Real Ghost Stories: The Crawlspace in the Basement – Growing up, I was always interested in the paranormal. I loved reading ghost stories or watching movies on TV, but in reality I knew I would be terrified if I ever experienced anything myself. I grew up in a small town in Illinois. I had moved there when my mom and my stepfather got married and I have lived there ever since. When they got married, we moved into the house that my stepdad had purchased a few years back. It was an older home that was built in the earlier 1940’s. The interior of the home was outdated and my mom and stepdad definitely knew it was time to do some renovations. They started updating the house in small portions. The area of the house was the basement. I am sure you can guess that this is when things started to occur.
The basement was split up into two parts. The first part was the main area and the second part was the laundry room. My parents decided that they were going to make the main part of the basement my play room, because I had too many toys that needed their own space. In the laundry room, there was a crawl space. It had a little wooden door that covered the opening. Now the crawl space was not low to the ground. It was up higher on the wall with a few steps you had to walk up to get into it. So the door was at eye level. For some reason, my mom always kept that door open. There were no lights in the crawl space either, so it was rather creepy. A couple weeks after they had finished the basement, we were all eating dinner in the kitchen. Now the basement door is in the kitchen, and it is always open. We were having a conversation about school, like we always do, when all the sudden we heard one of my toys go off. It was a little grill that made noise whenever you walked by or touched it. We thought it was pretty odd, but brushed it off. The next night, it did the exact same thing. Except this time, it kept going off. When my stepdad finally stood up to go downstairs and turn it off, the doorbell on my Barbie dollhouse started to go off. He eventually went down there and took the batteries out of both. After that I only went down there and played if I had friends over. Another occurrence in the basement happened in the laundry room. My mom had asked me to go grab the laundry out of the dryer. When I did, I was just about finished when all the sudden the door on the crawl space started to slowly close. Now remember it was always open, so I could see right into it. I don’t think, I’ve ever run that fast up the stairs before. Needless to say, I spent as much time as possible in that basement.
The next area of the home that my parents renovated was the kitchen. It was a Saturday night, and my parents were in the process of renovating the kitchen, they had pretty much just started. They decided to let me stay home, while they went to the hardware store to pick up some things for the renovation. So I decided to watch some TV in the living room while they were gone. My living room is right next to the kitchen, so it was very easy to see the kitchen from where I was sitting. About 20 minutes after they left, I heard two of the cabinets in the kitchen slam shut. I knew it was the cabinets because they made a very distinct noise if they were closed to hard. They were old, heavy wood cabinets and my mom used to yell at me for slamming them all the time. My two dogs immediately ran into the kitchen and started barking. One of them was staring at the cabinet, while the other started barking toward the bottom of the basement stairs. I was so freaked out I brought the dogs in my bedroom with me and locked the door.
The next room to be redone was mine. My parents were just repainting the walls, adding new carpet, and putting shelves in the closet. Now by the time they had started redoing my room, my little brother was about 5 years old. My parents decided that they wanted to go out for the night, a couple days after they finished my room, so they asked me to babysit. I invited a friend over to help me babysit and see my new room. We had brought some toys in the room for my brother to play with, while we sat on the bed and talked. About an hour after my parents left, my brother stopped dead in his tracks and lifted up the bed skirt on my bed. He was sitting at the end of my bed on the floor playing with his toys at the time. Once he lifted up the bed skirt, he immediate started screaming. He jumped up and asked him what was wrong. He started to cry and said that the bad man was underneath my bed. We checked and there was no one there. He pretty much refused to come back into my room for the rest of the night, and my friend and I were pretty relieved to get out of there ourselves.
Flash-forward a couple of years and now I am a sophomore in high school. My parents had just finished putting a huge addition onto the back of the house to add a third bedroom. My brother’s bedroom used to be the office area which was pretty small, so they knew it was time to add onto the house (They didn’t want to move because the housing market was awful at the time). My parents’ old room became my new bedroom, and my brother got my old room. The addition is where my parents’ new master suite was. Once again my parents repainted their old room and replaced the carpet so that it was newer for me. They also repainted my bothers room as well. A couple months after moving into my new room, I was sleeping when all the sudden my bulletin board hit me in the back of the head. Now my bulletin board was pretty much super glued to the wall. There was no way it was coming off, because we had put about 10 heavy duty glue strips on the back. The board itself was right above my tall dresser. My bed was right next to that dresser. As soon as it hit me, I knew what it was. I was so scared, that I refused to move. I figured I would deal with it the next morning. When I finally woke up, I was in total shock. My pictures on the board were scattered all around my bed and the plaster from the wall was ripped completely off where the glue strips had been. I also realized that it the board were to fall it should have knocked all the perfume and picture frames off my dresser. Except, they were all right where they had been and nothing was moved. There was no way it could have fallen that far off the wall and hit me in the head. I lost some sleep for a few days after that.
One of the last encounters was when I was a senior in high school. Every morning my parents had left for work around 6:30am. It was very rare that they were late or stayed home from work. I usually woke up at 7:30 for school. One morning, I woke up a couple minutes before my alarm because I heard my mom blow drying her hair. I thought that was odd because I knew she should have left for work already. I got up and started walking towards the bathroom, which was the last area of the house to be renovated. I could hear the blow dryer on clear as day. As soon as I got into the bathroom, it stopped and my mother was nowhere to be found. The blow-dryer was still plugged in, which was odd because she always made sure everything was unplugged and put away before she was done. I checked the garage and both parents were gone. It scared me so bad, I grabbed my stuff and went to my neighbors to get ready.
After I went away to college, I brought up some of my experiences to my mom. She said she was surprised it took me this long to bring it up because she had been experiencing some things as well. She told me that she used to see a little boy standing in the door way of her room, way before my brother was born. She also said that she saw what looked like a tall man standing in my bedroom, which really freaked me out because my brother said he saw the bad man under my bed. We moved out of that house about 6 months ago, because my mom and stepdad got divorced. Now we live in a newly built home, so hopefully we don’t experience any activity. I always wondered if maybe the spirits at the old house were upset that we were redoing their home and were trying to stop us.