Posted by WOW! When we put out the call for ghost stories, we did not expect so many! And so many of them are truly creepy. We’ll start with this one, which certainly made the hairs on the backs of our next stand a little taller…
1. What is your name?
My name is Brittany Galens
2. Are you in a Club? If so, which one?
I am in a Club. The Ritz Motel
3. Who is your favorite Solitaire TriPeaks Character?
My favorite character is Poi
4. Okay… now tell us your story…
My story…
I am the oldest in my family of four and considerably older than my youngest two siblings. There are 8 years between my sister and I, 13 years between my baby brother and I (don’t worry, I’m not just giving out random information. The age differences do matter)
So, when I was a sophomore in high school my siblings were just toddlers/preschoolers. We lived in an old house out in the country that had been built in the late 1800’s. It had a ton of history attached to it. When built it was used as the county municipal building, then the school house, then a dance hall and was converted into a duplex and finally my parents bought it as a single family home when I was 8.
The house was always creepy. It wasn’t insulated so the wind would rattle the walls, it had 9 “bedrooms”, 2 living rooms, an old rickety staircase with a crawl space that separated the top and bottom floor and a lot of weird closet spaces hidden away. Growing up I always avoided one small upstairs bedroom in particular because of the weird feeling I would get when I was in there. By the time I was 16 I had experienced a lot of strange occurrences. For instance, one night I woke up because I heard footsteps stomping up our stairs. My bed, at the time, was positioned against the wall that sat next to the stairs and the footsteps reverberated the wall as people would walk up. On this particular night the footfalls sounded boisterous. As if one or two people were running up and down the stairs playing rather than just doing a midnight trek to use the bathroom or get a snack. Being a grouchy teenager I didn’t investigate the noise but instead chocked it up to it being my youngest brother and sister playing around and I fell back to sleep. The next night, the footsteps happened again and I was irritated, so before burying my head under my pillow I told myself I would talk to my mom in the morning.
In the morning during breakfast I brought up the fact that the little kids were playing on the stairs after my mom went to bed and it was annoying. That’s when my mom informed me that both my baby brother and my sister had slept with her that night because my dad had been away. She asked me around what time I heard people playing on the stairs and I told her it had been like around 1 both nights. She said I must have been hearing things because my sister had woken my mom up around that time with a nightmare and both of the kids were in bed and she hadn’t heard anything.
It was weird. What was even weirder… the footsteps came back each night for almost an entire month after that and woke me up every time. Once it happened when my sister was sleeping with me. I never got up to investigate because, no. I would just lay listening to whoever it was as they played, running up and down the stairs until falling back to sleep.
This wasn’t the creepiest thing to happen in that house though. The creepiest by far, the thing that still bothers me at night if I’m home alone, was my sisters doll.
So, my lovely grandmother bought by little sister a doll for Christmas one year that was just ugly. Worse than that it had a button in its chest and if you pushed it the doll would recite the nursery rhyme prayer that I’m sure we all know,
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
To this day, as I write this down, I get goosebumps and can hear that stupid doll reciting that rhyme in its creepy little girl doll voice. So, remember how I mentioned there was one little room in our house that I didn’t like? Well, that room ended up becoming my sister’s bedroom for a time. My mom put shelves up on the wall in there and that doll sat on one of the shelves out of the way because it was just weird and even though my mom never talked about it, I don’t think she liked it much either.
Anyway, that stupid doll started reciting the rhyme randomly and showing up in places. I once found it in my closet. It would end up downstairs in our pantry. I found it buried in the clean laundry and always it would recite that creepy prayer.
My sister would be playing in the upstairs living room and I would be sitting in my room and suddenly we’d hear, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”
It was terrifying. I’m not joking about it happening all the time too. So much so that the voice box must have become strained and it would sound like whispering more than a normal voice recording.
I finally had enough of being scared of the creepy doll and one day I grabbed it from her shelf (How did it get back on the shelf?) and hid it in a bag of trash to be thrown away and thought, problem solved.
A couple of weeks later as I was walking home from a friend’s house in the pouring rain, I heard this weird noise coming from a pile of trash bags set out by the side of the road. I had completely forgotten about the doll but as I got closer to one of the bags I heard this sing- song whisper saying:
“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake.
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
5. Would you say this experience changed your life? If so, how so?
I’d say my experiences with the paranormal has changed my life. Mostly, I feel super aware and I know not to mess with things. The stories I told here are just the tip of the iceberg.
6. Would you want to have the experience again?
I never really welcome things but also I know they do happen and I like to acknowledge the experience and then move on.
7. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I know there are many ways to rationally explain away paranormal experiences. Being a reasonable adult I think back and try to be reasonable about each encounter but it doesn’t take away the terror at the time… and isn’t that the whole point.