Episode 75: It Lived in the Shed

[00:00:00] Odd Trails contains adult language and content. If you have a story to share, send it to stories at oddtrails.com. Enjoy the show! Forget facts. Forget logic. Forget everything that seems real. You just trust. Believe.

[00:00:22] I would like to say Annalise's story began when I was 11 years old. However, this would not be true,

[00:01:05] as her story began sometime in the late 1700s in the Netherlands. I only came to know of Annalise as a young girl when she was gifted to me in the form of an antique mirror, without any knowledge of her existence at this time. My parents had become close friends with an elderly lady they met

[00:01:29] through my father's business. We will call her Mrs. G. Mrs. G soon became like a grandmother to my siblings and I, so it was not uncommon for her to gift us tokens of her affections. Often these gifts were items from her motherland, and I always treasured them dearly. The biggest gift she ever gave me was an

[00:01:54] antique bedroom set. It included a bed, a chest of drawers, a vanity, stool, and a mirror. It was beautiful, made from wood with ornate designs. It had once been painted white, but the paint was now severely tinged by years of use and had already begun flaking. This was the year that shabby chic was in style,

[00:02:21] and so this set matched perfectly and required no repainting. Mrs. G said that this was her bedroom set as a child, and it was part of the items that had made the journey to America when she was a little girl. She stated it had been in her family for a long time, but she did not say how it came to be.

[00:02:46] My parents set up my room with the new furniture, and I immediately fell in love with it. I loved to sit on the velvet-covered stool at the vanity and get ready every morning. The only thing I grew to dislike was every night I would wake up and see the mirror, positioned to face my bed, and how it always

[00:03:10] looked like someone else was inside the mirror, but not in my true reflection. I told myself it was a trick of the shadows in the room, and not something sinister. Nearly one year passed, and everything had been normal, until one particular night. I was asleep when an unusual dripping sound woke me up.

[00:03:37] It sounded like the ceiling leaking onto the floor. I sat up, and I could see water pouring down the mirror. I got up to investigate. I thought something was leaking in the wall and causing this. I pulled the mirror away from the wall, but it was dry. The ceiling was also dry. The water was coming from the mirror,

[00:04:03] pouring down from the top, as if someone had turned on a faucet. I wrapped towels around it to clean up the mess, and decided to tell my parents the next day. When I woke up, the water had stopped, but now there were stains on the mirror. I showed my parents, and my father said it was condensation, and the stains were probably

[00:04:30] always there, since this was a form of mercury glass that was used to make antique mirrors. This happened several more times over the course of a year, and then stopped completely. The year I turned 13 was also the year my parents decided I was mature enough to stay home alone for a few hours,

[00:04:53] while they worked or went out. I relished in my free time at home alone, and I had no fears about being alone. One evening, my parents had left, and my siblings were either with friends or sporting events. I was in the kitchen doing chores. From the kitchen, I could look down a hallway, and see my bedroom door,

[00:05:19] and into my room. The mirror had a vanity, and had been repositioned at this point, and now I could see the mirror from the kitchen. I began to see bubbles floating in the kitchen, and I thought that was really strange. I watched them, trying to understand where they had come from, but I couldn't figure it out.

[00:05:44] I decided it must be from washing dishes, as this was the only logical explanation. As I stared, perplexed, I saw a shadow walk across my bedroom doorway. I thought one of my siblings came home and was in my room, so I sprinted down the hallway, only to stop midway.

[00:06:09] I don't know how to accurately describe what I saw, and typing this as an adult now, I barely want to admit it. It seems too scary to be real. But, standing in the corner of my room, was a man-like figure, too tall, too disproportional to be human, wearing all black, with a black coat or robe that went down to the floor.

[00:06:38] His skin looked like it had been melted, with gross patches of charred hair sticking out of his skull, a place ears had once been, but looked as though someone aggressively chopped them off. The only real human feature he possessed was eyes, very blue and intense eyes.

[00:07:03] His mouth was not a human mouth, but something fueled by nightmares. His teeth looked like these extremely long, blood-stained sort of fangs, and when closed, it almost created a cage for his mouth. He stood, not moving, with a smile that was unnerving.

[00:07:28] I was frozen by his presence, and then, fight or flight kicked in, and I turned around and ran outside. I sat on the porch until someone came home. I was terrified but too afraid to speak about what I saw. I wanted it to be an illusion, or hallucination or something, anything but reality.

