In the past week, I got the news that we were moving. My family has lived in the same house for 20 years, and a week ago I was told we would be moving to a new house in two weeks. Two weeks to pack up 20 years of my life. Of all the things I could have been upset about, I was really only thinking about one thing. One thing that I don't think any other 19 year old would be thinking of; the ghosts in our current house. So, this is the story of the spirits on Central Avenue.

My earliest memories of the haunting are really vague. I remember seeing a large, blue figure standing in the corner of my parent's bedroom. I would sit at it's "feet" and talk to it. I remember waking up to piano music in the middle of the night. I was too young to think anything of it, and I don't think I ever even mentioned it to anyone. As I grew older, things started to escalate.

When I was about 13 years old, I was sitting in the living room with my mother and father, watching TV. My sister was in bed in the room above our living room, sound asleep. Suddenly, we heard a loud bang that shook the entire house coming from her room. Following the bang, we heard a girl's voice yell "mom!". In a panic, worried something fell on my sleeping sister, we all ran up to her room. When we opened the door, we saw that nothing had fallen in her room, or the rest of the house. We searched everywhere. My sister was sound asleep and there was no one in the house besides us.

We have a wooden ramp along the side of our house. My parent's bedroom is on the same side as the ramp. My mom told me one day that she had started to hear what sounded like something rolling up the ramp every single morning at the same time, but when she looked out her window, there was never anything there. One night, my parents awoke to hear giggling and splashing. Assuming that some neighborhood kids had broken into our yard and gone swimming, my dad went downstairs and out onto our porch to tell them to go home. There was no one in the backyard, but there was one set of small, wet footprints on the deck, leading away from the pool that disappeared before the end of our porch.

Thinking we were just all convincing ourselves of something that was not there, we kind of let it go. Besides hearing loud bangs every once in a while and hearing footsteps on the third floor at night, nothing major happened so we got used to what we heard and brushed it off. One night, my boyfriend and I were walking up the stairs and as we passed my parents bedroom door, my boyfriend paused and said "did you just see that?". I hadn't seen anything and he told me he saw a white mist lift off the bed and float through the wall. He saw the mattress move as the mist rose, almost as if it was standing up off the bed.

I began hearing footsteps every night in my room, and every night they got closer. I would hear things move in my room as I was trying to sleep. One night, I was dead asleep and in the middle of my deep sleep, I woke up. My eyes shot open and I looked up to see a large black shadow figure with clearly defined shoulders and a head leaning over my bed. I couldn't distinguish any facial features and the figure was abnormally large, much larger than a normal human. I was terrified. The figure disappeared, and I slept downstairs on the couch that night. In the morning, I explained to my mom what I saw. She told me she had seen the shadow, too. My mother told me she was laying in bed one night; my father had gotten up and gone to shower and get ready for work. It was early enough that it was still dark in their room. Every morning, my dad wakes up my mom for work. My mom heard someone on dad's side of the bed, and she rolled over and saw a black shadow. "Is it time to wake up already?" she asked the figure, thinking it was my dad. From behind her, she heard my dad walk in and say "time to get up". Mom flipped over and saw my dad standing in the door way, and when she looked back, the figure was gone. She described the figure she saw and it was the exact same shadow figure I saw that night.

Since then, I have been at college so I personally haven't experienced anything, and I am not sure if my family has, but in two weeks, we may never experience anything again. In a way, I feel bad for the ghosts. Perhaps they were living through us, and now we are leaving them alone in an empty house, and given the age of our house (150+ years), I don't know if the house will ever be full again. I hope the spirits are able to rest in peace, even if that means living out their haunting in our old, empty house. In all honesty, I'm so thankful I lived in a haunted house with spirits that never made us feel threatened. Turns out, not all haunting's are those terrifying ones you see in 'The Conjuring', some are just lonely spirits that weren't ready to leave life behind yet.