A New Believer

Recently I had a chance to chat with one of my wife’s cousins about his ghostly stories. He told me he used to be a skeptic until just a couple of years ago when he lived in a pretty haunted apartment. Here are some of the stories I can remember him sharing with me, including some pictures he sent me of something that happened recently in his new place.

He had been living alone in Norwood, OH, a city just on the northern border of Cincinnati, in an apartment that was, if I remember correctly, the second floor of a house turned apartment building. From what I gather, the first floor remained unoccupied. He told me the neighbors often said to him how they constantly saw people walking around on the first floor, but nobody was ever there.

When he would go to bed he would hear people talking in his apartment, as well as cards shuffling. He said it sounded like if you shuffled them and then did “the bridge,” and he would check out his place and of course, find nobody there.

He said things would often go missing and then reappear days later in various places. Once he was watching TV, set the remote down on the arm of the couch which he “always did” and went to the kitchen for something. When he came back, it was gone. He searched all over for it, tore the couch up, and came up empty. Three days later, it was sitting on his computer desk.

When he met the woman who became his wife and she moved in, more things started happening. He suggested how sometimes cats or even dogs might kill a small rodent and leave it at the door as a gift to you, that would happen with various things they owned, at the foot of their bed. He would get out of bed and notice a neat pile of stuff, sometimes his wife’s brush and hairspray, to other things, sitting on the floor, like a gift.

Then they had their daughter. Their kitchen table and chairs were metal, probably cast iron. He said they had the thin legs, but every piece was really heavy. When their daughter started walking she also started trying to climb those chairs. Since they didn’t want her to hurt herself, they would push the table into the corner in the kitchen and put the chairs on it so she couldn’t reach them.

One night they were laying in bed and he heard his daughter screaming from her room. He said he had never heard her scream like that and it terrified him. He jumped up and ran into her room. He said her room felt extremely odd and bad, and he saw his daughter backed up into the far corner of her crib, screaming. He went to her, picked her up, and took her into his bedroom. He told his wife the daughter was staying with them that night but didn’t say why, only she just was. He didn’t want to scare his wife.

After placing his daughter in the bed, he went into the kitchen and got a drink of water, then stepped outside on his deck to smoke a cigarette. He went back in and went to bed. The next morning he went into the kitchen and saw one of the chairs, that had been on top of the table, was then in the exact center of the kitchen facing the door to the deck. He said it was as if someone might have been sitting there looking out of the back door.

That was when he decided it was time to move. He thought, if whatever it was in that place could easily move that heavy chair, what could it do to his daughter? Or them? For the safety of his family, they moved out to a new place, and he said so far all has been quiet there, and they love it.

EXCEPT… for this one incident. He and his wife were up one night watching The Conjuring. Halfway through the movie they started hearing noises in their new house. Noises that they had never heard before. He paused the movie and they both listened and heard the noises. Creeped out, they decided they were done watching the movie and they would just head in to the bedroom and watch some TV before going to sleep.

On their way to the bedroom he suddenly felt as if his stomach and chest were on fire and mentioned it to his wife. They turned on the TV in the bedroom and got in bed. As they laid there watching TV, his chest burned more and more until he couldn’t stand it anymore and pulled his shirt off. That’s when he noticed three welted spots on his stomach just under his chest. He had his wife snap this picture because he felt like nobody would believe him without the proof.

The following day the welts had gone down, but there were the three scratches left behind.

I see five scratches, and I think they were all done independently, because they’re all of different lengths and none are perfectly parallel to the others. Which is scary. He wasn’t scratched once or twice, but five times.

He has no idea what caused this, and why it happened out of nowhere, but nothing else has happened in this new house. He only hopes whatever it was in the apartment didn’t follow them and is taking its time in making itself more known.

Unfortunately, that could happen, and I hope it doesn’t. Naturally I wouldn’t want a violent entity around children. If whatever had been in the apartment decided to follow them to the house, it might take its time in making itself more prominent. Then again, maybe he’s just one of those people that these things are attracted to, and no matter where he goes they’ll be there. That happens as well.

I don’t like to throw around the demon thing very much because I think it’s widely overused, and I’m not going to here. But I will say that I think what they have, at least what they had in the apartment, was a violent spirit that was never in a good mood and projected that mood outward.

Norwood has an an old history, and many of the buildings there have pasts, and there are a lot of unhappy pasts around that area for various reasons. So who knows? Without an investigation, only thing we can do now is speculate.

The story about finding piles of his belongings at the foot of his bed reminded me of something I had heard years ago, something similar, and I remember that it seemed to mean something. Only now I can’t remember what exactly. I sent an email to TWO of the local paranormal investigation teams to see if they might know something, except I never heard back. I also searched on Google and found nothing. So maybe I’m remembering something else, or I just don’t know how to search Google.

Either way, if anything more happens to him and his family, paranormally speaking, I’ll post it here. I’d like to thank them for allowing me to share their stories here.