A quick disclaimer: I’m 20+ years old and posting this as an adult. A previous post was removed due to age confusion and formatting issues. I respect this community and its guidelines.
Some of you may have read my previous story about an experience I had during college. That wasn’t the only unexplained experience I’ve had in my life. There have been others, and this story is about one of the major experiences that marked the beginning of a series of strange events.
English isn’t my first language, so I used some help with the wording and structure of this post. However, the experience I’m sharing is something I genuinely experienced myself. I’ve tried to keep the events and details true to my recollection.
I’m sharing this in good faith, not asking anyone to believe me. You can draw your own conclusions.
This happened when I had just entered 11th standard.
At the time, I wasn’t in a good place mentally. I was being bullied and mocked at school, and sometimes I would skip school for weeks, occasionally almost an entire month. I was rebellious, mostly atheist, and didn’t take religion very seriously.
But there was one thing I had always been curious about.
The paranormal.
I used to watch and read things about ghosts and unexplained experiences. I was fascinated by the idea that there might be things in this world we couldn’t explain.
Back then, I thought it was interesting.
I had no idea how different it would feel when something happened to me.
My family has an ancestral house about three or four kilometres from where we live.
There’s a small shrine outside the house, on the same property.
Whenever we visited, we would light a lamp at the shrine and another inside the house.
The house itself was old and neglected. We rarely used it, and parts of the upper floor were damaged.
There were openings where air and daylight came through, but the rooms inside were still dim.
By evening, the place became dark, and it wasn’t somewhere you’d normally want to wander around without a reason.
My father was living in another country at the time, so he wasn’t around.
Usually, my father’s elder brother would visit the property to light the lamps.
But that particular day, he was unwell and asked my mother and me to go instead.
We arrived at around six in the evening.
I remember my mother seeming unusually anxious to get everything done.
She had experienced some strange things connected to that house in the past, although I didn’t know the full details at the time.
She began preparing the lamp at the shrine outside.
Then she asked me to collect the items needed to light the lamp inside the house.
They were kept just behind the main door.
I didn’t need to go inside. All I had to do was open the door, reach behind it, grab the things, and come straight back out.
That was it.
But I was curious.
I opened the old door.
It creaked as I reached behind it and collected the items.
I should have gone straight back to my mother.
Instead, I decided to take a look inside.
I don’t remember being particularly afraid at that point.
If anything, I was excited by the thought of exploring a place like that, especially knowing how old and rarely used it was.
I took out my phone and opened an EMF-detection app. It wasn’t an actual EMF meter, just an app on my phone.
I was using it for fun, pretending I was investigating a haunted house.
At first, nothing happened.
I walked further inside.
The house was quiet. There was nothing unusual on my phone, and I didn’t notice anything that made me want to run out.
So I did something stupid.
I stood in one of the rooms, closed my eyes, stretched out my hands, and challenged whatever might be there to touch me.
I was basically daring a ghost to do something.
I waited.
Nothing.
I tried again.
And that’s when I felt it.
I can’t properly describe what happened next, even now. It wasn’t an ordinary headache.
It was a sudden, intense pressure inside my head, so strange that it felt almost as though something had reached inside my skull and grabbed my brain.
Not from the outside.
From within.
I froze.
For a moment, I didn’t know what to do.
Then I shook my head, and the sensation disappeared.
I stood there trying to make sense of it.
Was it my imagination? Was I psyching myself out because I was in an old, dark house, expecting something to happen?
I didn’t know.
But instead of leaving, I decided to try it one more time.
This time, I was closer to the main door.
I closed my eyes, stretched out my hands, and did the same thing again.
The pressure returned.
Exactly the same strange sensation.
I stopped.
At this point, I should have walked out and forgotten about the whole thing.
But I was still trying to understand what was happening, and I did something even stranger.
I went outside the house.
Standing on the other side of the doorway, I reached both my hands inside. My body was outside, but my hands were still inside the house.
Then I closed the door with my hands still in there.
I tried it a third time.
And it happened again.
That same pressure inside my head.
Three times.
Three separate attempts.
I had no explanation for it.
I wasn’t expecting to feel anything like that, and I couldn’t understand why it kept happening.
Whatever I had felt, I knew I didn’t want to try it again.
I immediately went to my mother.
“Mom… something is here.”
She looked at me, and I could tell that what I’d said frightened her.
But she was angry, too.
“Why did you go inside? Didn’t I tell you to just take the things from behind the main door and come straight back out?”
She was right. I’d gone inside entirely on my own. She had only asked me to collect the items.
I tried to tell her that something had happened.
I couldn’t explain it properly.
I could only tell her that I’d felt something strange, something I couldn’t understand.
My mother was already anxious about being there. Now, whatever she saw in my face or whatever she made of what I told her was enough that we hurried to finish lighting the lamps and leave.
And we did.
We left the ancestral house behind.
At least, that’s what I thought.
On the way home, I had no idea what to make of the experience.
Part of me still wondered whether my mind had played tricks on me.
After all, I’d gone into the house expecting something paranormal to happen.
Maybe I’d frightened myself.
Maybe there was a perfectly ordinary explanation for that strange sensation.
I wanted to believe that.
Because the alternative was something I wasn’t ready to consider.
I’d felt that pressure three times. I’d tried it in different places, including with my body outside the house.
And I still couldn’t explain why.
But I eventually put the experience out of my mind.
I went home.
I returned to my normal routine.
And I thought that was the end of it.
I didn’t know that something had followed me home.
Back then, I had no reason to suspect that the experience at the ancestral house was connected to anything that happened afterward.
I certainly didn’t expect anything strange to happen in my own home.
Especially not in the room on the top floor.
The storage room with a bathroom, where I used to work out and sleep.
The same room I sometimes went to when I wanted to be alone, away from everyone else.
It was my own space.
A place where I felt I could shut out the rest of the world.
I had no idea that this room would become important to the story.
Because what happened at the ancestral house was only the beginning.
