Cold Room Tapping

Witness: Rachel Mullis
Location: Hazlehurst, Georgia
Date of Encounter: August 2000 – May 2001

My family and I moved to Hazlehurst, Georgia when my mother got a teaching job down there. We spent weeks trying to find a house, and we finally found one that seemed perfect — that was before we moved in and got settled.

I was 15 and my parents decided that I could have the back bedroom. On the second day of living there I noticed that the room stayed freezing cold. Since it was the middle of August, I figured that the air conditioning unit in the house was really good, and I didn't think a thing about. It wasn't too long before I had to sleep with a heavy comforter on my bed, though, and that was with the air off.

About a month after we moved in I began to hear tappings. It wasn't random, but it had a distinct pattern. The tapping was three solid hits, like, "thump, thump, thump," then there would be a slight pause, and it would happen again. When the sounds first started I attributed it to the plumbing, but then I began to pay attention to it. I realized after a couple of nights (the sounds only happened at night) that the tappings came from one of two places — either from outside my window, or from inside my closet. It kind of freaked me out, but I soon learned to live with it, just as I had learned to live with the cold. Except only I experienced the cold. If anyone else came into my room, the cold would lift, but when they left, it would come back.

Things were pretty much the same routine for another month and a half. Then, one day, I stayed home from school because I had a bad sinus infection. I was sitting at the computer playing a game, and the entire house was quiet. All of the televisions were off, as were the radios. As I sat there, staring at the screen, I heard two voices coming from my room. I couldn't make out the words, but I could tell that it was a man and a woman, and it sounded like they were arguing. The first thing that went through my mind was that I had left my TV on and that there was a soap opera on the channel. So, I got up and walked back to my room, and opened my door.

Not only was my TV off, but the cable was laying in the middle of the floor from where I had disconnected the VCR. I slammed my door and went back to the computer. I turned on some music so I didn't have to worry about hearing the voices. Not too many days after that, I was half asleep one night when I heard something that woke me up. The tappings had been going on, but as I said, I got used to them. I opened my eyes, and laid perfectly still. I heard three taps at the foot of my bed. I have a day bed and it has iron bars and the taps were on them. Now, I'm Catholic and I keep a rosary on each post at the four corners of my bed. I thought that maybe I had moved, and the movement had caused one of the rosaries to tap. I shifted on the bed, but the rosaries didn't make any noise. About that time, the three taps sounded from the foot of my bed once more. I turned on my lamp, and for a month I refused to sleep unless a light was on. After that incident, nothing much happened. My room still remained freezing cold, and the taps moved back to their original spots.

About two months before my family decided to move back to Macon, Georgia, the freakiest thing happened. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday and I was going to my room to get something. I got to my door and froze. Right outside my door was a cold spot. I opened my door and stepped into my room. For once, my room was warm. I  got what I needed and left. Maybe three hours later, I was going to go watch TV. As I walked down the hall, I passed through the cold spot, which had moved to a little over halfway up the hall. I stopped for a second, then continued. Later, when it was time for supper, I went back up the hallway, only now the cold spot was in front of my mom's room. I ate dinner and went to bed.

Around midnight my mom came barging into my room, asking if I heard anything. I told her "No." She asked me if I knew where her gun was and I told her, "No." She closed my door and I went back to sleep. I knew what was going on. The next morning, the battery in the car was dead. My mom called my grandparents to see if we could borrow my granddaddy's truck. As we stood in the kitchen waiting for them to get to the house, I leaned back against the counter and asked mom what had happened the night before. She told me that she had heard a noise. I asked her if what she had heard had been three taps from outside her window. She stopped what she was doing and stared at me. She asked me how I had known what it was, and I told her that I had been living with for a long time. It wasn't too long after that that I had to say good-bye to whatever it was. I was sitting at the computer e-mailing one of my friends about what had been going on in the house when from the wall beside my head came a very loud knock. I thought the wall was going to break. After that, the tapping stopped for both my mom and me, and my room stayed warm all the time.