The Ghost of Columbia Terrace

From: jmnemo (jmnemo@stthomas.edu)
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 1995 16:39:38 CST
Story-type: Personal experience
Location: Peoria, IL, U.S.A.
Source: Email Submission

However, the following is a true account that happened to me when I was very young. )

The reason that I feel compelled to share this experience is not because I am a true believer in the paranormal, but this experience I had at the age of seven can only verify those strong opinions that something is out there, as it continues to remind each of us in it's own way.

I grew up in a small town not far from Springfield, called Peoria. Columbia Terrace was the street my family lived on, which incidently was right across from a small park called Bradley, after the University there.

Anyways, almost every house on the block is over fifty years old, and our section of houses was the oldest. In particular, the house my family lived was one of the oldest, and somewhere somehow the reputation of it being haunted became known, and was often the butt of jokes at the annual halloween parties my parents hosted for all the families on the block.

I remember a few strange things that went on in that house, and it was not my imagination, because I always had a witness. My younger sister. Whenever we were together, something wierd always happened. When my parents bought a piano a month after my eighth birthday, my sister and I began lessons. You can imagine what an eight year old and five year old sound like compared to a professional, its pretty obvious. Well, for all we knew one night, when we both woke up at the same time, hearing the same music, our parents were both secretly leading lives of concert pianists. It was very late, and I remember what happened the night as clear as if it were yesterday because I have neer never been that frightened in my 24 years of existence. My sister and I shared a room, that was located at the top of a very long staircase that started from the living room. It was down to the very second, that my sister and I woke up at the same time, both frozen with fear. What we heard sounded like extremely soft piano music, with lots and lots of notes. All I could do was look at my younger sister across our room, her eyes were wide and her mouth was trembling.

This "sound" went on for what seemed like hours, but realistically about twenty-minutes. I know this because I immediately glanced at the little clock on our dresser that glowed in the dark, the minute the music stopped. I also know that it couldn't have been my parents, because neither one ever took a piano lesson in their life, and if they had, why would they practice late at night?

Shortly after this piano incident, I had gotten up late one night to go to the bathroom which was to the right of our bedroom, when I had my first glimpse of what seemed like a black, translucent figure that floated directly above the top step of the staircase, and stayed there, just hovering only a few feet away from me. My entire body seemed to go numb with fear, and it was all I could do to slam the bathroom door shut as fast as I could. Doing so, I somehow managed to pull the doorknob right out of its socket, and began to cry very loudly. My little sister was immediately outside the door, peeping through the hole where the doorknob used to be. She was very calm. "It's okay." I watched her through the hole, as she ran down the hall to my parents room.

A few days later, after my dad had got my out, I asked my sister if she had seen or heard anything "scary" and asked her to explain why she was so calm that night. She told me, this little five year old girl, that at the moment I slammed the door, the dark figure floated down the hall towards my parents room, and my sister was somehow "told" that everthing would be okay by this figure.

I'm not sure if this true account is that exciting or scary, but to a seven year old and a five year old, it was the most frightning thing to ever happen.

Incidently, I've had a few more recent experiences with this "dark figure," it appeared to my roommate late one night last year when she was in her room trying to sleep. It also used to hover in the corner of her room around three or four a.m. and we knew it was there because my cat "Cleo" would be in a constant state of aggression, which was not normal for this cat at all, everytime it was in her room. I don't have a clue as to why this keeps happening, but it continues to and I can't seem to stop it. It's like this huge cloud of negative energy (I've never experienced it being positive like my sister did) that follows me around, and you can literally feel these really "strange vibes" right before it appears, and something bad does happen.

Who knows?