This list of encounters that happened to my family (mother, father, older sister and me) dates back to the 1990s to early 1995. At this point it is worth mentioning that in this city all the houses are rented for free to the residents of the city, before our move to this house in early 1990, it had been empty since 1983.
Less than a week later, my sister, who was 3 years older than me, started talking about a woman she had seen in the living room the night before. The woman she described had blonde hair and no face. Because she was youthful, the rest of the family passed over the event without paying much attention to it. What was essential was her stubbornness in this story and her fear of the built-in barbecue in the garden, which she wanted to “remove”. What made my mother and I realize that perhaps it wasn't my sister's imagination after all was an event that occurred a little over a month later: At that time, my mother, my sister and I were in different parts of the house , when the front door opened and we all heard my father come in and say hello as he always did. What made this greeting a little different than usual was that when we all went to greet him, he was nowhere in sight. The mystery was deepened by the phone call we received an hour later, when it turned out that my father's car had broken down at work and my mother had to come pick him up. This incident was reason enough for my mother to give in and have the grill destroyed. Nothing unusual was found.
My second personal encounter occurred one evening while I was lying on her bed with my sister. Just as she had just drifted off to sleep, my eyes fell to the floor where I saw what looked like a sheep dog running around on the floor, it was certainly a bit smaller, but real nonetheless. The animal ran across the floor and hid under the bed. That was the last time I saw them. It was the night before the crows started showing up.
In the months that followed, these events seemed to die down, and very few (including my father) believed my mother, my sister, and my own claims that something was wrong with 8 First Street. However, during this time, my parents began to increasingly bothering my growing fascination with the undead and the macabre, which made sense since I wasn't even 5 years venerable at the time.
The next event that occurred, I think it was close to Christmas, was the beating of drums in the yard. My sister and I were engaged in normal childhood mischief as steady drum beats began to hit the external gas cylinders. The drumming was tender and snail-paced at first, then louder… faster… until it was deafening enough for any witness to hear. This was enough to bring both my sister and I to tears, so we ran away from home and sat in the street crying until our parents returned (from shopping or wherever they were). This incident dispelled any doubt that my mother could still achieve success, although my father remained unconvinced.
What happened in 1991 and 1992 has slipped from my memory in recent years, leaving only 3 personal experiences: the first was when the rest of my family was in the yard and I was alone inside. I still remember the unknown presence that placed a hand on my shoulder, an icy feeling that now, over eleven years later, I still remember as clearly as if it was happening right now. Around the same time, my parents discovered a piece of art I had made with the upstairs cabinet: three walls. two doors, all covered with drawings of the dead. Also in this cabinet, my favorite childhood book disappeared in an instant. That means I sat in the murky and read it with a flashlight, and after a while it was gone. The exact search for both parents turned out to be unsuccessful and it remains a mystery to this day.
The third event I remember occurred in mid-1992, when my sister was at camp. I remember this detail especially well because it made it all the more strange that that morning, wherever I was in the house, her voice kept calling out to me.
Early 1993 and everyone else is awoken from their silence by the repeated father greeting incident. My fathers skepticism also hits home at this point, as my mother told the story of the night before when our newly acquired Labrador Retrievers looked up at the roof and started barking at an unseen force, a deafening sigh that didn't accompany even my father could deny. Soon after, my mother began to tell me that she heard a voice singing in the halls slow at night, a voice that faded away every time she went to investigate.
My sister at this time also began to become increasingly concerned about what was happening around us and at one point she found an icy presence chasing her around the house and picking her up whenever she tried to stop. While that sounded far-fetched even to me, the way she looked right after she said it suggested otherwise. This was made worse by another incident that probably occurred when my mother was picking me up from a friend's house. When we returned home, we found my sister and friend sobbing in the street and claiming that there were footsteps in the hall, doors opening by themselves, and lights and radios turning on and off by themselves. At this point it was a mutual agreement, something was seriously wrong. My own encounter with a teenage boy in the hallway (which I later saw again, this time with a witness) only added fuel to the fire.
The call that my sister called, which involved her, me, and two of her friends, would be the last time these forces would be felt, and then it was as if nothing had ever happened (even the crows stopped coming), except for one last thing:
Two years had passed since the last meeting at 8 First-Street and I (at age 9) was sitting in class. At this point, a youthful girl who lived just a few doors down from me (and coincidentally had the same name as my sister), whom I had never really talked to after all, started telling the class about some ghost in her house, the stories were exactly the same like mine. That same week the crows returned again, very few at first, then as many as 20 at a time.
