The Man in the Top Hat

Growing up in a haunted house is one thing, but what if the spirits follow you wherever you go. This is a chilling account of a family tormented by ghosts, demons, and dark entities. My name is Edwin, and here is Chris. It's true scary story. The earliest memory of anything happening that I can remember is I was probably around sixty years old. We had this house. My grandparents lived there. It was in Virginia, so it was a very very old house. There was a lot of us, so there was my mom, my dad, myself, my two younger siblings, and my youngest brother. Generally, when there is a lot of people in one home, things become very active. You'd feel things, you sense things, you pick up on things. When we moved in, my grandmother told us that there is a spirit in the house. And my grandmother was involved in a lot of different things like tarot cards and doing readings and things like that, so she was already very sensitive. She would tell us, hey, there is a spirit in this house. We call him Angel, and she just wanted to let us know in case we saw anything or felt anything. I remember never feeling comfortable in that house. I always felt like somebody was watching me. I never physically saw anything, but it was just creepy. I just did not want to be in that house. I didn't like it. I didn't like the way it made me feel. There was this one time that me and my sisters were and we were playing very very loudly. My grandma she's in the kitchen. She comes running out of the kitchen telling us that we need to be quiet because she saw the spirit. She saw Angel. There was a door in the kitchen that led to the garage, and she said that she saw a white mist coming from the bottom of the door into the kitchen. She started screaming, like we heard her scream, so she runs into the living room yelling at us. Mind you, my grandmother never yelled at us when we were kids. We would like ride on her white couch with markers and she never yelled. So for her to come into the living room screaming and yelling at us, I knew something bad had happened. So me, being my six year old self, I yelled, I hate Angel. I don't care what Angel says. And then the very next day I come down with this strange virus. We didn't even know what it was, but I remember being insanely sick to the point where I was actually admitted into the hospital and I was in the hospital for three days. No doctors, nobody can find anything wrong with me. And I remember my parents talking to my grandmother and they said, yeah, it was angel. It was the spirit that had attacked me physically that was causing me to become so ill. My grandma actually told us that the owner of the house had shot himself in the head in the attic. You can only access the attic through the garage, so it made sense when my grandma was saying that she saw that mist coming from the door, because it led to the attic. The next time we experienced something, it happened in this house. It was in Little Washington, North Carolina, another really large, old, creepy house, all on the East coast. I was probably around eight or nine when this happened. We didn't really feel things, like we would see things, but we didn't really feel anything, except for my one sister, she was probably around seven, and she would talk about the dark man. She would tell us that he would follow her, he would watch her, and he was this tall, slim, dark figure and he had a top hat, and I asked her, well, how long has the dark man been following you? And she said all my life. There was this one instance where it was really late at night. My father was watching TV in the living room, my mom was asleep. Me and my younger sister we had woken up in the middle of the night and we realized, hey, Jen's not here, She's not in bed. Where is she? So we go downstairs and the way that the house was set up is there's a huge living room with a TV. There's a couch in the middle, and then there's stairs that lead up to our bedrooms because we were sleeping upstairs at the time. So when you come down the stairs, you can see the TV and there's this tiny little hallway to the side that's kind to cast it in, you know, in the moonlight, in the dark, so to speak, because it was really really dark even with the TV on, because of how large the living room was. So me and my younger sister we come downstairs and we see her in this dark corner, bathed a little by moonlight, and we can make out that she is standing in that corner holding a steak knife. All she's saying to herself is she's saying, kill John Kill John Kill John count count that's my dad's name. So we go to her and I'm shaking her and I'm like, Jen, what's going on, what's going on? And she's just saying, over and over kill John kill John Kill John kill. Me and my younger sister are just looking at her, and she's like in a trance and she's just saying this over and over and over again, to the point where I'm like violently shaking her, and she finally snaps out of it up she's like, oh my gosh, it told me to kill our father. She gets her finger and she points into the dining room, no light whatsoever, and she said that over there, she described it as a black figure with super red glowing eyes. I today believe that that was a demon. There's