Chased by Spirits: My Family's Paranormal Encounters

Welcome to true scary Story. Today we'll hear some chilly encounters from a shadowy figure haunting her childhood attic to unexplained paranormal activity in the infamous Dowley Hotel. My name is Edwin and he is Holly. It's true scary story. I grew up in this really teeny tiny town called Cleveland, Utah. The house was known as the very first post office in this really small town when Utah was founded. It was so old that when we did some renovations on the house, we would cut into it and see that it was logs on the inside. That's how old it was. It was an old log post office. My mom and dad decided to create a bedroom in the attic space upstairs. They cut a hole in the ceiling and built these really rickety, steep kind of stairs that went up into this little attic space. The top right corner of the room would be where the stairs would come up. Right at the top of those stairs, in the bottom right corner was my bed up against the wall right in that corner. Right there across the room in the bottom left corner would be my sister's bed, and then in the top left corner was my brother's bed. I used to see this really dark shadow every night. I would wake up in the middle of the night. Somebody was in the room with me, watching me. I would open my eyes and there would be this dark shadow standing over by my brother's bed, staring down at him. It was the shape of a man, but it was just a really dark shadow that would stand there. It would move from my brother's bed and it would just float across the room, standing over the top of my sister's bed, watching her. If I felt myself waking up, I would keep my eyes closed and wait for my brother to move, or wait for my sister to move, and then I would open my eyes. Then he would be standing right by me, staring down at me, watching me sleep. I was so scared. I would take all of my stuffed animals, put them all the way around me, and then I'd take the biggest stuffed animal that I had, and I'd put it right over the top of me and tuck it in to make it look like the stuffed animal is the one sleeping in the bed. I think around in my teen years, we moved out of that house and I didn't have any other experiences grown up until later in life when I met my husband. We had all of our kids at that time, and he was stationed in the Air Force and he got deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan. He got deployed to Korea every year. One of the funny things about me and my husband, we were really into the TV show Ghost Hunters. There was this one episode where they went to the Stanley Hotel. It's the actual hotel that Stephen King himself was staying in when he had those experiences that scared him so much that he wrote the book The Shining. This hotel is over one hundred years old in Esday's Park, Colorado. It's gorgeous. On this episode, they decide that they're going to split up into these separate rooms in the hotel that are known for the most paranormal activity in the hotel. One of them is on the fourth floor, Room four to twelve. Back to me and my husband, my husband is deployed to Iraq. I want to surprise him with something just pretty cool for him coming home. He's been gone for six months. I decided I was going to book us a stay at the Stanley Hotel so that we can go investigate ghosts. I decided to book that exact room for twelve. We drive to the Stanley and you walk into this hotel and there's this big staircase. It goes up the center and then it splits off to the right and the left on both sides, and you can go up to the other rooms. Next to the staircase, it has this really awesome, super old elevator that is one of those metal elevators that you have to close the gate. Eton old, rickety and really loud. We get our key for the room, so we get in the elevator and we go upstairs, step off the elevator, and the room that is haunted is right next to that elevator. We get in the room and go check out the closet. This closet is one hundred years old, full hard wood. It's got one of those really old door knobs on it that are really hard to turn. It's super heavy. On the backside of the closet is that elevator. We check that out. We checked the room out. It was really pretty. It had a really old bathroom in it, really super old Victorian I think with on the inside. We decided to go get some dinner and walk around the hotel for the rest of the evening until bedtime. So nothing happened to us that night. When we were walking around checking out the hotel and we took the tour, the tour guide was this really cool old guy that had actually done the tour for ghost hunters when they came. He was their tour guide. We noticed that on our tour, the guy goes right up to the room we're staying in, stood outside of the door and sit there and tell the stories about what happens in there, how people have lost things. Me and my husband are just sitting there thinking, yeah, we're staying in this room tonight. We even told the people that were on the tour with us, We're like, yeah, this is our room. We're going to stay in there. You guys want to look in there, and they were all pretty excited to go in and check out the room. And we ended the tour and went to eat dinner, and then we went back up to the room and it was time for bed. We decided that we were going to go and take a shower together. We're in the bathroom talking about how nothing's happened to us. It doesn't seem very creepy. There was three bulbs in this one light fixture above the bathroom sink. As soon as we were talking about this happening, the light bulbs all shattered. We got out of the shower, ran called downstairs, and I told the lady at the desk what had happened. She said that they were going to send somebody up to come and take care of it, and things like that happen all the time in that room. I just don't know what could have caused that. They came up, they cleaned it up, they left the room, and me and my husband get into bed, and we're laying there and I'm trying to go to sleep. This bed is facing the closet, so if you're sitting up in bed, you're looking right at the closet. I get this really dark, heavy feeling there is something in this room. I opened my eyes. I look up. Right above the bed is a fan, a ceiling fan, and right next to the ceiling fan there is this woman floating gap. She had really long, dark hair. I'm