[00:07:54] I went to bed that night, too afraid to sleep, too afraid of his return. I didn't see him for almost a month, but I began to see lots of shadow people. Everyone in my family was seeing them also. Something even began opening the front door, despite the deadbolt being engaged. My father would tell it,

[00:08:22] If you're going to open the door, at least close it behind you. And just like that, the door began closing itself. Everyone also started seeing the lady in white, which was a woman with blonde hair, wearing a white dress that looked like a ball gown. She was seen wandering the property and the house at all times, day or night.

[00:08:49] After a month of seeing these entities, I saw him again. I was standing in the kitchen when I saw a glimmer of light come from the mirror. He appeared at the bedroom doorway, with the same smile, and he did a sort of flick with his fingers, and there were shadows everywhere, despite the already dark room and hallway.

[00:09:16] It felt like he was showing me that he controlled everything that was happening. I ran outside and again, waited until someone came home. I decided to talk to my mother and my aunt about this. Although, what could I really say? Hello, mother? Yes, I believe I am seeing dead people. How absurd it sounded, even in my head.

[00:09:44] Anyways, I found the words and they both just stared at me. Expressions hard to read, as though I told them some fantasy story. They agreed I should not stay home alone anymore, with the belief that this would solve the problem. But it didn't. Things actually worsened, but were pushed aside when tragedy struck, and my aunt had to stay with my family for a while.

[00:10:14] She moved into my bedroom, and I shared my sister's room. Everything was quiet at first. No shadows. No opening doors. No creepy, demonic man. The peace was temporary, though, as my aunt began to experience similar things. She stayed for six months and then moved out. She later admitted to seeing the same demon man that I saw.

[00:10:45] He had stood over her and startled her awake one night. This forced her decision to leave. Everything became routine, and we stopped talking about it, as if that would end things. The events, though, continued, but everyone pretended that nothing was happening. When I was 17, I had a boyfriend that came over one Saturday.

[00:11:12] He asked if he could take a nap in my room, so I left him alone while I was on the computer in the dining room. Then, I heard him yelling my name, and so I ran to see what was wrong. He said he woke up, and there was a woman in the corner of the room. She was standing behind the bedroom door. She was wearing a lace dress that was torn and dark.

[00:11:41] She had long, dark hair that was messy, and an evil look on her face. He said she grabbed the doorknob and slowly closed the door, and then began walking towards him. He said he closed his eyes and opened them again, and saw that she was crawling onto the bed until she was sitting on top of him. He said he closed his eyes again, trying to wake up.

[00:12:10] And then, she pressed cold, wet hands onto his chest, so hard he felt the air leaving his lungs. He said he could hear his heart beating loudly in his head up until that moment, and then it slowed to a stop. He opened his eyes, and she was still there, smiling, but now he couldn't move. She whispered something in his ear,

[00:12:39] but he couldn't understand the words. She placed her hand over his eyes, and then he woke up again. He said he thought he had a seizure because he woke up shaking, and with a bloody lip. I urged him to go to the emergency room, but he refused. I had never told him about the things I saw, and I chose not to at this point either.

[00:13:07] This boyfriend and I soon broke up after he tried to kidnap me with very evil intentions, although that's more of a story for Let's Not Meet. I eventually moved out on my own, and for some time, this bedroom set stayed with my parents, perfectly preserved in my old bedroom. When I married, I lived in the mother-in-law suite at my parents' house.

[00:13:35] They had moved from our childhood home by this time. The rest of the furniture was stored away, all except the mirror, which was displayed on the stairway landing on my house. This overlooked a small hallway to the living room and bedroom. My then-husband made many complaints about seeing things in the mirror at night when he went to the bathroom. I told him this was just the darkness and shadows,

[00:14:05] but he soon began saying that he was seeing a woman with long dark hair, a lace dark dress that was torn, and an evil look in her eyes. He said he saw her in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, only glimpses of her at first. Soon, he swore, she waited outside the bathroom door. There would be wet footprints when he opened the door.

[00:14:34] He said she would go to the closet and hide, but no one else saw her. He also said that he felt like she was stalking him. He was home alone one day when he heard someone say, help us, and he couldn't find a logical explanation for it. Eventually, he demanded that the mirror could no longer be in the house. He wanted to throw it away,

[00:15:02] but I only wrapped it up and tucked it away in the garage. He somehow believed the mirror being gone would solve the issues. We both began seeing and hearing things. Items would be moved, broken, missing. The cats almost always hid under furniture at this point. We heard voices. We saw glimpses of shadows, and we both experienced the feeling of

[00:15:31] not being wanted in that house. I also began having extremely vivid nightmares, and my husband was experiencing sleep paralysis almost nightly with a common theme. A woman in the corner that would come to him slowly and sit on his chest and press hard until he felt as though he was suffocating, only for her to cover his eyes and he would wake up.

