Unsettled

So, a little prologue is in order. I met this girl Andrea through a self-proclaimed shaman named Andrew. They were both in their early twenties and I was almost seventeen. She and I connected immediately. Andrew even said (before we met) that we were 'reflections of each other'. We both sort of abandoned our other friends for a while and became extremely close.

We never did any ouija together, but it was an unspoken understanding that we were both practicing spiritualists and sensitives. We never bragged about our experiences and there was never any pretense. It was simply a close friendship built on understanding and common personalities. At least it was good for a while...

She lived with her grandparents in a very old home in Grapevine, Texas. Andrea lived in the room that her mother had lived in when she was a girl, and both of them had a lot of issues with depression and drugs. Boy could you feel it... The air was much thicker in that room, and there were strange stains on the carpet and the walls. The stench was unbelievable and I tried to help her clean it more than once.

Only... it seemed like the room WANTED to stay messy.

For instance, one spring evening of 2006 after a rigorous attempt at making her room livable, we decided to walk to the nearest bistro and get some cream sodas. She lived in a suburb next to a very posh part of town, and we shopped there a lot. When we returned, we both paused at the entrance to her hallway.

My eyes were frozen on a strange ancient black and white portrait of a man... or a boy. It was hard to tell. He almost looked like a half gremlin man with a squashed face and a tuft of white hair on his head. His eyes were beady and seemed to come out of the picture. Smoke seemed to surround him in the photo. I can't tell you how frightening it was.

"You haven't noticed that before?" She asked, getting uncharacteristically quiet.

"Yeah... I also never noticed how many mirrors your grandma has up."

While I couldn't take my eyes off the strange picture, I also saw both of us in the corner of my eye in the mirror to our left. Only we weren't the only ones there. There was a black mass entering behind us. "Who is he?"

"My great grand father." She said staring at the picture along with me. "I never really met him. But he hates me..."

She started moving down the hallway, her head bowed, and I started following, shutting my eyes tightly from the awful portrait. It wasn't just his strange appearance, it was the seemingly purposeful way he'd been placed in front of the long dark hallway - as if to look you up and down before going into the bowels of the home.

When I opened my eyes again, we were half way down the hall. My heart was beating in my throat and out of nowhere, the black mass seemed to rush around me. I felt something chasing me, and then it PUSHED MY SHOULDER forward as if taunting me. I ran into Andrea's bedroom, as she'd gone far ahead of me.

"What the hell was that?"

"I'm not really sure." She sat on her bed, staring out her window. "But... never go into my backyard."

I put my drink on her desk - the desk that had been in her family through three generations.

"Why not?" I knelt at the end of her bed, my torso resting near her feet.

"I used to go out there, even though I was always scared of it. I heard voices. They never said anything clear it was just jumbled up whispers... So one day I went out there and found a dead bird in the far back next to an old tree. Then I went out the next day... and there was a dead cat in the same exact place. I didn't go out the third. I never go anymore."

"But what's here, 'Drea?" I wasn't unfamiliar with these things, but the activity surrounding this family seemed angrier than anything I'd ever encountered.

"They love it when we pay attention to them like this."

Suddenly there was a crash behind me. My drink had been thrown of its own accord onto the floor, creating a new stain. I got the distinct feeling whatever energies resided there preferred no one interfered with the messiness of that room.

I just looked at Andrea and she looked at me. Things got progressively worse. Scratching started sounding from the outer-wall along with a strange human groaning. It was too harsh of a scratch to be an animal because the wall seemed to shake along with it.

After that night I tried to keep our visits at my home, because when I tried to convince Andrea we should investigate and try to release whatever spirits were trapped, she seemed almost like she wanted them there, or was too afraid of them. More and more our friendship grew estranged. She started becoming angry and bitter all the time. Her room started becoming infested with roaches and I couldn't stay there at all anymore.

Eventually we stopped talking, but I remember that night so vividly, and I often worry about her.

Yourghoststories