A ghost story from Jessica of Melbourne, Australia...
My family has a bit of a history with experiencing the paranormal (both my parents encountered the same ghost in our first family home in Ringwood while I was a baby), but until now, I myself had not experienced anything.
My parents are now separated and my father, whom I live with, has remarried. About 6 months ago we moved into a house whose property had been recently sub-divided to make way for more units on the block behind us.
The owners of the house had also really done up the outside by rendering the walls and adding a large deck - basically, a lot of changes had come over the property just before we moved in.
Everything seemed fine for the first few months, but as Winter really set in, my sisters and I started to notice that our end of the house always seems to be cold. Our bedrooms are located off a large rumpus room.
All three rooms (2 bedrooms and the rumpus room) are continuously cold. Even with the ducted heating on, the temperature does not really seem to change. If you stand right above the duct you can feel the warm heat, but for some reason the heat won't spread throughout these three rooms.
We've had the vents checked numerous times by the heating company and no one can come up with any explanation as to why these rooms don't warm up.
I thought nothing of this until little things started to be moved around. My 16 year old sister and I were the most targeted with small items of jewellery, school supplies and even items of clothing on occasion simply disappearing.
The items would reappear a few days or weeks later, usually in the rumpus room. At first we thought it was our six year old sister playing with our things and without telling us, but when I lost a pair of earrings that were on a shelf much too high for her to reach, I began to wonder whether something else wasn't going on.
For about two months now, sometimes when I'm home alone I get this really eerie feeling and feel on edge, especially in the rumpus room. At first this feeling only came at night, and I put it down to being nervous about someone breaking in or something, but then I started to get this feeling during the day too. It only happens when I'm home alone. At these times, I avoid going into the rumpus room as much as I can, and if I have to go to my bedroom, I almost run through the rumpus room to it. I also have this thing about keeping my bedroom door closed, or only slightly ajar, because I don't like the vulnerable feeling I get from the rumpus room.
We also sometimes hear crashes and bangs coming from the rumpus room's end of the house, but when we go to see what has fallen over, nothing is out of place. Twice at night my sisters and I have heard a huge crash outside, sounding like glass and wood shattering, but there is never anything there, and our dad and step mum say they haven't heard anything like that, even though the sound is loud enough to wake the dead.
The strangest thing occured to me only this morning. I was in the shower while my baby brother was asleep and my step mum was cooking in the kitchen. I was just turning the water off when I heard a deep male voice, kind of sounding like my dad, say what I thought was 'Jess' but it sounded really muffled. So I answered 'What?' and got no answer. I called for dad again, but got no reply, so I continued getting ready. Once I was dressed I went out into the kitchen and asked my step mum what my dad wanted when I was in the shower. She gave me a funny look and said that my dad hadn't been home since seven o'clock this morning. I told her about the voice I heard and we both tried to look for other explanations - the neighbours on that side of the house weren't home; there were no radios or TVs going inside or outside of the house at the time. We're at a loss as to why I heard a voice saying my name.
Even though we've lived here six months, we still get mail for people who used to live here. But we seem to be receiving mail for ten or so different names. None of the last names match up with the people who owned the house before we did, but dad seems to think that maybe it was used as a sort of half way house where people just crashed here whenever they felt like it. I wonder whether this is true and whether something happened in the rumpus room, or one of the bedrooms off it; and if this is why my sisters and I are experiencing these weird phenomenon.
Publisher's Note: It is possible that the ghostly activity is taking place because the ghost wants to be acknowledged. Oftentimes, ghosts are looking for confirmation that they are still alive and interactive with the living, maybe even needing to resolve some unfinished business.