[00:16:01] All of these events led up to this one point that made us finally decide to get help. It was sometime after midnight, and my husband and I got into a bad argument that resulted in him leaving the house in anger. As soon as he left, the tension also left. I sat on the couch to calm myself and noticed my cat staring at the wall of the stairwell landing. On the other side

[00:16:31] of this wall was dirt, since this portion of the house was partially underground. I assumed there was a mouse or something and my cat could hear it. Then I began to hear knocking on the door. Three knocks, then silence. Repeat three knocks, three times. I think this is odd. My husband had a key. I heard him pick them up

[00:17:00] as he left, so I know for certain he did not forget his keys. I stand, deciding how to react. Then I hear the three knock pattern again on the window. My cat is going crazy now, meowing and pawing at me and exhibiting overall unusual behavior for him. I take one step towards the door, but I hear the knocking pattern again, this time on the window

[00:17:30] that is level with the ground. The knocks are moving closer to me and something about that thought unsettled me. My husband would not lay on the ground to knock on the window. I pull out my phone and begin recording. That's when the knocking pattern begins on the portion of the wall my cat originally was staring at. I bolted up the stairs, only to find my husband sitting there, looking at his phone.

[00:18:00] I told him what happened and showed the video. That's when we decided to talk to a paranormal team. The paranormal team came out a few weeks later to investigate. It was broken into two sessions for them. I was present for both, and as they requested, I did not give any details about the events I witnessed. The team was three people, two women and a man. One woman was a

[00:18:30] medium, the other was sensitive to activity, and the man was able to bless a home when needed. They used different equipment and the medium's abilities. The house did not disappoint either. They determined it was the most active a house had ever been for them. The medium determined something was strange about the mirror, and there was a female entity attached to it, and it did not like my husband.

[00:19:00] A lot of things were said about the house, but I will save those details for another story. A year or so later, my husband and I divorced, and I moved. The mirror was once again on display in my new home. This house was an older home, built in 1912, and already unexplained things began to happen. I contacted the paranormal team again, and they suggested

[00:19:30] some sort of ritual of covering the mirror with salt and black cloth, and placing it outside. So I did and then brought it back inside. This made things worse, and the mirror took an almost dark presence that made it uncomfortable to be near. The paranormal team agreed to come out once more. Please note the events I am about to tell may be triggering for some people.

[00:20:00] They once again used equipment, and immediately picked up activities, everything from EVPs, shadows on camera, being touched, and equipment breaking. They decided to lay the mirror flat on the floor, and used a light ball that began lighting up in rhythm to three knocks, almost like Morse code. The voice box also began to go crazy, and kept

[00:20:29] yelling, outside, under, house. The medium placed her hand on the mirror, and said it felt hot, but overall could not get anything from it. At this point, something touched her arm, and all of the equipment went insane, like it glitched out, and then just all stopped working at the same time. Nothing would turn on again for the rest of the night. The medium asked me to

[00:20:59] place my hand on the mirror because she wanted to test something, so we placed our hands at the same time. That is when we both felt what can only be described as someone from the other side also touching our hands. I jumped back, and she calmly said, she touched you too? I nodded, too freaked out to speak. That is when the medium told the story as she said

[00:21:29] she was told when their hands touched. She said the girl was hundreds of years old, bought for a young girl named Anneliese, living in the Netherlands. The girl adored her vanity and mirror, and kept it with her forever. She grew up and was married, and brought her beloved bedroom set with her to her new home. Unfortunately, her husband was very unkind to her and abused her in multiple

[00:21:59] ways. She went on to have children with him, one being a daughter. She feared her daughter would be abused if she could not protect her, so in a last-ditch effort of protection, she attached herself to the mirror by cutting her hand and rubbing the blood into the mirror, so that when she died, she could be on the other side. When she passed, her daughter took the mirror and the bedroom set, adoring it

[00:22:29] as her mother's treasure. The mirror saw hard times, wartime, death, and other losses throughout the family and history. The mirror was passed down to Annalise's daughter's daughter, and this continued. Annalise watched over her generations like a duty. She told the medium about my ex-boyfriend's evil intentions and how she presented herself outside of the mirror

[00:22:58] to scare him. She told stories about things my ex-husband did to me and how she tried to scare him also. She said something in the old house blocked her from doing much, and she felt something evil was attached to him. She said that even though I was not her family by blood, she had fondly watched me grow up and loved me just the same as she once loved her daughter, and she wanted to

