Rate this encounter: J. Howard, Livingston, California, 1988-1989

My fiancée(now ex-husband) and I decided to rent a house together in early March 1988. He moved in a few weeks before me because I was expecting our daughter the first of April so I needed to stay in the town that my doctor and the hospital were in. Me and my oldest daughter would go and spend the weekends with him before the baby was born and all was normal. The layout of the house was different than any house I'd ever been in and he explained that it was originally a store. The only bad feeling I had about the house at that time was the fact that the only thing between our yard and Highway 99 was a chain link fence. It was a corner lot and there had been more than a few fatal accidents at that intersection. We could find no other reason for the strange occurrences.

Strange things started happening the first day I moved in. We lived there a little over a year and had many experiences. Things would disappear then we would find the item in an odd location sitting out in plain sight. We heard voices, felt cold spots, and our animals wouldn't enter the children's room, in fact our dogs would growl and back away from the doorway. There was a basement and I had a weight machine down there so everyday while my daughters were napping I would go down there to work out, and every time I would hear very heavy footsteps going from my living room to the girls' room. The first few times I ran upstairs to see who was in my house, but nobody was there. In the living room there was this place on the floor that when anyone stepped there, the floor would creak, and if you were sitting in our recliner, you could feel the floor give a little.

There was one night around midnight, my kids were in bed and my fiancée had went to pick his teenage niece up so she could come and spend some time with us. I was sitting in the recliner and the floor behind me creaked and I felt t give, but the noise and the give were bigger than usual, like someone or something big had walked up behind me. My hair stood on end and I came pretty close to panicking because the floor kept creaking at intervals like there was somebody circling me and I felt like I was being watched. I really wanted to get up and run from the house but there was no way I could have carried both my daughters out, so I got some control over my fear. The only thing I could do to keep from losing my head was to talk so I said, "I don't know who or what you are but I'll make a deal with you. You leave me alone and I won't make you leave." The floor creaked a few more times and then the feeling that I was being watched was gone.

About thirty minutes later my fiancée and his niece came in. It was late so I made a bed for her in the living room on the couch and we all went to bed. Once we were in the bedroom and she couldn't hear us, I told him what had happened. Because his niece lived over two hours away, the plan was for her to stay the weekend. That morning when he woke up and went into the living room she was already awake and sitting on the couch. He asked if she had slept okay. She said that she hadn't slept at all and that as soon as he could get ready she wanted him to take her home. She told us she was sorry but that she was never going to come back to that house again and said she didn't want to explain why. She never did come back to that house. It was obvious to us that she had experienced something and whatever it was it wasn't very nice.