The Sleepover: There Was a Ghost Among Us

In a quiet ranch house on the outskirts of Hollister, California. A group of friends thought that they were in for a simple sleepover, but as the night grew darker, something unseen began to stir in the hallway. My name is Edward, and here is Alex. It's true scary story. I live in a town called Hollister in California, which is about an hour south of San Jose and about forty five minutes to an hour inland from Monterey, so right in the central coast area. This happened back in two thousand and eight. I was seventeen years old. My mom's family has lived here since the town was founded. She's fifth generation here, so i'd be sixth generation here. There's a lot of things that have happened in this town that I have encountered and experienced to myself. I was good friends with a girl here in town whose family owns a ranch out in the hills. She invited me for a sleepover for another friend's birthday party. I had heard stories about some of the older ranches having activity paranormal and whatever. I had never experienced at a friend's house before, so I didn't think anything of it when she invited all of us out to her house. She lives fifteen minutes outside of town, so it's not super fun. But at the time, I didn't have a car somewhere. Mom had to drive me out and pick me up. The next day, there was four of us girls all at this little slumber party. Her dad and older brother were out of the house for the night. They had just gotten a new horse. They were testing out how he was going to do on a camping trip. They were using him as a pack horse. They were on the back end of the ranch, so it was just all of us girls in the house. The dogs were gone, your dad and her brother were gone. We had free raid, we had gotten some pizzas. We decided we're going to sit down and watch some scary movies. You know, typical teenager girl stuff. Nothing really was going on, you know. I was on one couch. The other three girls were on the big couch. We were all hanging out our sweatpants under blankets, chit chatting, watching some movies, and I think we were watching Constantine with Keanu Reeves. The way her living room was set up, her couches were in kind of like a U shape, so I was on a little love seat with my back to her kitchen, and they were on a bigger couch kind of in the middle of the room. So I'm hanging out watching this movie and I see a little bit of movement off to my right, and I don't take anything of it. We're out in the country, you know. It could have been a mouse, it could have been a spider. I don't take anything of it. And then I notice, I don't know, maybe ten fifteen minutes later, I'm hearing some noises down her hallway. It's an old branch house. You know, houses settle, there's little noises that happen, little creeks, houses are groaning, you know. Holliser itself is actually well, very well known for earthquakes. We're right on a fault line out here. It's not unusual that, you know, we're having little mini earthquakes all day. So I didn't think of anything of the noises at all, just minded my business trying to watch this movie. And then it started getting louder. It almost sounded like like somebody was shuffling up and down at the end of the hallway, and I was sicking to myself. Nobody else is here, it's just us girls. Maybe one of the dogs is back there. Maybe they didn't take one of the dogs. Leave it alone, don't pay attention to it. And then it starts getting louder, like it's getting closer coming down the hallway. I look and I don't see anything, like the lights on, you can see all the way to the end. Don't see anything, no shadow, no nothing. And I look over to my friends on the other couch and I lock eyes with the girl whose family owns the house, and I'm like, what is that? What is that noise? I can see on her face that she doesn't really want to talk about it, And I said, look, I don't care, Like, is somebody else here? Is one of the dogs back there? She saill, No, that's the thing that lives in my bedroom. What do you mean, the thing that lives in your bedroom? So, from what she told me, her house is on an old, old ranch, we have a hospital in town called the Hazel Hawkins Hospital. Hazel Hawkins was a little girl who died of a severe infection from appendicitis. If the tale is correct, at the time there was no hospital close enough to get her to to save her. So her grandfather donated a bunch of money to the county to build a hospital after she passed. The hospital has since been named for her. Supposedly, the ranch my friend's house is on now was originally part of that ranch, the Hawkins family ranch. I don't know if that's true. That's what she told me, but regardless, there was something on the property that wanted to be known. Whether it be the ghost of this little girl or the spirit of something else, it wanted us to know. It was there that night for whatever reason. She's telling me, I don't know what it is. I don't know who it is. I think it's this little girl. I don't see her. I just kind of see an outline of a person when it whoever decides to make themselves known. But I can't tell if it's male or female. It's just like a silhouette. So how often does this happen? She says, not too often, but it does happen often enough that I don't tend to like to have a bunch of people over here just in case something happens. I was like, has anything bad happened? She's all, no, nothing bad, but you know, weird stuff happens, Like we'll go outside in the morning, and there will be broken plates outside, but they don't match our dishes, or something that I have been missing for two weeks shows up on the kitchen table. Things get moved around, We're finding random stuff outside, we're fighting random stuff inside. Just weird, random disappearing reappearing act sort of things. And then the noises, you know, the shuffling and the tapping, And this doesn't bother you. She's although, no, I've lived with it for so long, but it's like specifically located in your bedroom. And she said, well, I mean it's kind of centered there, but it's kind of also all over the house. She's like, but I'm also not sure if it's just one entity or multiple entities. Are any of them malevolent not to her knowledge. Well, we're going to leave that alone. We're gonna try to ignore it. We go back to watching our movie. The noises continue, and it continues like this for another hour or so until we decide we're going to change. Like the movie ends, we decide we're going