[00:23:28] protect me as much as possible and never intended to scare me. But, she said she could sometimes not stop things from using the mirror and her blood tied to it for sinister business. She said something outside the new house desperately wanted inside, and when I placed the mirror outside, it attached itself and was able to come in freely when I brought the mirror inside. The entity's name is

[00:23:58] William. He was once an enslaved man on the plantation that was once on the property of my then new house. He was killed maliciously one day and buried where he died. No one ever found his body, and people assumed he ran away and changed his name. His body is supposedly under the foundation of my house, and since my house was built in 1912, these things were not inspected thoroughly,

[00:24:27] and so no remains were found during the construction. He enjoys haunting the property and torturing people because he does not realize the world has moved on, and this is not the same time in which he died. Annalise wanted the medium to make William leave because she felt he was going to harm me. The team performed several different ways of protection. They blessed the home, they believed William was

[00:24:57] outside again and hoped he would pass on to the white light soon. Afterwards, I had an appraiser with extensive history knowledge inspect and appraise the mirror. He confirmed it was from the 1700s, although an exact year was hard to place. He said he has never seen such an old piece in this condition, especially to have traveled as far as it has, and that often items

[00:25:27] this old find their way into estate sales and are estranged from the generations to follow. I smiled because I know that Annalise must have something to do with the condition of the mirror, although I always wondered if Mrs. G knew the full story. Everything has been quiet since the investigation took place one year ago. The mirror no longer seems dark. The house is light

[00:25:57] again, and William has not made any commotions since that night. I recently told my current boyfriend this story while sitting on the couch now in front of the mirror as he stood in the doorway of his office. Beside the wall, the mirror rests against. When I finished, I jokingly said, so the lesson here is that you should treat me nicely, otherwise Annalise will come out to get you.

[00:26:27] I laughed, but then we both heard a quiet yet audible enough knock, knock, knock from behind the mirror, almost as if she was letting us both know she is still around.

[00:26:57] I was living with my grandfather at the time when my dad and stepmom got their own home. It was a cute four-bedroom home that had been renovated to include a sunroom, and it was attached to a garage by a breezeway that led into the backyard, where a shed was located just about 20 feet away. I was to have the front bedroom for when I came to visit, and my four younger sisters were to split the back two rooms that were accessible via the

[00:27:27] master bedroom, which would be my parents. The youngest two sisters were two and three years old, and Crystal and Emma would have been around eight or six, respectively. I was 11, and I was just about to celebrate my 12th birthday. When my sisters and I were first taken to see the house, I was walking with my then three-year-old sister, Caitlin, through the backyard. As I held her tiny hand and guided her through the yard, we started to inch

[00:27:57] closer to the aforementioned shed, and she started to cry. I thought maybe she had been bitten by an ant or something, so I asked her what was wrong, and she pointed at the shed. She said, that man is scary. Because I've always believed that children and animals are more sensitive to the supernatural, I picked up my baby sister, and we ran back to where my parents were standing, and told them what she told me. Of course,

[00:28:26] they brushed it off, and thought maybe I was trying to scare her, and I didn't press the issue any further. My family moved in, and got settled just before summer break would begin, and I prepared myself to spend my summer break with my parents and sisters. My sister and I kind of had a tradition where we would camp out in the living room, and this is mainly due to the fact that my room didn't have electricity because of the old wiring, and my sisters didn't have a TV in their room.

[00:28:55] So, we would all pile up on the fold-out bed, and the two cots then lay claim to the living room all summer long. That first summer is when we first encountered the spirit within the home. We'll call this entity Mr. Thompson, as we believed it was the ghost of the previous owner. My family and I grew to love having Mr. Thompson around, as he had a grandfatherly way about him. We never saw him, but he certainly made his

[00:29:25] presence known and he would become our guardian in many ways. The first night that summer, my sisters and I had our beds ready, and we were roughhousing on the fold-out bed while the youngest two watched The Cat in the Hat, the movie with Mike Myers. As I was pinning Emma down with Crystal on my back, we heard faint knocking through our giggles and our shouts. I made them stop for a moment while I listened, and I couldn't hear it anymore. So we went back to

[00:29:55] roughhousing, and I was just about to flip Crystal off of me when we heard the knocking again except this time it was louder, and it didn't stop until we stopped and got quiet. It came from the direction of the kitchen, so I assumed that the fridge was just making some weird noises, like old appliances tend to do. We went back to roughhousing again when we heard the knocking again, except this time it was right above our heads where the back of the couch met the wall.

