Family secret: demonic possession, paranormal, or just coincidence?

Many of my life's memories from a child up to my present time I have been 'plagued' by strange experiences. I would like to just tell you a few of my experiences from my childhood to young adult in my family home. Most of the incidents were just different, and could be explained away like the lights working, but the heat would not. I do remember when my sister wanted to make toast. When the toast popped up it flew across the room and just as it landed, a sharp knife flew off the wall board. It landed sticking into the floor at the tip of my sisters toes. We had many incident much like these, unnerving.

It was difficult living in our mobile home growing up. It was just my mother and the three of us girls. It was the 1960's to the late 1990's and my mother was a devoted Christian. We had several pastors that come to our home over the nineteen years that I lived there. They came and blessed our home and sang religious songs to try and drive the strange happenings from our home. It never worked.

Another odd experience came four years after my mother had remarried. They had gone off for the evening, it was New Year's Eve. I was in my late teens. I had shut off all the lights and was wrapped up in a blanket watching TV in the living room. Thats when I felt it. You definitely know when the strange presence decided to appear. The darkness became darker, the room became colder and the creaking was different. The wind was blowing outside, but when the presence appeared it was like a shell around our home. The wind was muffled. I felt like I was in danger. Fear wrapped its cold arms around me. I could feel it close by. Even the lit room of the living room dimmed.

I yelled out at it. “Leave me alone. I'm not afraid”. It was like it knew. Like it knew I was deathly afraid of it. I felt like it came closer. I swallowed my fear and got up from the couch. I made my way threw the darkness of the kitchen for the light switch. I could not turn on the lights. For a minute I chucked to myself thinking the wind knocked out the electricity, but the living room light was still on. I knew it had come for me. I found a knife and tried to make my way back to the lit living room, but it would not let me go. I was thrown back onto the floor. A force that I could not see. I got up and crouched in the corner, scared out of my mind.

I do not know how long I sat crouched in the corner of the stove and cabinets. It was like time stood still. I felt like my memories were lost, because the next thing I knew the front door opened to the living room and my parents were home. I do not know where five hours went. It was eleven o'clock the last time I looked when the lights dimmed. It was now four o'clock in the morning.

I remember not being able to communicate to my mother as she was trying to pry the knife from my hands, I could not feel anything when my step-father picked me up in his arms and brought me to the living room. I was numb. I was scared and my ears seemed to still be filled with this pressure. Almost like I was in a high altitude place. It took me a while to get control of my body. My mother hugged me and said a few prayers. My step-father sat next to me trying to pray also.

I would like to take you away from this memory and tell you about our hallway. I used to think it was just us, the ones that lived in our mobile home on the hill, near a swamp, on the dirt road. A road that had no street lights. However, it was not just us.

Our hallway no matter what time of the day, bothered anyone trying to walk down it. You needed to walk down the whole hallway in order to get to the bathroom. That was a task on its own. I knew it was not just us when my sisters started to have friends over. We usually never told anyone outside our church about our home. We felt that others might think us insane. This was our family secret. One of my sisters best-friend, however, changed all this for us.

After a few dozen times that she came to stay at our very modest home, during dinner, she plainly stated to my mother, “Mom, why didn't you tell me your home is haunted”? The table became silent.

“Why do you think our home is haunted,” was my mother's cool reply.

“I saw him, or rather it,” she stated picking up her fork and proceeded to eat.

“What or who did you see and when”? my mother inquired.

She stopped eating and plainly stated, “I knew from the first time I came here and used the bathroom that the hallway was creepy. But, I saw a shadow at the other end of the hall, near the bathroom door a couple of weeks ago”.

Many friends over the years after this told us of a creepy feeling or a dark figure at the end of the hall. What really got me was when I was twenty and a mother of a two year old. We were potty training him. When went over to my mother's house at the mobile home. My son wanted to go to the bathroom so I took him by the hand. He walked with me until we entered the hallway. Suddenly, he started to cry and wanted me to pick him up. I did just as he stated, “NO! Bad, bad”. He pointed down the hallway. He became so hysterical I took him back to the living room.

My step-father passed away when my son turned three. He died in the mobile home, a sudden death. He had a major heart attack one morning while he was getting dressed for work. I asked my mother one day a year after his death whether our family secret had been haunting them after all of us had moved out. She wouldn't say. All she would say is that she was going to make sure that the home was fixed up and then she was selling it as soon as possible.

My mother only lived in the home a year more and then she rented it out to a friend of hers and his wife. She took an apartment in the city not far from me and my oldest sister. My middle sister moved out of state to try and get away from our family secret. The couple only lived in the home eight months before telling my mother that they had found another place and would not need to rent her home anymore. So, my mother put it on the market. Less then a year later the home was sold. However, a call to my mother a couple of months later made me wonder if the home was still inhabited by our family secret.

My mother just told me that he called and asked if there was something about the home that she failed to mention to him. I do not believe my mother told him. Not long later I went by the home to find that they had torn down the mobile home and were digging for a basement. Only a few month later I saw that they had built a house right were our mobile had set for many, many years.

I am not sure if the happenings are still going on, but it has not been more than ten years since the house was built and it sits on the hill, near the swamp, on a dirt road with no street lights, empty. The owner moved out only four years after the house was built. I just found out that he has had it for sale for five years, no takers so far.