On the other hand, though, it was late at night right after my little sister was born and my father was working late at the local carpet manufacturing plant a few miles away, so it was just me, my mother, and my infant sister in the house. My mother was putting my little sister in her crib, and just got finished making sure I got to bed safely when she heard a low, guttural growl and scratching coming from the front of the house. (We didn't have any animals at the time, so we really have no explanation for this occurrence.) She went into my room to make sure I wasn't pulling her leg, but my four-year-old self was already fast asleep. She went to investigate the noise, but there was nothing in the living room, the kitchen, or any of the adjacent rooms. She went to the porch to make sure there was no wild animal out front getting into the trash bins, and there was nothing to be seen (even with the flood lights on). When she returned inside, she heard something else. She heard a deep, slow laugh coming from the end of hallway, near my room and next to her room where my baby sister slept in her crib at the time. She rushed to the source, but was again met with nothing. She raced to check on my sister and I, woke me up from my slumber and told me to sleep with her in her room until my father came home the following morning. She heard nothing else of that nature, except for thumping noises all around the house.
Now, I am twenty-two, and I get weird feelings all around this old house. I'm no longer in the back room I lived in as a child (that belongs to my sister), instead I am at the beginning of the hallway across from the bathroom and adjacent to the living room. In said hallway, there is a small, old cabinet that is the current place of my grandmother's ashes. In the living room is an old rocking char that belonged to my great grandmother, and resided in her room before she passed away. Along with these relics, as I would call them, my parents recently finished renovating this old house, and making it more modern (something my grandmother kind-of opposed on several occasions). We also now have a puppy that is highly protective of us, and likes to bark at signs of danger.
Given these premises, the other night my puppy woke me up chasing something around the house. "But Briana, it's a puppy, they like to do that kind of thing." Well, dear reader, this behaviour was severely out of character for her. When it is bedtime, she is usually found burrowing underneath my blankets and curled up in the bend of my knees, so her running up and down the hallway and barking at two distinct areas of the house was unsettling for me. If you were wondering what those areas were reader, they were none other than the hallway cabinet and the rocking chair in the living room. Now call me superstitious or a kook, but I sincerely believe that animals can sense that kind of thing, and my puppy had never met my grandmother or great grandmother (they both passed in 2014, and we adopted Belle in 2017). I could understand why she would be freaking out at these areas, she perceived them as a threat and wanted to warn us--even though I know they wouldn't be if my relatives did cross over to check up on us. I was frozen in my bed during this encounter due to the fact that I heard where Belle's barks were coming from, and I had been getting strange feelings from the rocking chair recently so I didn't investigate. At all. Belle's barking went on for about ten minutes before she returned to bed and went to sleep.
Call me crazy, yeah, but my house is old and full of older family heirlooms and relics; I've seen too much Buzzfeed Unsolved and Ghost Adventures to just dismiss this as a coincidence or random event. I just hope the next "encounter" isn't like the growling my mother experienced, or I'm living in my car. If it does, though, I'm calling Ryan and Shane.
B
