Real-Life Nightmare: Life Inside a Haunted House

[00:00:00] Welcome to True Scary Story. Ariel grew up in an actual haunted house, which came along with terrifying experiences, torment, nightmares. My name is Edwin and here is Ariel's True Scary Story. My name is Ariel. I grew up in a haunted house

[00:00:28] for 14 years in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. I moved into the house in 2005. I was seven years old. From the very beginning, this eerie feeling. I felt like somebody was watching me, like there was always something waiting around the

[00:00:49] corner. Every time I walked into another room, I was scared somebody was gonna be there, something was gonna be there. My parents, they always chalked it up to, oh we're just living in a bigger house now, you're just getting used to it. I

[00:01:04] don't know, I always felt something was weird. I would start seeing shadows or figures. Oftentimes when I was in my room, I could see a shadow of feet underneath my bedroom door. It would just all of a sudden walk away. It wouldn't

[00:01:27] vanish, I would see it walk away. I would go and open my door thinking that my parents were there or something. There's nobody there. Sometimes I would even hear creaking outside my door like footsteps. A lot of nights, there would be this

[00:01:47] really tall looming shadow in the corner of my room. I would wake up in the middle of the night and see this super tall shadow that stretched from the floor all the way to my ceiling. Sometimes it was in one corner and sometimes it was

[00:02:05] in another. It was in the shape of a tall lanky man. I would look at it in the middle of the night just trying to not see it, just trying to convince myself it's not there, there's nothing there. I was often paralyzed. I couldn't move. I'd

[00:02:22] hid under my blankets and hoped that I could go to sleep. Some nights it was there. It really haunted me. I would also hear footsteps. Most nights I would hear them walking away from my door in my room too. Sometimes they would wake me up.

[00:02:42] I'd be in my bed asleep and I would hear a shuffling noise with creaking along my floor as if somebody was standing right next to me. I didn't want to turn around, look and see what or who was there. Because of the footsteps, I couldn't be

[00:03:03] in my room alone in the silence. At night, in order to sleep, I would have to turn the radio on or some sort of music on. I needed to just drown out any noises that were happening during the night. Along with the footsteps and the shadows, the

[00:03:26] mirrors in my house. I would see figures in mirrors. They would dip behind walls. One time I was standing in my front entryway. We had a mirror there. Behind me

[00:03:42] would be our dining room. You could see part of it and then the rest was behind a wall. I was putting my shoes on and then I stood up. I was facing the mirror and the mirror was showing

[00:03:54] the dining room behind me. I saw a girl. She was young, probably around 12 or 13, but she had raggedy, messy, matted hair and this ripped white dress. It was all dirty. I saw her walk into my dining room. It was so vivid. I thought to myself,

[00:04:20] oh my god, who's in my house right now? I remember just rushing into my dining room to be like, hello? There was nobody there. I went to go speak to my parents and I said,

[00:04:31] hey, who's this girl in the house? Did you invite somebody in? Does she need help or what's going on? They just had no idea what I was talking about. I told them I was in the entryway.

[00:04:42] I saw her in the mirror. She walked into the dining room. My dad is the biggest horror fan in the whole entire world. He just thought, oh my god, that's really cool. You actually saw her?

[00:04:56] That's so cool. He was just fascinated. Meanwhile, I'm just terrified. For the entire time that I lived at that house, my best friend at the time refused to sleep over unless I covered all of the

[00:05:10] mirrors in my room with towels or blankets. Every time she came over, she kept seeing figures and shadows in them that weren't there. That creeped me out even more. It validated me. I thought, okay, at least maybe I'm not crazy. I am actually seeing these things,

[00:05:28] but at the same time, I was like, well, my friend gets to go home and I have to live here. I remember all of my friends telling me when they would come over, they felt uneasy, unwelcome

[00:05:43] in my house. As soon as they stepped into my house, they felt like they shouldn't be there, like they weren't allowed to be there. They just shouldn't, which was also disheartening to hear.

[00:06:00] I used to suffer from insomnia as a child. I had nightmares in that house. The recurring one that I would have, it was from the point of view of an intruder in my house, almost as if they

[00:06:18] were giving one of those real tortures on camera, but a thousand times more ominous. They would just slowly glide through my house. I'd do a circle in my living room and then go

[00:06:28] down the hallway, very slow. It always took place at night. There was never any noise or sound associated with it. It was just vision. It would always end up outside my bedroom door.

