For Halloween I wanted to do something a little different. Rather than talking about my favorite horror games, and movies like I did last year, this time I wanted to share a true story instead.
This is a true story that happened to me when I was 14 years old, and is one that continued well into my adult life. It is something I still cannot explain, but teenage me was terrified, and for the longest time it prevented me from playing games late at night, except for when using a handheld. But of course it wasn't just games it kept me from—it was staying up late in general.
That being said, outside of a few weird videos and photos, I do not have definitive proof of anything I'm about to say.
The Summer of 8th Grade Year:
My unexpected story began the summer of my eighth-grade year. I remember it quite vividly because it was the year my family finally purchased a home PC, and for the first time ever, I was able to stay up late at night talking to friends on MSN Messenger and playing games. I had just purchased a PS2 with my eighth-grade graduation money, and I was looking forward to finally getting to play all the great titles I had missed out on. Things were looking up, and the thought of going into a scary high school was the last thing on my mind. Yeah, it was going to be a great summer... But then something unexpected happened.
Although it has been over 20 years at this point, sometimes the whole ordeal feels like it was just yesterday. I was awake and talking to my friend Derek online while also watching TV in my room; I believe I had it on Nick at Nite. Our conversation wasn't anything too crazy, just talking about games and whatever TV show was on at the time, but then suddenly, something happened. My PC was in front of a large window in my room, with my TV to my right, and my bed to the left near my door. I'm not sure why I looked in that direction, but as I glanced off to the left, I thought I saw something in my doorway. Whatever it was, it was quick and seemed to side-step just out of my view. I never believed in ghosts or aliens or anything, but my blood ran cold, and I didn't know what to do.
It took a few minutes, but I rationalized what I had just seen as me being tired, and so I decided to go to bed. Rather than sleeping in my room, however, I closed the door and went to sleep on the couch. I guess a part of me was still struggling with what I thought I'd seen, so I felt "safer" not being near my own room. I remember my parents thinking it was weird I slept on the couch that night, but I kept quiet and again chalked it up to my brain playing tricks on me. But then I started hearing things... Not voices, but my own parents.
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| (Photo of my messy computer desk a few years later. Nothing changed between 8th grade and the date the picture was taken, outside of getting an iPod Nano.) |
The (Not so Secret) Secret:
Our house wasn't the biggest. The rooms were all decent-sized, but we're talking about five main rooms, a front porch, a back porch, and a basement. If anyone said anything in the house, it was pretty easy to hear what they were talking about. As a kid, I had countless Christmas gifts ruined simply because I overheard my parents talking, and anything my friends and I discussed would be heard by them as well. It's not that we tried to spy on each other; it just happened with our limited space. That's why my parents attempting to sneak around and tell each other stories behind my back didn't work, as I could mostly hear what they had to say. And there was something they were trying to keep hidden from me because they too couldn't explain it.
It turns out that even though I hadn't told them a single thing about my doorway, my parents had also been noticing strange things in our house. My dad's story especially freaked me out, as it was something I remembered happening without realizing it. According to him, he watched my mom walk out the front door at night and not come back. He was bringing laundry up from the basement when he watched her walk through the living room, past my door, and go outside. He thought to himself, "she wouldn't be going outside," and instead walked into my room to check if she was there. This is the moment I remember him just standing in my room without saying a word before turning around and walking out. I thought it was weird, but I didn't ask why he was there or what he was doing with his basket of clothes. He then went back to his own room and discovered my mom was sound asleep. It wasn't her he watched walk out the door.
On my mom's side of things, items were going missing around the house, and she had an interesting conversation with our neighbor. They weren't sure if they should say anything to her or not, but it had them a bit worried. Apparently, they had seen an older lady standing under our tree at night just looking at our house. According to them, she looked a lot like the lady who used to live there: a woman named Elsey. They knew it was physically impossible, as Elsey had passed away before my parents moved in, but they wanted to let her know there was someone out there.
These are the stories I would overhear my parents talk about that summer, but of course, they eventually came clean. I personally hadn't seen anything else, but the weird events around our house were just getting started.
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| (Photo of the tree in the front yard where "Elsey" was "seen.") |
The Remodel:
The end of the summer of 2005 was when my parents finally decided to remodel our kitchen. New counters, a center island, new furniture, etc.—a complete revamp of what we previously had. It was an exciting time for all of us, and it was a step toward getting the house my mom had always wanted. Our home was in disarray for quite some time because of this remodel, but when everything was said and done, it looked great! While not everything came out exactly as planned, it was a major upgrade, and "we" were all happy with it. Unknown to us, however, this is when things would get stirred up.
Not long after the remodel, a lot of things started going missing and showing up in weird places. I remember my cousins coming over to play The Sims on PC, and when I opened my CD case, I discovered it was gone. It wouldn't be until three to four years later that it would reappear between the pages of an old magazine on a bookshelf I didn't use, which is also where the power plug of my electric keyboard would appear years later... inside an old school binder. At the time, however, I simply knew the game was gone and figured I would never find it again.
