This happened to my family when I was a child. I’ll change names around a bit.

I was the youngest of 4 when we moved into an old farm house in the early 70s. We started upgrading the house a bit while we lived there. We added shag carpet in the living room, turned the upstairs into bedrooms for everyone. But then, we started noticing odd events.

First, my father would hear things at night. He always assumed it was one of us kids sneaking down the stairs. So nearly every night we would hear him bellow for us to get back in bed. Even though we all were in bed. There were several night in which he had his belt in hand, ready to punish whoever it was. But he could never catch anyone.

Back then, refrigerators had these handles that you had to pull down and out in order to open it. But my mother kept finding it open. She assumed it was one of us kids and scolded us often.

My mother also liked to pull out an old ouija board on occasion. But since moving into the house, it seemed we always got good answers. One day, they asked when my brother Jm would die. Actually they just asked when Jm would die, not specifying beyond that. They were given a date and then the thing slid right off the board. Everyone thought it was wierd, but my mother recorded the date and left it alone for a while.

Then we all started hearing unexplained noises and things misplaced. Things we know we set down in one place only to find it in another. By this time, we were joking around about our “ghost”. It became the perfect scapegoat for everything that happened in the house.

But then the dreams came. It was not every night, but it was once or twice per week for months. We all started having recurring dreams. Not all of us having the same dream, but the dreams we had all kept coming to us over and over. In my case, it was that of a man in a plaid shirt and beard showing me the way up to the attic. Whenever I followed him to the attic, he would hang himself in front of me. Being a child, this scared the heck out of me. I became frightened of the attic and the entrance to it (in my parents bedroom). I even became scared to be in their bedroom. Eventually, I learned to wake myself up from the dream and how to run away while in the dream.

My brothers and my father all had dreams that had something to do with a guy in a plaid shirt. At this point, we were sure we had a ghost haunting us. and my mother was trying to figure out how to get rid of it.

Then a most amazing thing happened. I remember sitting on the floor, playing with lincoln logs during a big thunderstorm. My mother was in the kitchen, listening to the radio (the radio was the only way to hear if a tornado was spotted). My brother Jm was between the kitchen table and the window sill; propped up on two legs of the chair. I remember looking up and watching my brother slip. I remember because it totally confused me, The chair did not just slip out from under him. It went flying over the table, as if it was pulled out from under him and flung up towards the ceiling – impossible to my mind.
Just as he hit the floor, a bolt of lightning came through the window and struck a wall plug in the kitchen. We were all thunderstruck and I was blinded for a while. It blew out nearly everything in the kitchen and the TV. It also left a pretty big hole in the wall where the plug used to be. If my brother had not “slipped” he would have been hit right in the back of the head by a bolt of lightning.

A few months later, my mother came into the living room and apologised to all of us. You see, she had just witnessed the refrigerator door open all by itself. She apologised to us for all the times she scolded us for leaving it open.

One evening, while we were all watching TV (some western), we all saw footsteps in the shag carpet go from the kitchen, across the living room between us and the TV, and then to the stairs. Then we heard the stairs creak a couple of times. Everyone just sat there in shock. Nobody said anything for a while; just kept looking at each other. One of my brothers inspected the impressions left in the carpet. What we saw was just not explainable by any normal means.

This all ended a few months later when my father tore out and replaced the stairs. Perhaps it was mere coicidence, but everything quit happening right after the stairs were replaced. We sold the house a couple of years after that and never told the new owners anything.

In fact, we quit telling anyone any of this because nobody believed us anyway.

Nearly a decade later, my brother Jm married and had a son he named Jm Jr. The child died of crib death on the very day the ouija board said jm would die. We neve touched that board again.

For the sake of argument, let’s not debate whether you believe me or not. Without proof absolute, there is no reason to, nor do I expect any reasonably skeptical person to believe this. But the question I
Yes indeed, it is true (as we believe it). I am actually the youngest of 5 brothers and the son of a man who still does not believe in ghosts – though he cannot explain any of it. He never did like talking about it and did not like us talking about it either. There were lots of little things, but nothing as dramatic as what I wrote about. Mostly things that happened to each one of us without any witnesses. I automatically discount those things and cite only that which more than one of us experienced.
A book? Never really considered that before. Never considered myself much of a writer.
The unfortunate death of Jm was followed by several years before my mother came out with her diary entry that predicted it. Even she had forgotten about it until she read it again. It was written in ink in her unique cursive, so alteration would have been obvious. It had also predicted my brother js marrying a woman named “Naomi”. But that never happened.

Asked by:Time Will Tell