There were a few hot spots in our house I especially didn’t like – the hallway by my mother’s bedroom, her actual bedroom, and the front hallway. They were all to be avoided whenever possible. Just thinking about the basement in that house gives me the creepy crawlies. Full on nightmare material I’m telling you.

I recently purchased my own home, do you want to know what it doesn’t have? A basement, that’s what. I’ll take my chances with the tornadoes of the world. The lack of a basement was one of the things I liked best about the house. The realtor was like, “You probably won’t like this, but it’s just a slab.” Well then, pop the champagne, I’m buying a house today!

I don’t want to go down in the basement…

On Main Street there was a huge basement and the only way to avoid being close to it when you came and went was to go through the front hallway. Well I didn’t like that vibe either. For some reason there were always hornets there (which I got stung by many times). So the basement it was.

There’s something down there…

I can’t describe the feeling of walking through, or passing by the door of the basement any better then by saying, pure terror. I’m talking, break out in sweats, wide eyed terror. I have no idea what could have ever happened down there that could have been so bad. Whatever it was, it left an echo or evil stain on it for the rest of eternity. By the way, one second in that basement actually felt like an eternity. My sisters and I were all terrified of it. I never actually saw anything odd down there. I don’t think James Brolin is walled in there but you never know. And even though we didn’t see anything, we felt something menacing down there watching us, and we always thought if we stood still in there long enough whatever it was would grab us.

I don’t want to go…

I can’t talk about the basement and the staircases without talking about something that I always kept secret. I was young and I thought maybe I was losing my mind. I was afraid to tell anyone, even my family and we shared everything.

Some days I would walk to the top of the stairs and then the next thing I knew I was at the bottom by the basement door and outside door. I was always panicked at first because I didn’t remember coming down, and what if I fell? But I would remember a sensation of floating down them and I definitely knew I didn’t walk down them on my own. Some days I would stand up top and wait and see if I would float down, like a game. Later, when I was in my tweens, I never felt that again. And I wondered, did they jump into me trying to find a way to get outside of that house? All I knew was no one said anything about it happening to them so I wasn’t saying a peep.

About a decade ago, give or take, my sister’s and I were having dinner and chatting away. The Main Street house came up, as it often did, and my sister said she had something happen to her there that she never talked about before. Well we were all ears. She started to explain how she felt like some days she floated down the steps and my other sister said “You too?!” And then we realized we couldn’t all be having the same hallucination, we must all have actually experienced this.

Here’s one sister’s account of “floating” down the stairs…

“So, some of the times that I came home…and actually sometimes when leaving the house…I would get the feeling that I floated up the stairs (or down depending which direction I was going). And I wouldn’t know really how I got to the top or the bottom. It was surreal. This was just the crazy leading to crazier.”

Here’s my oldest sister’s experience…

“I didn’t like anything about that entrance. At the bottom, to the left of the stairs, was the entrance to the terrible basement, at the top was the door to our kitchen. Not exactly at the top, though. the door was around a blind corner, and you never knew if you were going to run into whoever was always turning the doorknob. The staircase itself was…mysterious. For a good chunk of my childhood I had many trips down the stairs (it only happened to me when going down the steps, never up) that I had no memory of walking. I’d be at the top, have a brief sensation of falling, and then floating. My brain would be all foggy, like when your under a mild anesthesia. Suddenly, I’d be at the bottom of the stairs, wide awake, hand on the doorknob to exit. And I’d be SCARED, because I knew something wrong was happening, but I had no way to make it stop and no way to PROVE it was happening. So, I said absolutely nothing about it, until I mentioned it at dinner one evening, ten or so years ago…

I don’t want to go down in the basement…

What did the spirits want with us, with our body? Why only float us on the staircase? (I should mention I only floated down). Were they trying to get out of the house, and when we got to the door they realized they couldn’t leave? I can’t believe all these years as adults who understand and believe in hauntings we never told each other. I truly thought I was crazy. I’m amazed I can share this with everyone now. I’m learning it doesn’t matter if you think I’m a silly, crazy girl at the end of this story, because what’s important is getting it out of my system. There just may be a person (or a family) like ours that needs to know they are not crazy. Isn’t that why most of us in this paranormal world are here? We want to understand what we went through, we want to help those living through it now, and we want to show the world we aren’t crazy, we are not alone in this.

I truly hope this helps some young girl or boy. If you’re reading this, you are not alone and you are not crazy. I believe you. If you can have ghost encounter PTSD, then I have it. I’m a night owl who barely sleeps at all, and I need a light and noise to not be afraid to close my eyes. And unless my sisters and I had shared hallucinations, then spirits are real, very real, and hopefully they aren’t in your home right now…

To be continued…

Song lyrics are from, I Don’t Want to go Down to the Basement by The Ramones

Copyright © August 2019, property of Bigfootmountain and Sasysquatchgirl