no other thing for it. And I was like, Jen, let's put the knife away and let's go upstairs and let's go in bed. And she was really weak, just kind of like swaying a little bit, so we took her back upstairs. Later in bed, and me and my younger sister at the time, we did not want to go to sleep because we did not know what was going to happen. Was she going to wake up in the middle of the night and do it all over again. After that, we just started praying and we're like, please God, you know, don't let this happen again. Please God shed your blood of protection upon us, because my family is very, very religious. And the very next day we were like, hey, do you remember doing this? She had no recollection whatsoever of that happening. We're all in our late thirties now, and she's like, no, that never happened. I wasn't sleepwalking, I wasn't dreaming. Me and my little sister both have this memory of her doing this. We know that it happened, even though she doesn't believe us. We never actually told anyone. This is the first time that I am talking about this since we were little kids. Another situation that we had this was a house that we had again lived in with my grandparents and my aunt and her son. So there's nine people living in a three bedroom house, super super tiny house with just a lot of people. Everyone had an experience in this house. I was around maybe nine. This is when I actually saw the dark man that my sister had talked about. I remember that it was really late at night. My grandma was asleep on the bed that I was on in my sister's because she would always sleep with us. And I remember I was watching TV. It was super late at night, and then I just felt this strange feeling come over me that somebody was watching me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I had chills, it got very, very cold. I'm facing the television. Right next to the TV is the door that leads into the hallway. I turn my head. I cannot move, I cannot speak. I remember my eyes popping out of my head because I see exactly what my sister had described, A tall, slim figure with a top hat, no face, no eyes. It's just this dark thing staring at me. I could not move, I could not speak. I wanted to scream. And I'm just looking at it and it's looking at me. And then I remember just closing my eyes and being like, please God, Please God, don't let anything bad happen. Please God, let me wake up from this, whatever is happening, let me wake up from this. I don't want to be her. I was scared, terrified. And then I opened my eyes and it's gone. The feeling is gone. Everything is gone. I didn't wake up my grandma. I didn't wake up my sisters. But the next day I told them what had happened. So while we're all talking about this, they're like sharing their experiences now. Because we had lived in the house where I would say probably maybe three to six months, my sister saw this little girl. So she was in the bathroom and she was just kind of playing around in the bathroom. You know, there was a big mirror, and she was looking in the mirror and just kind of doing like funny faces and stuff. She said that she heard something in the bathroom. Nobody is in there with her, it's just her. This was the same sister that we believe had been possessed. She was looking in the mirror and then she looks to this side and she said that she sees this little girl with these curls, dressed in early nineteen hundreds clothing. It was like a pink dress, and she had these ribbons and tights and these pink shoes, and the little girl was just staring at her. It approached her a little bit, and then she looks back in the mirror at herself and it's gone. She bolts it. She runs out of the bathroom. We were in the bathroom again and we were like putting on makeup and whatnot, and my sister was with me at the time. We're looking in the mirror and we're just kind of playing around, you know, we're like, you know, nine or ten, and then I see this man and his face is dirty, and he's got like all these cuts and bruises, and he's wearing a black and white striped gel outfit that you would see like from the nineteen hundreds. He's got this hideous smile and he's just smiling at me. I would say I probably stared at him for about ten seconds, and then it got really cold, and me and my sister looked at each other and she was like, you saw something, didn't you. My younger sister and my younger cousin, who also lived in this house, talked about how they would see this clown. And this clown was again early nineteen hundreds, with the face paint and the hat and a dirty, dirty clown outfit, and he would just watch them. Now, me and my other sister never experience We never saw the clown, but my younger sister and my cousin saw it and neither of them knew what each other was seeing. We didn't talk about this again until we got older. Later, after we moved out of this house, we found out that there was multiple murders around the area. We lived next door to a chiropractor. It became a chiropractor, but it was a very old house that they had knocked down and two people were murdered in that house. We also found out, because we lived on a main road, that there was a bunch of accidents and people jaywalking that would be hit by vehicles and