[00:06:45] It would open my bedroom door, but I would never go in. The worst part of those nightmares in particular was I knew that I was dreaming. I was awake in the dream, but I knew that I was dreaming

[00:07:00] and I physically could not wake up. I would always try to will myself wake up and I physically could not. I felt stuck. I remember thinking, I'm never going to wake up again. The nightmares, they were

[00:07:16] so common. I had to hang three or four dream catchers in my room. I don't really know if they worked, but it made me feel a little bit better at least. I knew I'm going to have a nightmare

[00:07:31] tonight. I don't know what it's going to be. It's either going to be about a natural disaster where my whole family dies, or it's going to be somebody intruding in my house. It was just always so

[00:07:43] creepy and terrifying. I would watch doors open and close by themselves, or I would hear them in the house. Worst of all was my bedroom closet door. My closet door was on an old rusty hinge and the track was

[00:08:06] also old. It could wake me up many nights. I would be having a nightmare. When I would wake up from the nightmare, I would sit up and see that my closet door was open. Sometimes it would be

[00:08:21] wide open. Sometimes it would just be a crack. One night, I woke up from one of those horrible point of view intruder nightmares where the person had opened my bedroom door. I remember waking up,

[00:08:39] my bedroom door was open. I looked at my closet door, it was also open. I ran to my parents' room. I woke them up and I said, why did you come in my room?

[00:08:52] Did you open my door? My closet door? What is going on? This isn't funny. I was just terrified, crying, hyperventilating. Eventually they calmed me down and my mom ended up coming to sleep in

[00:09:03] my bed with me so that I could actually sleep. It's one of those experiences. I remember it to this day. I remember the exact feeling I had. A pit in your stomach. Again, something is around

[00:09:19] the corner. Something is waiting for me. It felt so ominous and evil. It didn't feel like it had good intentions. The rest of Ariel's story continues right after this. Stay with us.

[00:09:44] None of my other family members experienced it to the level that I did. There were a couple times where we all saw doors violently swing open, but nobody was as terrified as I was. Nobody else was having these dreams. Nobody else's doors were swinging open.

[00:10:02] I felt targeted. I remember the worst, absolute worst incident though that still haunts me. I was 10 or 11. I was often homesick from school because I was barely sleeping. My parents had just

[00:10:20] left for work five minutes earlier and my brother was already gone on his way to school. Whenever everybody left the house, I immediately would go downstairs just to be in the family room so I

[00:10:31] could be close to an exit door if I got too scared. I came downstairs into this hallway between the kitchen and the living room. I remember seeing my cats in the hallway. I bent down to say

[00:10:45] good morning, give them some pets. As I bent down, I heard a closet door open from upstairs. It wasn't mine because it wasn't creaky. I looked back at my cats. Both of their ears were completely

[00:11:01] folded back. They were very upset. They had both snapped their heads to look straight upstairs where the noise came from. Then I heard heavy footsteps thumping on the carpet coming down the hallway towards the top of the staircase. Along with these thumping footsteps that sounded

[00:11:27] as if someone was wearing heavy work boots was this horrible, sinking, all-encompassing feeling that locked me in place. I could not move. I felt paralyzed like in my intruder dreams where I couldn't wake up. Then I hear the footsteps start thumping one by one down the stairs.

[00:11:50] I'm directly to the left of the staircase. They were halfway down the stairs. I snapped out of it and my only thought was I need to run. I sprinted to my neighbor's house. I was in my pajamas. I told

[00:12:07] my neighbors someone just broke into my house. They're in my house right now. She offered to call the cops and for some reason I was like no, I want to call my parents but I called my dad. He

[00:12:18] pulled like a u-turn on the highway and sped all the way back. He was only five minutes away anyways thankfully. Him and my mom get home and they rush into the house and they start calling

[00:12:28] out for anyone in the house to come out that they're going to call the cops that they're on the way. I refused to go into the house. It was a good hour before my parents had convinced me to

[00:12:39] come back in because there was nobody in the house. They checked every single closet everywhere. Nobody's there. It's empty. I finally went back in. I told my dad again. I heard a closet door

[00:12:51] open. They came out of a closet upstairs. He checked all the closets. There's nobody in there. He took me upstairs to open and shut the closets and identify which one I heard. As soon as he

[00:13:03] opened my brother's closet, I was like that's the one. It's my brother's closet. He was like that's weird. There's no way this could have opened. It was shut when he came upstairs.