[00:30:25] We scrambled off the bed, grabbed the two youngest girls, and barged into our parents' room screaming excitedly about what we heard. My dad told us it was an old house, so that's probably why we heard those noises, but I wasn't convinced. Noticing the time, my dad told us it was time to wind down anyway, so we went back to the living room to go to sleep. We didn't hear any more knocking that night. I forget exactly when this happened, but the night we all became

[00:30:55] convinced that the house was haunted was when my stepmom was carrying a sleeping Megan and my dad was carrying a sleeping Caitlin to their beds so that Crystal, Emma, and I could stay up late without disturbing the babies. My dad was walking in front of my stepmom to open the closed bedroom door, when it opened on its own, as if to help my parents out. We all saw it, and my parents stopped in their tracks to process what had just happened. I'm not sure

[00:31:25] exactly what my dad said, but he basically joked that the house is haunted and thanked what he believed to be a faulty door latch for its help. He stopped laughing when the door promptly shut itself, as if whoever was opening it had been offended by my father's comment. After that, we all accepted that there was indeed a ghost, ghost, and we named our friendly ghost Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson was helpful when it came to one's hands being too full to open a

[00:31:54] door, or if we were looking for something specific, we'd suddenly find it in a place we already checked. He mostly kept to the living room, and you would only hear the loud knocks if it was too loud in there, especially if it was late at night. We learned through some digging that when Mr. Thompson was alive, he was in Vietnam. He was a veteran. He had extreme PTSD, and this was evidenced by the many bullet holes our apple tree had in the backyard. We believed that the knocks

[00:32:23] were because he was getting overstimulated and needed us to calm down if he was to be happy. We never, ever felt threatened by him, and we lived in a comfortable peace for some time. I celebrated my 12th birthday in that house. It was a good time. Then, shit hit the fan. Now, I know you're wondering about the creepy man Caitlin saw in the shed, and this is where that comes into play. There was a chain and lock on the shed

[00:32:53] door that nobody had the key to, and my dad couldn't get the chain off until he was able to locate some bolt cutters from a long-time friend of his who I grew up calling Uncle. By this time, my uncle and his wife and their two granddaughters had moved into my parents' house for a time, and while they were there, we celebrated my 12th birthday. My cousins, who I will call Renee and Alex, were around Crystal and Emma's ages, and I often got stuck with babysitting everyone while the adults would

[00:33:23] run errands and visit my grandmother, who lived down the road from us. On one night, they removed the chain from the shed. I don't know what it was that they had found, but we weren't allowed to see it until they got everything cleaned out. So my cousins, sisters, and I were all in Crystal and Emma's room, playing and stealing peeks out of the window that faced the shed. We didn't see anything, of course, because it was too dark, so we didn't pay too

[00:33:52] much attention to what was happening out there. However, whatever it was that was locked inside of that shed soon made its presence known, and we would never know peace again as long as we remained on that property. School started yet again, and I went back to my grandfather's house to attend school while visiting my parents on the weekends and on school breaks. Because I wasn't there all of the time, and because there was a point in which I refused to see my parents for some time, my

[00:34:21] sisters were the ones to first experience what we had in that shed. They didn't like to sleep in their rooms as they no longer felt safe, and they told me about how they would sometimes hear something outside, scratching or knocking on the wall. I assumed maybe it was an animal outside causing these noises, because Mr. Thompson never scratched the walls, and I didn't believe that he would ever venture past the living room to mess with my sisters. My cousins Renee and Alex and their

[00:34:51] parents were still living there as well, and they talked about hearing similar things outside of what was my bedroom as they slept there. By this point, the shed was being used to hold our trash cans to keep animals from digging in our trash, and whatever it was we weren't supposed to see had been cleaned up. But, there was an obvious change in the atmosphere surrounding the shed, and shortly before they moved out, my uncle and father were drinking beer outside while my stepmom and aunt played Yahtzee inside

[00:35:21] with me and my cousins. All of a sudden, we heard my dad and uncle yelling a stream of cuss words, then gunshots, and then they came running inside to tell us to get somewhere safe and not to come out. We were obviously confused and frightened, but we did as we were told, while my dad, who was a police officer at the time, called for backup to our house on his radio. Next thing we know, our house is surrounded by police officers doing a perimeter check while my dad and uncle

[00:35:50] explained what happened. They both gave the same exact accounts of a very large creature that broke out of the shed and jumped our fence. They both described this creature as having an almost bear-shaped body with human-like limbs and before it crushed our fence during its jump, it turned to face my father and uncle. That's when they saw what appeared to be a German shepherd's face, but it was too dark to really make out. And then, it pushed