that were killed. We don't know what century it took place in. We don't know if it was in nineteen hundreds, but we found out that there was murders next door. There's another house that we lived in, and this is up in Michigan. There was a two story upstairs downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs, two bedrooms downstairs, very large kitchen. It was very large house. My grandparents lived there on my mom's side, My cousins lived there, We lived there. There had to have been at least thirteen people living in this house at one time. We called it the Amityville House because every one saw something. Every person that lived in that house experienced something. It would get worse when we had like a Christmas party there and we had thirty some people in the house. That's when I got really, really, really strange. I always felt uncomfortable in this bathroom. It was my uncle's bathroom and he had painted it all red. We used to call it, you know, the Bloody Mary bathroom. Red carpet, red tile, a black sink, a black toilet, a red shower, like everything was black and red. Was crazy. My younger sister, her and my cousin were just kind of like in one of the bedrooms with the red bathroom because it was connected to it. They were just laying on the bed and they were watching TV, not really doing anything. My sister saw a pen fly across the bedroom hit the wall, and they're both like, did you see that. It had kind of become normal for us to see these things in this house. So we didn't really make a big stink about it, like we were like, okay, that happened. My cousin he fell asleep downstairs on the couch. I was upstairs with my sisters. We were all asleep. It was like six o'clock in the morning. We're all asleep. My cousin comes running upstairs screaming at me, Why did you pull my hair? Why are you hitting me? What are you doing? And we all wake up because he's screaming, and I'm like, dude, I was never downstairs. I've been up here the whole time sleeping. He's like, no, no, you slapped me in the face and you pulled my hair, and I saw you run upstairs. To this day, he fully believes with his whole entire being that I was the one that did that. Another thing that happened with my grandfather is he was also asleep on the couch. He said he saw these two little girls by the living room door just jumping around making noise and playing. It's the middle of the night. We're not going to be downstairs bothering my grandfather. We were upstairs asleep. So we hear him yelling, stop making noise, stop playing, go to bed, and we're like, we're upstairs sleeping. But you can hear him yell because there was no door that separated the stairs from the downstairs to the upstairs. And then the next morning he's like, why were you guys playing downstairs in the middle of the night. I was trying to sleep. We were like, Grandpa, we weren't downstairs. We were asleep. We heard something. We didn't know if that was you yelling at us or not, but we weren't downstairs. And again this is another one of those things that happened in this house. We were just like, okay, it's the spirits, it's whatever it is that's here is doing that. I was again sixteen seventeen, and we it was cool to smoke cigarettes back then. So I had stolen a cigarette, stole the lighter, and I had nowhere to go but outside. I went through the kitchen to the back doors. Again, this is about two am. I was talking to my cousin on the phone late, you know, we were joking around. Was like, ooh, I'm gonna go have a cigarette. I make sure that the door that separates me from the downstairs door is open, because you close that door, it locks. You cannot open that door from the outside. You have to be inside to open the door. So I'm outside, you know, on the cell phone with my cousin, and I'm smoking and everything, and it's late at night and we're in a field and I'm looking around and I'm like, why did I think that this was a good idea. It is really really creepy out here. I'm like, I need to get back inside. So the door that I had left open was still slightly open, but to my horror, the door that connects to the kitchen to get in is close shut. So I am jiggling the handle of this door and I cannot get in. There was no wind. It was a summer night. There was no storm, no wind that could have shut that door from the inside. Nothing. It had to have been something that was on the inside of the house that did this. So I'm jiggling the handle and I'm crying now because I'm like, oh my gosh, Oh my gosh, I can't get in the house. I can't get in. Nobody's gonna find me until they start to wake up. So I was out there crying on the phone with my cousin. