Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

" A Ghost Encounter "

Submitted by Randi Nicole Carmicle

I've had a number of incidents with spirits since I was small. The first one, I was about 2 or 3 years old, and I don't recall much about it, but my parents remember. All I remember was an old man standing at the foot of my bed looking at me all night. The house had the strangest layout I've ever seen, it was in a perfect circle. It is on Highway 78 here in Kentucky, around Hustonville.

The next that I recall was not a ghost, but a psychic impression. I was nine years old, and we lived in an apartment. Every single day at exactly 3:30 in the afternoon, I would see a young man clad in blue jeans, a white shirt, and a red bandana run from the pantry, through the kitchen, into my parents' bedroom, and vanish. You could set your watch by it.

After that, we moved to a house on the outskirts of my hometown. I believe there were two ghosts in that house; one cruel and one kind. The cruel one would attack me in my sleep (I was 10 at the time), enough to leave blood on my bedding. The "nice" one, however, is the oddest--the one that has stuck with me the longest. My father knew him when the ghost was alive. They were friends. In the late 1970s, early 1980s, he killed himself in what was my bedroom closet. My dad doesn't believe that he was the thing hurting me, and I agree. They didn't tell me of my dad's friend killing himself in my closet until after we moved out, as to not scare me.

After that, when I was 11-12 years old, we moved to a different house (we had trouble paying rent when I was a kid and moved a lot as a result). The events that transpired in that house terrify me still. The first incident started the exact day we moved in. The house was a disgusting mess when we moved in, so my parents left to go buy cleaning supplies, leaving me alone in the house. It was the first house I had ever lived in that had both a full attic and basement. As I was too short to reach the pull-string for the attic, I resolved to explore the basement. After "toodling about" in there for a while, I decided to go back into the house proper, only to find the door locked...from the other side. Bear in mind that the door was locked only on one side with three dead-bolts and a latch-and-hook lock. There was no way it could have locked on its own. I let myself out the other door and waited on the front porch for my folks to come home. They found me very, very angry at both of them (I thought that they had locked me in as a prank), but they swore (and still swear 13 years later that they didn't).

More happened in that house over the years. In the stupidity of youth, I decided to explore the unfinished, "dirty" part of the basement. The back wall was boarded up with dry-rotted wood. I resolved to rip it off with a hatchet (my parents weren't the most safety-concerned people in the world) and shined my flashlight into the darkness. Inside was a tunnel, but I couldn't tell how far it went. As it was getting late, I decided to explore it starting the next morning.

The following morning, decked out in "explorer gear" and a headlamp, I began to crawl through the tunnel. It was completely dirt and got more and more narrow and low as I went deeper. Eventually, all the sounds of the house and streets above me faded away. I have no idea how long I crawled until my headlamp caught on something shiny in the distance. I scrambled to it, lifting it into the light so I could see it better. It was a human skull; from the looks of it, of someone who had been shot. There was a small hole in the back of the head, around the top. The maxilla had completely been destroyed, and the zygotic was cracked. In my shock and horror, I dropped the skull and scrambled out of that tunnel as quickly as my 12 year old body could handle.

It got so much worse from there. It is like what I did angered whatever was in there. It started attacking me. Each night, at exactly 3:00 a.m, it would stomp up the stairs (my bedroom was directly above the basement, with a flight of stairs connecting the two, a wooden door dividing the two) and would stop at the door, sometimes jangling the handle for a few minutes. It went on like this for months until one night, It wasn't content to just rattle the handle. It beat on the door as hard as any human could. The door nearly shattered from its frame.

Other things started happening, too. Electronics, even brand-new electronics, would malfunction in odd ways (my VCR recording random things, my CD player randomly switching through tracks in the middle of songs and swapping CDs seemingly on a whim), my analogue wrist-watch running backwards. One night, as I was getting ready for bed, my "jam box" (some call them a "ghetto blaster", some call them a "Boom box", some call them a "Pack-n-jams"--call them what you like) wouldn't turn off. I flipped the switch to shut it off, but it still kept playing. I unplugged it, but it still kept going. Thinking that perhaps there were batteries inside, I checked the back to find it empty. I freaked out at this point and threw the jam box down the stairs, locked the door, propped a chair under the handle, and went to sleep.

The worst happened not long after we moved from that house. Lying in bed one night, wide awake (my neighbor had this obnoxious flood light right outside my bedroom window that would stay on all night long) when everything goes dark and silent for me. I feel little pressure points on my bed, like someone on their hands and knees above me. I can't breathe. I can't move. I honestly thought I was going to die (no offense to non-Christians here, but to leave this part of the story out would do it a disservice and serve to detract from its honesty). Barely breathing, I squeaked out: "Jesus, please save me" and I was released. I sat up in the blinding light of that stupid flood light, for the first time, happy to see it; gasping for air. Less than a month later, we moved away, and, luckily, I have had no ghost experiences of note since.