ANDIn 1987, I lived in a house in Atlanta with four roommates. We lived there for a little over a year, and during that time we had several experiences with what we later learned were real spiritual presences.
The house we were renting was over a hundred years aged, having been built just after the Civil War, when Atlanta was burned and destroyed by Union troops.
The house was a stunning aged Victorian house located in a neighborhood of Atlanta known as Inman Park. We were all quite juvenile (in our early 20s) and trying to start our own careers, so the prospect of sharing the rent on a gorgeous aged two-story, five-bedroom house with a full basement was appealing.
A week after moving in we were all asleep in our rooms when we were woken up by the screams of our roommate, who I will call Hannah. We all jumped out of bed and went to Hannah's room. She sat up and said she woke up to a gloomy male figure standing next to her bed looking down at her. She said that when she screamed the figure turned around and came out of the room. She was very scared and very agitated. My other roommate and I (the roommates were two male and female couples and one single female) immediately checked the inside and outside of the house but could not find any intruder. (This happened around 2 or 3 in the morning.) Eventually we managed to composed Hannah down and everyone went back to bed. The next day we simply chalked this first incident up to the nervousness of living in a modern house, which turned out to be a creaky and somewhat spooky aged, historic house. (Hanna, however, would not hear of this explanation and for several days thereafter continued to insist that she had seen the gloomy figure standing by her bed. From then on, she refused to be left alone in the house.)
About two weeks after this first incident, we were all sleeping again when suddenly there was a very noisy bang and the sound of glass clinking from the hallway that separated all the bedrooms and the shared bathroom. Once again, we all jumped up and ran out into the hallway, where we discovered that the full-length mirror that had been mounted on the bathroom door had shattered into hundreds of pieces all over the floor. As everyone was sleeping, we couldn't understand how it had happened as the mirror frame was still firmly attached to the door and only the glass itself was broken. (Atlanta is not prone to earthquakes and the street was not busy, so we ruled out the possibility that a huge truck or something else had passed by and caused vibrations inside the building.)
Later, similar “poltergeist” activity manifested itself in many other ways: there was one instance when I was home alone watching TV when, for no good reason that I could later determine, three candles standing on the fireplace mantel suddenly fell to the floor, as if someone had he swept them away with his hand. Then there was the phenomenon we've all experienced at one time or another, where personal items and other items would disappear, only to reappear in a place where the owner swore he hadn't left them. (On one occasion, after a thorough search by everyone in the house, missing car keys were found lying in the middle of the person's bed.) Other strange activity included knocking and knocking sounds coming from the attic or basement when it was certain that no one was in either room.
The last incident involving an actual “creature” sighting occurred about two months after we moved. We were hosting a miniature party at our place, and a house guest, whom neither of us had met before the party, took a personal tour of the place on his own. Suddenly she came running from downstairs, saying that she had just seen a man standing in the corner of the basement. She said that when she called him, he just disappeared! We immediately went down to the basement to check and of course found no one there. This was the most captivating thing, because there was only one entrance to the basement and a person who wanted to play a prank would not be able to sneak past anyone without being noticed. (As noted, the guy who saw this figure in the basement was a brand modern friend who we later determined had no prior knowledge that there was any “unusual” activity associated with our place).
After about six months of this, things seemed to composed down and no one noticed or reported any more “spiritual” activity. We began to convince ourselves that maybe, just maybe, we had all overreacted to some degree and maybe we were all just too imaginative about the whole thing.
Finally, towards the end of our stay at home, my wife and I went out to a restaurant for drinks and dinner one evening. We started a conversation with another couple sitting at the next table, two people who were complete strangers to us and whom we had met that night quite by accident. When they asked us where we lived in Atlanta, we told them about our apartment in Inman Park. They said, “Really, we lived in Inman Park. Which street do you live on?” When we told them, they said, “That's captivating, we rented a house down the street. What's your adress?” When we told them our address, they said, “Oh my God, we rented the exact same house,” and then the women asked, “Have you seen a ghost yet?” Well, you can imagine that both my wife and I were completely stunned to receive such confirmation of our “ghost problem” from two complete strangers! We started exchanging observations with them, and they told us about many strange events they had witnessed in the house that were very similar to ours.
This experience completely convinced me that there really was something crucial in the subject of ghosts, and after that I was no longer so quick to dismiss similar stories I heard from other people.
