When I first saw my parents' new home, I was moving in with my two very young boys temporarily--the husband was deployed to Afghanistan after two years of constant deployments and underways, and I took them up on the offer of coming "home" while he was gone.
My kids took the front room, which has since become the office. I took the back room. They are jack-and-jill connected with two washrooms and a shared bathroom.
My older son was speech delayed but had never had issues with sleeping. We'd always kept a small light on for him, but suddenly, he was very concerned about the shadows (which he called "sheddows"). They were watching him, he said, and they seemed dangerous. When I asked what they looked like, he described something with a lot of shark-like teeth. When he was a little older, he told me, "They looked like this," and then stood with arms straight at his sides, head upturned, mouth wide open and lips pulled back.
It was during this time I also started to notice weird things happening.
One night, I was in the bathroom and heard what sounded like my father grabbing things from the closet in the hall linking the front and back rooms. I was going to ask him if he wanted help looking for something, but then he stopped. It didn't sound like he'd put anything back--just left it lying around--so I went to bed, fully expecting a mess in the hallway come morning. The next day, nothing was in the hall, nothing was out of place in the closet, and my father insisted he had been asleep while I heard him rummaging in the closet. My mother vouched for him--she was in bed reading next to him.
Over Christmas, my sister visited, and we shared the bed in the back bedroom. While I was trying to fall asleep, I suddenly felt like someone was at the side of my bed, where I had my back turned, and then it felt like someone was very slowly crawling up onto the end of the bed. The pressure of someone's weight actually rocked me thanks to the really old mattress (the bed belonged to my great-grandfather). Nothing happened--the weight just disappeared, and the sense that someone was there also faded.
Regularly, there were sounds like someone had walked down the hall and stood outside my bedroom door. One time, it sounded like they were trying to turn the door knob. Another time, it sounded like they were scratching at the door.
I often felt like I saw small black shapes like animals darting around the house.
A few times, I saw a tall figure walk past the kitchen doorway.
Once, I walked into the laundry room where pantry doors were, and a really loud *wham* sounded by my head. I thought something really large had fallen inside--maybe a giant bag of flour or rocks or a very large dude, perhaps--but when I carefully opened the door to catch and right whatever it was, nothing was out of place.
