Do you believe in ghosts and Haunted Houses ? by Rosie Damico

It all started when my mom moved into a new apartment in a very old house that was turned into a three family apartment building. She lived on the first floor. A couple of years later when my family and I needed a place to live she moved to the second floor of the house and we moved in downstairs. Then the freaky stuff started happening.

One night while I was on the couch watching TV with everyone, I saw what looked like a billowing cloud of pitch black smoke slowly move across the curtains covering the kitchen window. There was nobody in the kitchen, no other windows in there that could explain lights and objects making odd shadows. What was so freaky was I got this scared, prickly feeling go up my spine when I saw this black cloud. The hair on the back of my neck stood up at attention. It was like there was another presence in the house besides us humans. I didn't see it again so I didn't say anything and shrugged it off as my wild imagination.

I never told anyone about that incident until one day my older brother and I got to chatting about ghosts, demons, and spirits. He started telling me about this freaky billowing black cloud that moved like it was in slow motion across the curtains in my kitchen window and how it made him feel uncomfortable like there was something, or someone, there with him. But he had been alone in the apartment that day. He described this eerie black thing EXACTLY the same way I saw it. I NEVER told anyone about it.

Later that same week my younger sister was taking a shower in my bathroom and I heard her blood curdling scream so I went running, thinking she slipped and fell in the tub. She came running out of the bathroom with her hair full of shampoo, dripping buckets of water all over my kitchen floor.

She said she felt a weird presence all of a sudden and when she opened her eyes while shampooing her hair a very slow moving, black billowy cloud made its way across the outside of the white shower curtain. She felt such a deep, intense fear that she had to get out of there. I, of course, took her back in the bathroom (she was only 18 at the time) and sat in there while she finished showering. She didn't know about my brother’s or my experience with that same black cloud. Whatever it was, it never brought harm to any of us and eventually it disappeared.

Same apartment, in the living room, some time during the first year living there, my mom came downstairs to tell me something before she headed out. My pocketbook was hanging on the back of the front door and we were standing a few feet away at my desk. She had her keys and sunglasses in her hands and put them on the desk, because we're Italian and we need to have our hands free to whip around while we talk at the speed of lightning. It was only my mom and I there in the room. She went to pick up her glasses and keys and they weren't on the desk. They didn't fall off on the floor, and none of my kids were around to sneak off with them without us catching them. Nothing. We searched everywhere. What the hell?

My mom had to leave though or she'd be late for whatever it was she was going to, so she went upstairs to get her spare set of keys.She came back in but I still hadn't found them. I grabbed my pocketbook off the front door to lend her my sunglasses and I nearly died of a heart attack. Unzip my purse... right there in the top were her sunglasses and keys. Impossibly possible! Once again, that eerie, spine tingling feeling came back. We to this day can't figure out how the keys and glasses went from being on the desk right smack in front of us, to being in MY pocketbook that was a few feet away.

That leads me to the next supernatural experience I encountered in that house. We had this one random can of Play-Doh. My sister was in the shower and I told the kids they had to wait a little while until we were all done showering and I cleaned off the kitchen table. So I put the can of dough on the table and the kids and I went and watched TV. After a while I go to the kitchen and the can is gone. Nowhere to be found. I thought I must have put it up somewhere and just forgotten. The kids didn't sneak in and take it. So I was like, "Okay ghosts, I get it, you live here too. Give me back my kids’ Play Doh."

Go back in the living room, my sister gets out of the shower and that's when we heard the noise in the kitchen. All the kids were still in the living room with us so we go investigate

The can of Play Doh was rolling, well, kind of more like rocking like a baby cradle, back and forth on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Slowly, just rocking back and forth. Spine tingles, neck hair standing on end like I'd gotten electrocuted, the whole nine yards! What the hell! Very funny Mr. and/or Ms. Ghost! Go ahead, play with the dough. Have fun!

And then there were just the random things that went missing all the time and would show up days later on the kitchen table or counter. Purposefully placed in certain places around the house we kept finding the things that went missing days, weeks, even months later. It was a very tiny 2 bedroom apartment with just a living room, eat-in kitchen and a bathroom. This was not my kids’ doing.

Every day when my mom was at work and nobody was home at all upstairs, we heard footsteps, someone walking around upstairs, doors and cabinets opening and closing. My mom would come home and find all the windows in her apartment open all the time, even in the dead of winter.

Rosie Damico - I'm Rosie, married mama of 5 ridiculously smart kids. I love to write. I love to tell my real life stories.

Ladies and gentlemen, I lived in a haunted house!