[00:36:19] the top of our fence down during its jump and that's when my father and uncle both located their firearms and shot at it. When we looked, our chain-link fence had been pushed downwards. As if something very large had fallen onto it. The dent itself spanned roughly five feet across. Whatever it was didn't appear to have been hit by any bullets and the officers weren't able to locate the creature so they left. We were all very shaken up by this and my

[00:36:49] uncle and his family eventually moved out into a place of their own the following summer. School ended and summer break came once again. Off I went to my parents to spend my summer break with my sisters. We were each allowed one friend to stay a few days with us. So, there were eight girls in the house and all eight of us got to witness this next incident. We were all piled up in Crystal and Emma's room with Crystal and her friend on Crystal's bed.

[00:37:19] Emma and her friend in Emma's bed and me and my friend in the trundle bed. The AC in the living room had gone out so we had to sleep where we would be most comfortable as summers could be pretty hot here. Emma had a noisemaker sitting in the window next to her bed for the white noise it would play for her to fall asleep to and the window had been cracked to let some of the night air in. My stepmom was standing in the doorway explaining the plans that she had for us

[00:37:47] the following day when the noisemaker shot across the room at her nearly hitting her. Emma and her friend both went pale because neither of them were even remotely near the device and my stepmom knew that it was an unseen force throwing it at her. The noisemaker was broken and my stepmom simply picked it up and ignored the fact that it had been launched directly at her by something none of us could see. We barely slept that night and the next

[00:38:16] night we decided that we would try and talk to it to see what it wanted. Of course nothing happened because we didn't know what we were doing. So as we were being dumb kids asking the empty air questions we heard the electronic keyboard go off inside Crystal and Emma's closet. We asked another question and another key played in response. Because I'm the eldest I volunteered to check the closet putting on a brave face. I approached the

[00:38:45] closet doors and just as I opened them my father jumped out at us which made us all scream. One girl wet her pants and three others ran right out of the room. I however punched my father before realizing who it was and he was thankfully more pleased with this prank and impressed with my right hook than he was upset with me. Later that night after we had all cleaned up and were ready to go to sleep we heard the keyboard go off again. Because we thought that

[00:39:15] my father was trying to prank us again we all told who we believed was my father to stop playing pranks on us. We weren't going to fall for it. There was silence for a moment and we expected my dad to come out of the closet laughing but nothing happened. Then another keyboard key was pressed and made a noise. Annoyed I got up to open the closet and was jokingly chastising my father when a feeling of

[00:39:44] dread set in in my stomach. Because I remembered that my father worked night shifts during the week. He left for work hours ago. I gestured to the girls to be absolutely quiet and then I opened the doors to the closet ready to get physical with whoever was in there. The closet was empty. Then another keyboard key was pressed in front of my eyes this time by something that I couldn't see.

[00:40:14] I told the girls to run and we all slept in the living room that night where we felt safe and protected by Mr. Thompson. Our friends left the next day. That summer passed with fewer incidents and we had forgotten everything by the time school started back up. I had just turned 13 and was ready for 7th grade. I was back at my grandfather's and back to seeing my parents every weekend in school break. This is when my memory becomes more clear on everything that happened

[00:40:42] because my sisters and I became the targets of this malicious force that occupied the shed. I babysat them a lot especially at night when my dad would go to work and my mom would go to help my grandmother with some house cleaning. As siblings do we fought, made messes, cleaned those messes, rough housed, and played hard. When we were home alone we refused to venture outside after dark and would only stay in the living room for obvious reasons. When we did go outside

[00:41:12] after dark it was mainly to check on the laundry located at the back of the garage so all five of us would go out there to check the laundry with me acting as lookout and to be the first point of contact if somebody or something was there. Crystal and Emma tag teamed the laundry. Then we'd run inside the house to find refuge in the living room once more. When we had cousins or friends staying over they would also come with us outside as a group and we'd

[00:41:41] all be in the living room unless someone had to use the bathroom or needed something from the back bedrooms. In that case we would walk around in groups of two. It sounded strange but having this kind of buddy system in our house made us feel better and it will soon make sense. You see the malicious spirit in the shed began to get more brave especially when our parents weren't around. Christmas break that year I had gotten my first ever phone and my friend Christine

[00:42:10] was staying that weekend with us. Crystal had a friend who had broken their arm and had been getting their cast signed by everyone so Crystal decided that she also wanted a broken limb for the simple fact that she wanted a signed cast. I tried talking sense into her but I couldn't stop her so I was just going to let her fuck around and find out. I also planned to get a video of it so that I could show her how dumb she was.

