
i know it sounds contrived, or cliche', but it all really happened. and not just to one person, but a whole group of people. so how can it be explained as a singular "hallucination"?
anyway that's why i believe...
