I, like a lot of other people, have had many encounters with the paranormal during my life. The most prolonged account started when we bought an old house.

In the fall of 1976 a man that my husband worked with asked us to come and look at his house that he was going to put on the market. We were just starting to look for a house to buy. When we went to see the house, I felt that I just had to have it. It was a big old, farm house that was now within the city limits. It had five bedrooms, two baths, a double lot, and a inground pool. Just what I thought we needed with a growing family. The problem was, that we only had two weeks to sell our mobile home, so that we could buy this house. We sold our mobile home in one week, and when I asked the owner of the house if he would accept a land contract, he did. Maybe this doesn't seem to odd to some, but our interest rate was 2.5%. Things just seemed too easy.

We moved into our home on January 1, 1977, and things started to change for us. My husband and I had never had any serious problems between us, and we had never had any financial problems either. That all soon changed. We both seemed to change into different people a lot of the time. There were things happening in our house too. Noises that weren't normal and I saw an old man in bib overalls in different areas of the house. A couple of my friends saw this old man too, but my husband never experienced any of it. He thought I was either loosing my mind, or lying to get attention.

I became very depressed, and started talking to a close friend about what I was experiencing in the house. She talked me into contacting some people in her church that might be able to help with the problem. I also started going to church on a regular basis. My husband also started attending church with me, that is when he started experiencing what was going on in the house. He finally heard the growling and gnashing of teeth, the footsteps, appliances turning on and off by themselves, objects moving on their own. He finally saw that I was neither crazy, nor was I lying.

One day, while I was in the kitchen doing laundry, I was told by a demonic being that there were many of them in my home, and that they were there to stay. He also told me that my house would burn. We asked some people from the church to help us with a deliverance. A deliverance is about the same as an exorcism, but done by a Protestant church. During this deliverance, a wolf in a shroud was seen along with other demonic images. This all seemed to help for a few years, but they eventually did filter back in. The Bible says that if a spirit is allowed to return, that they come back seven times stronger. We again started to experience manifestations and paranormal occurrences. Our family portrait hung over our fireplace. In front of the picture, the mantle was covered with candles in candlesticks and holders of all kinds. The picture would not stay on the wall. We would constantly find it in the middle of the living room floor, glass broken out of the frame, but the candles were never moved, and the nail that held the picture to the wall was still in place. If the picture was just falling off the nail, the candles would have been taken down with the picture when it fell. Another time, after working all day, I was in the kitchen getting ready to clean up. I was yelling at the boys for bringing a ball in the house that was supposed to be kept in the pool. The ball suddenly levitated straight up into the air, and came flying at my face. Just before it would have hit me, it fell straight down to the floor, and stayed where it fell. It didn't bounce or roll. My children also kept experiencing a slimy wart covered creature with glowing eyes.

Finally the occurrences just seemed to die down again after blessing the house, and doing what I called my spiritual housework. A few things would happen now and then, but nothing major. In December of 1995 I started feeling uneasy about the house again. Every night when I came home from work, I would crane my neck to see around the last corner on the way home. I had to make sure that my house was OK. This went on until February 3, 1996. We were having the coldest day of the year that day with miserable weather. My husband decided to go work out at the gym that he belongs to, and I rode with him, to go get some groceries in the same town as the gym. We were both uneasy for some reason about leaving the house that morning. Our oldest son was at his girlfriend's parent's home, he was to meet his father at the gym that day, and our youngest son had begged to spend the night before with a friend.

I was waiting outside of the store for my husband to pick me up, when all of a sudden he came flying past where I was. I yelled to him, and he told me to hurry up. When I got to the truck I asked him what the big hurry was. He just started throwing our groceries into the back seat of his truck. Then he told me, Our home was on fire. He had received a call at the gym. It was the longest ride home in the world. Twenty-five miles seemed like a hundred. I didn't know if our youngest son had gone home, and was in the house or not, and I knew that our cat and our dog were there. I prayed all of the way home that it was going to be a minor fire, but when we got there our roof was caving in. The fire department said that the house probably burned for two hours in the walls before it broke through to the outside so that anyone could see it. We lost our pets and everything that we owned. It took the firemen 9 hours to put the fire out. Needless to say, my family was devastated. I don't know if we will ever fully recover from the trauma. Our youngest son has been the most affected by this tragedy. He can't seem to get past the mental hurt of losing everything that meant so much to him, and the security of his home. We have since bought another home, in a different town, but it doesn't seem to help him much.

As the fire was burning, a twelve-year old boy came up to me and asked me if I had seen the horrible creature that came out of the roof when it collapsed. He said that it went up into a tree, and sat there laughing. The creature that he described was the same creature that my son's had described to me years earlier.

So far, we have not experienced any new paranormal events in our new home, but it was strange when our one son looked at us one day and said, "you do know that they can follow us, don't you?"