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't get back in the house. What am I gonna do? For at least fifteen minutes, and then I see the light turn on. My grandma is in the kitchen to get water, and I'm my grandma, Grandma, grandma, could you please let me in? And she opens the door and She's like, what are you doing. I was like, Grandma, did you close the door? And she's like no, I literally just came in here to get some water. What are you talking about. There was no one in here, all the lights were out. I just came to get some water. And then we both looked at each other and we were like, mm, it was just another experience, just something strange that happened. It was just one of those things. There is so much that happened in this house that everybody experience, and I honestly can't even keep track of everything that happened. I saw an aunt through a window that had passed away. Whatever this energy was, whatever this sphere was, it liked to take the form of people because we always thought that it was each other. Like my grandpa saw us kids downstairs, my cousin saw me pull his hair. It always took the shape. This was a very common thing we knew. My aunt had told me multiple times, like when they were over for Christmas, that she would see me go into the bathroom and then leave the bat and this is the red bathroom. Go into the bathroom, leave the bathroom. Well I'm not even there, I'm downstairs. So when I went upstairs. She was like, weren't you just up here? Didn't you go into the bathroom? That wasn't me. I wasn't up here, I was downstairs. The house wasn't uncomfortable. We didn't feel uncomfortable in the house because there was so many of us, and we kind of just knew, you know, this thing it likes to take shape of us, whatever it is. We never did any sort of research on that house, but we had left, and then a few years later my grandparents had sold it, and whoever they sold the house to, they demolished it. The only thing we know was literally everybody in that house saw something, from the oldest to the youngest. My cousin who was way old at the time, she was in her third I have a lot of family. She made something called an angel board. She had this square cardboard cutout and she wrote all the letters of the alphabet. It was a handmade weed to board, but she never called it that. She called it the angel board. She didn't want to scare us, so she brought this bord into the Ammitaville house. We're already experiencing things, so we're like, you know what, let's play with it. Let's see what happens. Lets see if we can find out who the spirit is. We would do like this prayer before we would start, and it goes like, you know, we call upon our guardian angels to protect us and to watch over us and to guide us. We would use this little shot glass where we would all put our fingers on and we would wait, you know, till something happened. There was this one spirit that would come through. When he was a boy, he was about fifteen or sixteen. He had told us that he died in a car accident. We would ask it, you know, like where are you are you in heaven? You know, where are you contacting us from. It would always just you know, say the dark place, the dark place. We didn't know what that meant. We know he was in a car accident. He gave us a description of himself, you know, brown hair, brown eyes, all of this fun stuff. And then we wanted to see if it knew anything about us. So we would ask, you know, tell me, you know what color shirt I'm wearing right now, and we would all just kind of, you know, look at each other and see if it would move. It would go to pink blue, it would name the colors that we were wearing, and we were all like, did you do that? You know, did you move it? Did you move it? Everybody was like, now, I did not move that thing. Then we started to ask questions about our future. Are we going to get married, are we going to have kids? And it told me that my grandfather would die very soon, and it just said blood disease, blood disease, blood disease. A few years later, my grandfather had diabetes and he had an infection in his foot that went into his blood stream, and he unfortunately passed away. That little boy that told these things followed us every time we would play with the board. Again. It was another house. This is my aunt and uncle's house. It was a huge house, and this was somewhere in Indiana. We were, you know, sixteen seventeen. We're all over here at my aunt's for Easter. Let's play with the board. Let's see what it does. We brought out the board and we played with it, and of course, that same boy came through and we were just talking to him. And then once we were done, we were like, okay, you know, let's put the board away. We're all sleeping in this one bedroom we're sleeping on the floor. It's a bunch of people. All the beds are taken, so we're just sleeping on the floor. So I wake up in the middle of the night. I'm like, Okay, I gotta go to the bathroom. The light is off. I walked into the bathroom. It's a tiny bathroom. It's super dark. I open up the door. The mirror is right in front of the door. I'm looking through the mirror and I see this boy, brown hair, brown eyes, scratches, blood on his face, and I see him and he's staring back at me. I was scared. I was scared because it felt like all of the light from the room, if there was any light that came, was gone. And I can make out his face. The description that he gave us and the board was accurate. It looks just like the kid that we were talking to. He's got this weird smile on his face. I closed the door and I started praying, and I was like, oh my God, Oh my God, Please Jesus, I'm never going to play with that board again. I'm never gonna do it again. I don't want to see these things. Like I'm scarred at this point from everything that we've seen. I don't want