I grew up in a haunted house. I knew it was true all along but I was in denial then and for many, many years after. At the time, I was so frightened that I couldn't acknowledge it. I had relatively few experiences and I shared them with noone because I wanted to put it out of my mind rather than have the events gain any validity. I will get to the specifics, but first I want to explain what made me start thinking about this again. I went to my 20th year high school reunion and a former classmate approached me and said, "You must meet my husband, he lived in the house before your family." Cool. For the first time in my life then I met one of the former residents. I don't know why, but I blurted out: "Hey, what about the ghosts in that house?" He said, "Oh yeah, there's a poltergeist in there!" Wierd. I asked him, why he said that, what happened but he kind of brushed me off and said, "Look, what do I know, I was only eight when we moved out." This was in 1971. My family kept the house until 1985.

I know that I saw an apparition in my bedroom doorway when I was around 16. Except for wierd vibes, it was my first really strange experience. I was about to go to sleep and I had shut off my lamp next to my bed. For some reason, I looked over toward the door and I saw a silhouette of a young, tall, lean, man with a wide brim hat. He seemed to be watching me. I quickly hid under my covers and tried to block it out. Go away! I yelled in my head. But, I couldn't shake the oppressive feeling in the room. So with all the nerve I could muster I shot my arm out from under the blanket, flipped on the light and bolted from the room. I slept in another room that night. The next day I convinced myself that it was just a shadow, my eyes playing tricks on me, an overactive imagination. I didn't tell anyone.

A few years later, at a friend's house with a couple other people, my sister was there. She had occupied the bedroom before me and she started talking about ghosts in the house. I admitted that I thought I had seen something in the doorway. She was able to describe the same figure. She told me that she watched him enter and stand at the foot of her bed looking down on her. She's braver then me!!

Well, then I really knew, but I still had a couple incidents that I hadn't shared with anyone. So this week, after my reunion and strange encounter with the former resident, I spoke to my mom. It turns out that she knew of plenty of incidents that my sisters had reported individually. It seems to me that this thing mostly bothered the teenage girls. There were 5 of us, close in age. But, it also messed with my mother from the getgo. She told me that there was trouble from the time she moved in, starting with it breaking all of my grandmother's dishes over a period of two nights. I never knew this. I then told my mother that I experienced and incident once in the middle of the night when I was a teen. I heard something in the kitchen under my bedroom and I went down to see. I found the water faucet rotated so that it was right over the counter. The cold water was running. I wasn't afraid, just puzzled. I thought maybe there was some logical explanation. I put it out of my mind an told noone until this week. Imagine my surprise when she told me about a day when she drove up the driveway and found my younger sister outdoors, too afraid to go in the house. She told my mother that she was in the house alone and had found the water running over the counter!! I was away at college when this happened. Keep in mind that there are 11 children in my family and all details don't efficiently filter down to all of us.

My mother told me that we could have cancelled the sale of the house based on these activities. C'mon I told her. That's silly. I asked then, "Did you tell your prospective buyers?" She said that she did, but they said that they didn't believe in that stuff. THey do now. They write to my mother about their experiences. WIthin the first two months of living there, it locked the man in the closet in my old bedroom. My mom told me that my oldest sister got locked in her room, too. And that, it had first locked out and then unlocked the door to another sister's bedroom. I didn't know about that one though I had heard about the wall hanging that was put back up on the wall in my sister's room even though she had locked the room from the outside.

So now, I've started contacting siblings to hear their stories first hand. My youngest sister had it the worst. We had all grown and left and it terrorized her. COme to think of it, we all left by 17 or 18. Now I know why. For my sister it once appeared in the form of our own father while she was waiting for him to come home.

There is so much more. The house is in Northern Westchester County in an old Revolutionary War town. The house was built in 1810 and was used as a stopover on the underground railway. I wonder if I should pursue this and I wonder why now suddenly I feel ready to accept it. Maybe I should leave it alone. My sister told me today that the occurence of strange happenings in that house are on record at the local town hall. She also told me that my mother had consulted a priest, but he warned her that trying to banish the ghost might cause quite a bit of ruckus and clear the way for latent, more dangerous spirits in the house. On a final note, my mom tells me that the ghost's grand finale for our family was the last two nights when she and my father occupied the house alone. The second to last night, everything had been loaded into the van. She was awoken at night to the sound of glass breaking (kinda how it had all started!). The next morning, she told my dad but he didn't believe her. The very last night, she said there was a terrible noise, the sound of boards or planks banging and crashing. Dad heard it, too, and they were both really scared. I told her that I don't get it. Shouldn't he be glad? Didn't he want us out? She figures that he got used to us and was mad at us for leaving because it meant someone else would move in. I'm thinking, maybe he was frustrated that we never did attend to his unfinished business, nor did we take the bait by trying to dialog with him and thus strengthening him.