[00:13:15] I refused to be alone in the house for six months afterwards. We knew okay nobody actually broke into the house. My parents were trying to explain it away. I started thinking when my parents got into

[00:13:28] the house, it was all locked except for the front door from the inside. If there was an intruder, they couldn't have gotten out from any other door. The front door took a special force to close

[00:13:41] because they had put some weather stripping on it or something. Nobody, not even close family friends, were able to close it. Only me and my family knew it takes practice closing it. That's when I started getting even more scared because I thought okay

[00:13:56] I am not crazy. I was not dreaming. Something happened. I don't know what it was but what if I hadn't snapped out of it and I just stood there and waited for whatever it was to get down the

[00:14:09] stairs and reach me. It's still to this day every time I talk about it, I'm looking over my shoulder and I still get these horrible chills. Thankfully that only happened once and I lived there for

[00:14:23] 10 or 11 more years before I moved out but that definitely was not the end of the incidents. Shadows, seeing things in mirrors, lights turning on and off. That continued up until I moved out.

[00:14:37] In the middle of the night I used to hear somebody messing with the beads outside of my door and I would hear clicking on my door. Some nights I would open my door, nobody was there, cats were not there,

[00:14:50] they were fast asleep on my parents bed. I would be in my room upstairs. I would hear my mom call my name, run downstairs and be like yeah what do you want? She always said I didn't call for you,

[00:15:03] what are you doing down here? My dad did experience a lot of things in that house. He didn't admit it to me until a couple of years before I moved out. He saw figures and shadows splitting from one room

[00:15:19] to another. He heard my name being called sometimes by my brother, sometimes by my mom. He also had lights turn on and off in a lot of rooms that he was in. He actually had a piece

[00:15:34] of paper thrown at him. It was whipped from the coffee table into his face. The only thing my mom One time her wallet went missing. It was in her purse obviously. My dad was looking for it all day.

[00:15:48] So was my mom. I was looking for it too. I went downstairs, her purse was in the center of the living room. Her wallet was sitting right next to it. I was like oh my god, what is this?

[00:16:01] I was like oh my god, what is this? I was like oh my god, what is this? I was like oh my god, Her purse was in the center of the living room. Her wallet was sitting right next to it.

[00:16:12] I went to call my mom and I was like your wallet's right here, what are you talking about? She was white in the face. She was like okay, I'm going insane. I thought that they were playing a

[00:16:24] trick on me. One time her credit card went missing. She found it just balanced on top of her wallet later on in the day. None of us took it but she would just find stuff balanced on top of her

[00:16:36] stuff or in just a very convenient location. They tried to look up the house history and nothing was found. There were no documented deaths in the house. In Canada, it's not legally required for

[00:16:52] realtors to disclose or even document if deaths occurred in a house. The only places that keep those records are the police department and again, that information you can't really get unless you're related to whoever passed away. We never found anything but I do remember when my parents were

[00:17:14] getting the keys for the place, the previous owners were there. We were just having a chat with them and saying thank you like we're gonna love this house and everything. My dad, he was offering his

[00:17:24] condolences because the guy who lived there, his wife had passed away fairly recently. A year prior my dad asked him like oh I'm so sorry about that it's really tough. I hope that she was comfortable

[00:17:39] where she was. The previous owner of the house who was quite cagey about where she was when she passed away, he just said yep she was comfortable. He had mentioned she hated hospitals so we were like

[00:17:54] was she in the house? It's possible that she passed away in the house. I know a lot of people pass away at home it's just what happens but I just know the house was built in 1970. It wasn't

[00:18:07] ridiculously old or anything. Whatever it was just didn't have good intentions because of how it made me feel. You might hear a door open or a door close or a light flicker and you might think oh maybe

[00:18:20] that's just my family member visiting me but for me it was the feeling of dread. You can share your own story and get in touch with me over at truescarystory.com and up next check out our

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[00:18:50] that. You can cancel anytime. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone. See you soon.