looking at her. I start grabbing my husband's arms, shaking him and I'm like, honey, gee, here she's right there, and I'm hyperventilating. He wakes up, sits right up, and he's like work where And I'm like, she's right there in front of us. At that point, she starts moving towards me, and I take a breath and I'm like hi. She stops, tips her head sideways, she disappears. We laid down to go back to sleep, and I could not go to sleep. The morning after, we went downstairs to go tell the people that I had an experience. There's a tour guide there and I tell her what had happened to me last night, and she kind of just, yeah, that happens all the time. It seemed like she didn't believe me, didn't take me seriously. We decided we were going to go look around the town and check out the hotel more. It's pretty big. It's got a few outbuildings too. We spent the day just be in tourists. We get back to the hotel, my husband decides what he's going to do is he grabs this little l no smoking sign that is sitting on top of the dresser, and he's going to put it right in front of the closet door, slide it right under it, just in case something happens. We go to sleep and nothing else happens that night. The next morning, the closet door is closed, but the little el sign was out in the middle of the floor. I'm feeling really uneasy about staying in this hotel and room because we had one more night there. I call my mom, I'm falling, I don't want to stay here, and my husband's be in a sweetheart sitting there telling me it's gonna be okay. We just got one more night, let's just stay here. And I said, okay, we'll just stay because it was paid for that night. Actually nothing happened to us. We just woke up and left to go back home. I would absolutely stay at the Stanley Hotel again. The hotel was beautiful, the food was amazing from their little old fashioned restaurant, and the rooms were really comfortable, really scary, but really comfortable. I would not stay on the fourth floor again, not at all, not in any of the rooms on the fourth floor, forget it. Throughout our marriage, we have had quite a few paranormal, unexplainable things that have happened. After we went and stayed at the Stanley Hotel. We had moved out of the house that we were staying at the time, we moved on to base housing At Hill Air Force Base, cabinet doors would open and close. You would hear whispers or voices throughout the house. When I was in my room laying on the bed, I would be reading and right above the book, I would see this little boy's head just quickly dash past the bottom of the bed. One other instance, ME and my husband were laying in our bed watching TV. All of a sudden, all of the stuff that was in there our bathroom fell off of the shelves into the bathtub. Another time that I was laying in bed, all of a sudden, I felt these little steps stepping next to me from my feet all the way up to my head. And I turned and I looked, and there was nothing there. We decided that we wanted to name this little ghost, and I'm like, how about we name him Billy. At that exact same time, my husband said that in his head popped the name Billy. After this house we had moved off the base. It was Halloween, and we felt this ghost presence had followed us because same things started happening in this other house. I took my kids to go see my mom for Halloween. While we were there, I was on the phone talking to my husband, and all of a sudden, he says, there was a little boy that just ran across the floor, down the bed. Out of the corner of my eye, the kid run across the room. We're sitting there talking about it, and then all of a sudden, you hear in the living room the sound of one of my Halloween decorations go off. This Halloween decoration, it was broken. The motion active part of it was busted. That was an old gravestone that would crack open and scream at you. The only way for it to go off was for somebody to push it. We moved to Montana. We had a bunch of things happen in that house. My children saw these things. My son, Lincoln, he is very sensitive. A couple of days ago, I was in my room my son's girlfriend. I was gonna show her something on my phone. I was walking down my hallway, passing the kitchen, and out of the corner of my eye, I see my son standing in the kitchen in front of the scene. His back was to me. I thought, Okay, I'm gonna go show Lincoln first. When I turned to look into the kitchen, he's not there. He is not there. There is nobody there. He comes walking in through the family room in the back door. I explained to him this ghost or mimic or whatever this was looked just like him. I have no idea what that was, but it scared the crap out of me. That's the first time something's happened to me personally in this house. I'm hoping nothing else happens here. I'm almost over the whole ghost thing. Baldy. We have had other situations where we would be sitting out on the porch. We live up in Willow, Alaska. It's a really tiny town in the middle of the forest. We have neighbors that aren't very close to us. We would be sitting out on the porch and you would hear strange howls, moans and growls over in that forest over there across the lake. We're avid hunters. We know what it sounds like when a moose is in heat. Doesn't sound anything like that. Me and my son and his friends, we always talk about shape shifters up here all the time. Skin Walkers is a big deal in Alaska. A skin walker can make certain forms of people or things. I don't know if it could have possibly been something like that. I can't tell you. I really have no idea what it could possibly have been. I don't know if it's the places that we've lived in, or if it's because my side of the family, you know, is so sensitive to go, or if it's Lincoln himself, if he attracts these things coming to us everywhere that we've been in, all of the houses that we've lived in, I haven't really been very scared, even though we've had these experiences happen to us. Every time I'm thinking that we're in a new place, it's going to be great. There's nothing going to happen, and something happens. You can share your story with us over at true scarystory dot com, and to listen without ads and support the show at the same time, visit scaryplus dot com. If you're following the show, I'll talk to you next week. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See us soon.