[00:42:39] She decided that the best way to do it was to jump off the roof of the shed. I felt uneasy about being around the shed but Crystal was dead set on it so I went anyway. Christine and I helped Crystal drag our pool ladder over to the shed and then Christine held it steady while Crystal climbed up to the top of the roof and I stood about a few feet away ready to catch the whole thing on camera. Christine came to stand next to me and we both watched Crystal

[00:43:08] inch to the edge of the roof preparing for her jump. After taking a few deep breaths and telling her that she'd be fine, Crystal decided not to jump after all. However, just as she began to back away from the edge of the roof, she suddenly lurched forward and had thankfully caught her footing before she scrambled down to the ladder and ran to where I was standing. I thought she had simply lost her footing but she swore that something pushed her. I wish I still had this video

[00:43:38] footage but in the video you can see Crystal's back move as if she were being shoved and right at that exact moment an inhuman face appeared in the shed's window. We never went near that shed again after that but whatever it was that was in there wasn't done with us. During that same Christmas break Emma and Crystal were staying at their friends houses while Christine and I stayed at my parents.

[00:44:08] Christine and I were on the fold-out couch talking about school and typical teenage girl drama and we were completely alone in the house. She was showing me a text that she had received when we heard an infant crying. Confused, we looked around thinking maybe it was one of my sister's toys malfunctioning. But when we tried to go into the back bedrooms, the door leading to the bedrooms wouldn't open and we could hear a baby crying on the other side.

[00:44:37] Because I knew for a fact that we were alone in that house and that there weren't any toys on the other side of that door, I knew that in my gut Mr. Thompson was keeping that door shut to keep us from encountering whatever was on the other side. Christine and I sat in silence too scared to do anything else and waited for my parents to get home before telling them what happened. They brushed it off, of course, thinking it was a malfunctioning baby doll and we never heard the

[00:45:07] crying again. Fast forward to spring break and I am now living with my parents at this time. Now I get to experience all of what my sisters were telling me about 24-7. The room that was supposed to be mine had been converted into a dining area so the door and wall keeping the room separated from the house had been removed. I was sleeping on the trundle bed and crystal in Emma's room and every night we would hear scratches and knocks on the outside of the house.

[00:45:37] The knocks were loud and came in threes and we were all too scared to look outside. One night I was on the phone with my now husband and I was eating pizza in the kitchen facing the sunroom while my stepmom sat in the living room treating my sister's hair for lice. As John who was my boyfriend at the time was telling me about his family vacation to New Mexico I watched as a very tall and slender figure passed by the sunroom windows.

[00:46:05] The front of the house sat about four or five feet off of the ground and the windows went up from the floor about three feet and reached the top of the room. This figure was stooped over and it was still as tall as the top of those windows. It was a dark shadow and appeared to have horns of some kind that grew out of its forehead and turned backward like the horns of a ram do. I watched it as it crossed the window then disappeared.

[00:46:35] I ran to the windows to look outside all the while explaining to John and my family what I had just seen but it was gone. Later that summer I'm sitting outside of my stepmom's minivan at night talking to John. I wanted to get some privacy from my sisters so I completely disregarded the buddy system we had going on just to talk for a few minutes. I was in the middle of telling John about something that had happened that day when I saw that same figure stroll

[00:47:03] across the backyard causing me to stop mid-sentence. I could hear John asking me if I was still there and all I could make out was, it's back and it's walking across my yard. I bolted out of the minivan and into the refuge of the house. Once I was in the living room I explained to John what had been happening while my sisters stopped what they were doing to listen. All of us were still a little shaken up and John thought that I was trying to pull his leg until he heard the fear in my voice.

[00:47:33] Even though my sisters were the ones who had experienced this for much longer than I did, I was and still am the only one in the household the entity showed itself to. After that I would see it stand outside of the windows through the curtains at night and I could feel myself becoming more and more unlike myself the longer I stayed there. My father and I butted heads a lot and I began to experience depression for the first time in my life. I was on the phone with John one night

[00:48:02] and Crystal and Emma were staying with friends of theirs. My stepmom asked me to go change the clothes out of the washer and put them into the dryer and because I didn't want to get in trouble for telling her no, I begrudgingly walked down the breezeway in total silence while John coached me on the other end to remain calm and to be fast. I had him on speaker while I was switching the clothes out and I had the laundry room door closed behind me.