to watch another movie. The noises that I'm hearing, the shuffling and the tapping, are coming closer down the hallway towards the living room where we're sitting and I'm getting uncomfortable. I have always been on the more sensitive side to things. I've had multiple things happened to me in my lifetime where I've experienced little things here and there. But the entity, spirit, ghost, whatever you would like to call it, was super agitated. I don't know if it's because we acknowledged it and then decided we were done acknowledging it, and it was not done with our attention, and it wanted more attention. Honestly, I don't know what was said to make it mad or upset it, whatever the situation may have been. But the noises that it's making now it's tapping on the walls, but it's coming down the hallway. You can hear it getting closer. And if you ever had something really really large go past you at speed, like a semi truck and you have that whoosh of air as it comes past you, I heard it. It was an audible come around the back of the big couch, not towards me, around the side of the girls, farther away from me, towards her backyard area. You hear it like kind of rushing down the hall like the tapping at this point, it sounded like footsteps, like running, and then just around the back of the couch, and then it sounded like it dropped something incredibly heavy on the floor, just a huge slam on the floor. All of us just screamed. I've never seen girls move so quickly. The three girls on the one couch all jumped from the bigger couch onto my smaller, little love seat. I don't know if they thought I was going to protect them or they just wanted to get away from whatever it was, but it was so loud. It sounded like somebody took like a really big, heavy bag of something and just slammed it into the ground. It was deafening. The whole living room shook like I still get anxious talking about it. Just it was. It was so shocking. I've never had something react so aggressively towards me. I mean, I've experienced a lot of odd things in my lifetime, but that was. It escalated so quickly. The aggression from just like little noises down the hallway to it like ring down the hallway and slamming itself into the ground, or just making this huge slamming noise. Was so quick and so aggressive. It scared me. I looked over the couch the other couch after the fact, after we'd all calmed down, and there was there was nothing over there. Nothing had fallen, nothing had been knocked over. I don't know if it just could physically manifest for a couple seconds and just use whatever force it had to throw some weight around, or what the situation was, but there was nothing on the floor on that end of the couch. The other girls were terrified. I looked at the other girls and I said, I'm sorry if you think we're ignoring you, We're not ignoring you. We don't want to bother you. I didn't know what else to do at that point. I felt like I needed to apologize to the spirit for not acknowledging it earlier, or saying hello, or whatever it wanted from us. We did talk about it a little bit. It was more like a what was that? What's going on? Do we need to go? Like? What do we do? I don't even think she knew what to do, Like she'd been living with it for so long. I don't think it had ever done anything like that to her before. We all just kind of sat there shaking for probably a good half an hour until we decided that it wasn't going to do anything else. You know, we were teenagers. We didn't know what to do at that point. We were just kind of panicking because we were alone and none of us had any way to go anywhere, so it was like, well, what do we do? We can't leave. We all ended up sleeping in her older brother's bedroom because he had the biggest bed and all four of us could sleep in one bed together. I didn't really sleep that night. I kept waking up just assuming I was going to see something in front of me, and for the rest of my time there, I did not want to be in that house. The next morning, when her brother and her dad got back, we went outside to talk to them and whatever. The other girls wanted another a piece of leftover pizza, so I went back inside to grab some snacks, and I had angled myself so I could keep an eye down the hallway because I didn't want to be scared again. I didn't want to be shocked again. But I never slept at that house again. I have been out there since. I would not go go out there at night unless I knew I had a way to get home, because there was no way I was sleeping out there. Again, whatever it is that resides on that property, I don't think it's malevolent, but it definitely does not like to be ignored. And it made itself very clear that night that if we were going to speak about it, we needed to acknowledge the fact that it was actually there and not just talk about it in general. Unfortunately, I don't really talk to her anymore, so I don't know if she's still experiencing things. I'm not sure where where she's living now, but that was probably one of my more terrifying experiences. And I mean I've experienced some other things, but that was my first real experience, like it actually happening to me, not just me having a feeling in a building or a random location. I don't take I'll ever forget it to this day, vividly. I remember sitting on that couch and hearing that wushing and that slam on the ground, and being absolutely terrified that it was going to do something to us. I've always been more in touch with my spiritual side, Like I'm not religious by any means. I did go to Catholic school, but I never stayed with an organized religion. I've always been more in touch with my spiritual side, and I've always believed that there must be some sort of afterlife, you know, there must be some sort of other side that Never in a thousand years I have thought something like that would happen to me. I always thought that was just something you've heard in like stories or saw in a movie. It was just so bizarre, and I still see the whole scene so vividly in my mind, like that is something that will never leave me. Make sure you're following this podcast to get next week's story. You can get weekly Paranormal Mysteries through our newsletter. The link is in the description of this episode. This story was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel a VW sound Additional production by me Edwin Cowarrubiez and the Scary FM team. Thank you very much for listening. It's scary everyone. Let's see you soon.