to see these things. I don't want to feel these things. And I opened my eyes and I opened the door, and I heard up and turned the light on, and he's gone. Little do I know my cousin, who's sleeping in the next room is experiencing something with the little boy. She tells us the next morning that she was asleep. She remembers feeling really, really cold, and because she was so cold, it woke her up. And all she said is she opens her eyes. She's stiff, she can't move. It's like she's frozen. She sees the little boy that we were talking to on the board, the same little boy that I saw. She sees the little boy and she's staring at him and he's staring at her. She can't scream, she can't open her mouth. The only thing she has control of is her eyes. So she stares at him and he's like covering above her, and their eye to eyes, she said, started praying, opens them. He's gone. We talk about this the next day and she's like, hey, I don't think we should play with that board anymore. And I'm like, really, I don't want to play with it either. I have to tell you what happened to me, And she's like, wait, what happened to you? So we share each other's stories. The description matches perfectly of that little boy that we were talking to. He followed us to three different houses from that board, and we all swore to God that none of us did this. None of us touched it, we didn't move it, we didn't make it. Say the same thing over and over again. And when we swear to God, I know it's true because again, very religious family, I know none of us did that. There would always be the cold and then the prickly, and then we would experience something. So me and my one cousin we would say it's sleep paralysis because we opened up our eyes and we were frozen and we couldn't move. It was really, really, really scary, and we talk about it to this day. We agree. You know, it was a demon that possessed my sister. This dark man followed us from house to house. My sister said that he followed her up until her twenties and she hasn't seen him anymore. We talk about this clown with my two cousins, who never spoke to each other about it, not until we were much older. This thing was always there watching them. One of the most scariest things that happened to me was that situation with my sister that she saw this black figure with these red eyes telling her to kill my father. Now, my father was very abusive emotionally, mentally, physically, and we all talked about, you know how much we didn't like him, and you know how why did mom end up with him? You know, like, we were never close to my father. We were super close to my mom, and then for that spirit, that demon coming to her and telling her to do that, it was. It was scary. It's still today scares the crap out of me. I don't like talking about it. I don't like thinking about it because that's not normal. That's not normal for a seven year old to have a knife and want to kill your father. I've realized, actually me talking to my sister, you know, getting her story about the clown, We've started to feel really strange things lately, just talking about our stories. Like the house that I live in right now with my fiance and my step kids. It's not a scary house, but my daughter has told me that she's seen some strange things lately, and I've seen this dark figure. I don't know who, because we had a name for him, dark Man, you know. I don't know if it's the dark Man or not. But something happened the other night ago that reminded me of being in that house with my grandma on the bed, seeing that figure and being terrified. And that happened a few nights agout. The TV was on. My bedroom door was slightly ajar and it's dark, there's no light, and I'm just, you know, laying in bed and I'm trying to fall asleep. And then my eyes go to the crack in the door and it's probably about eight to ten inches open, and I see him and I haven't seen him in a very, very long Like I'm getting emotional talking about it because I haven't seen it so long. And there he was staring at me with the top hat, slim dark figure, same thing that's haunted us since we were kids. And I saw it and I got really cold, and I was just like, oh my god, it followed me here, It followed me here. I close my eyes. I start praying again, and I'm like, Jesus, are rebuke it in your fully precious name please got I don't want to go through this. I don't want to experience this. And I open my eyes and it's on. It's the same thing I saw. I know what it is because it attached itself to my family. Whatever it is, and the only thing that I can do now is just pray about it and just rebuke it in Jesus' name. And I wish that i'd never see that again. I don't want it to hurt me, and I don't want it to hurt my kids. And I know that it's not a nice spirit. It's not something that's watching over me or protecting me. It wants to hurt us. Do you have a true scary story to share with us? Click on over to true scarystory dot com and fill out the form. To get these episodes at free and support the show, check out Scary Plus over on scaryplus dot com. It's free for fourteen days and four ninety nine a month after that, if you can cancel anytime. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it Scary everyone, See us soon.