[00:48:30] He had just made me laugh with a joke when the door was violently thrown open by some unseen force and then I felt hot air on the back of my neck as if someone were breathing on me. I grabbed my phone and I hauled ass out of there down the breezeway and into the door leading to the living room. My stepmom was startled by my sudden entry and I told her I'm not going back out there mama. Something is trying to mess with me. At this point my stepmom knew that something was out there and she didn't

[00:49:00] press me to finish what she had asked me to do. We waited until morning to finish the laundry. The final incident took place shortly before we moved into the travel trailer where my let's not meet story took place. The trundle bed that I had been sleeping on somehow had a hole torn through the mattress so I shared a bed with Crystal until we moved into the travel trailer. We were in bed one night with Emma in her own bed and we had the lights off

[00:49:29] because we were supposed to be going to sleep. Caitlin and Megan were in their beds in their room. It was quiet except for mine and Crystal's giggles as we thumb wrestled one another. Then came those scratches and knocks. And I had had it at this point. I was fed up with the harassment we endured from this entity and I was ready to confront it face to face. I ripped the blanket we were using as a curtain back and I regret having done so.

[00:49:59] There taking up the entire window from top to bottom with our window being four feet up from the ground was the upper torso of what I can only describe as a demon. It had its large grotesque hands pressed against the glass and its face was inches from mine as I was standing on the bed. It had glowing red eyes and its face was dark. Those horns I described from earlier were thick and gnarly. And while I couldn't make out a mouth or

[00:50:29] nose, it still was smiling at me. Its horrific twisted grin caused me to fall back onto the bed screaming and Crystal took off running to my parents while Emma hid under the blankets and Caitlin and Megan came running to where I was. I grabbed them and told Emma to come on as we ran to my parents room where Crystal was explaining what had happened from her perspective. She didn't see what I had seen, but she did see that something large was dark and

[00:50:58] standing there. And that's what she told my parents. My dad grabbed his 45 and went to check around the house. And while he didn't see anything, he did hear what sounded like a low, deep chuckle when he stood outside of our bedroom window. There wasn't much that we could do about it then. And all four of my sisters piled into Crystal's bed with me. And every one of them was snuggling a limb causing me to wake up in serious pain that next morning.

[00:51:28] After this, we moved into the travel trailer and then moved the trailer to my grandmother's house where we never experienced anything like that again. My entire immediate family then moved to a single property consisting of 64 acres where we would go on to experience other paranormal encounters that I'll discuss another time. After about a year had passed, I did some digging into the history of our old house and asked my uncle what it was that was in the shed that we weren't allowed to see.

[00:51:57] After he explained to me what they had found, everything clicked into place. For a time, after Mr. Thompson passed away and before my family moved in, the house had sat empty for about a year. During that year, some folks tried to squat in the house and some folks used the house as a means for their occult practices. Now, I myself am into the occult and I am a spiritual person so I don't care that it was practiced there.

[00:52:26] However, I think novices who didn't know what they were doing managed to get something right and when they realized the shit that they stepped in, they locked the shed up where whatever it was they summoned remained until my dad cut the chain. What my Christian family was cleaning out was evidence of occult practices. And they didn't want us kids exposed to it, not knowing at the time that we would go on to have some terrifying experiences regardless.

[00:52:56] I believe we felt safe in that living room because that's where Mr. Thompson liked to spend his time before he passed and he guarded that room against whatever it was outside trying to get in. Because I am a spiritual person, I've had many other paranormal encounters throughout my life but none have ever affected me the way that this one has. My father, on the other hand, has an ongoing experience in which something has been attached to him all of his life but that's a story for another time.

[00:53:25] Thanks for listening and I'll be sure to send more stories about my paranormal encounters soon. And I personally would like to say Nikki, our author of this story, by all means send those stories in because this one was absolutely wild. Thank you for listening to this special episode of Odd Trails. We don't normally feature stories this long. However, I had a death in the family this week and we didn't really have the time to come

[00:53:54] together for our usual dialogue at the end of this episode. We figured that we would take advantage of this opportunity to share two long, terrifying tales to keep you on the edge of your seats. Thank you all so much for your support. We love you all. We'll be back at the tail end of next week's episode to make you think, laugh, and question everything you've ever known. This week you have heard the story of Annalise by Lacey and It Lived in the Shed by Nikki.

[00:54:23] Both stories were narrated with the permission of their respective authors. If you have a story to share, make sure you send it into stories at oddtrails.com. We'll see you all next week. Please stay safe. Peace out.

[00:54:52] Ghosts and the ghouls disturb you, darling.