Another event was when random music began playing from my room, and I discovered an old toy of mine in the closet was the cause of it. Again, I just assumed it was something rational like the batteries dying, but it was strange timing with all things considered. Still, this isn't what finally pushed things over the edge and made us all come clean with our own stories.
The Dog:
After that first summer night, I made it a habit of sleeping on the couch instead of in my own room. Being up too late began to creep me out, and staying in my room at night became a definite no-go. I was getting paranoid and doing my best to hide it, but the floodgates were about to break. That night my dad was sick, and my mom chose to stay in the living room as well. We had a large sectional couch, so we both had our own ends we could sleep on. I was in my usual spot where I couldn't see the door to my room, while my mom was facing it. That's when I dozed off, and my mom was a witness to the answer to another mystery...
Even when I did sleep in my room, I always shut my door. We had a dog I didn't want in there at night, and although she was mostly good, sometimes she liked to use my carpet as a toilet. Not sure why, but in her mind, that was the room to do things in. So, when I'd close and lock my door at night only to wake up to a wet spot, or something else, on the floor in the morning, it was always puzzling. The door would be open, and my parents would always blame me for not shutting it well or not actually locking it. Well, that night my mom and I were in the living room was yet another day I did in fact close my door, and my mom was the lucky one to see the door open itself—literally.
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| (Photo of the couch we had back then.) |
According to her, she watched our little Shih Tzu walk over to my door, sit in front of it, and the doorknob seemingly turned on its own. The door then opened, the dog walked in, and my mom raced after her. Once inside, she flipped on the light and saw our little dog all excited as she moved her head as if she were being petted. My mom called out to her quietly (as she didn't want to wake me up), and our dog ignored her. Eventually, my mom walked over and picked her up, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind her.
That next morning, my mom told me exactly what she saw, and this is when I too started telling her about the weird little things I'd noticed, and that first night. My mom then revealed to me that all of this had started months ago after she had gone to the graveyard with her friend to drop off flowers. When my mom stepped out of the car, the first tombstone she saw was none other than Elsey, which caused my mom to say to her friend, "Hey, I live in that lady's house!" While my mom also doesn't believe in ghosts, she can't help but wonder if this "Elsey" really did follow her home.
Over the Years:
After our whole "coming clean" conversation, Elsey became our answer to anything strange. We had guests in our house who told us they saw weird things at night, despite us not warning them about Elsey, and random objects continued to appear in random places. I personally never saw anything again myself, but I witnessed my sliding closet door open on its own multiple times, once while my cousin and I were playing Call of Duty together. Sometimes when I was using the webcam on MSN, there were weird graphical glitches behind me that I couldn't explain.
I became used to it, however, but was never able to capture any proof. The closest I ever got was when I received a PlayStation Vita on my 21st birthday, and I managed to capture this strange video using it.
It isn't much, but our ceiling fan simply started slowly spinning on its own, where it then picked up speed and then came back to a crawl. While recording, a black shadow moved across the ceiling, which I have no explanation for to this day. It isn't the strangest thing I've seen, but at least it was something to show what I had been dealing with.
Another incident was when our Christmas music box began playing on its own while company was over, but I missed the opportunity to grab my non-smart phone. This also caused me to miss it playing a second time as well. Again, all of this became normal to me, and I just accepted it.
The final event that happened to me while living in that house was during a rough patch in my life. I lost my job due to budget cuts, and moving out and living on my own was out of the question. So once again, I found myself staying up late at night in my parents' house, unsure of what I would do with my life going forward. Then, something hit me. Literally.
That night, I was up after 2:00 AM, and I was finally getting ready for bed. I had my door closed as usual, mainly to keep the cat out, and I remember walking over to the left side of my bed to get in it. Just as I was about to do so, however, something hit me in the back and made me jump! At first, I didn't realize what I was seeing, but as I looked at a round piece of plastic, I could feel the hairs on my neck stand up. What hit me was this, something I would later discover the next morning was actually a piece of my chair.
Here are the images I took after it happened to show fellow Netto's Game Room writer Sagi "GlacialLeaf" where I was standing, and what happened. They were never intended to be shared to the public, as I never expected to share this story.
And doing a quick Discord search for our old conversation history, it wasn't too difficult to locate the message itself:
I'm still a bit disturbed by this because I've never had anything like that happen. I saw and heard things, and had my stuff go missing, but I never had something actually "thrown" at me. It didn't hurt, but the fact that there was some force was just... not right. But as I said, this was the final thing to ever happen to me in that house, as my life was about to change.
Not too long after, I did find another full-time job, and eventually, I met the girl who would go on to become my wife. Of course, we warned her about the house and how Elsey might be real, but thankfully it didn't bother her. She had some stories to share of her own, and they honestly sounded a lot scarier than anything I ever encountered. But then one night, she was staying over sleeping on the couch, and she too had an experience, and it matched up with what my dad had said many, many years ago.
That morning, she was awakened by a lady whom she thought was my mom in a white nightgown, who walked through the living room, went up to the front door, opened it, closed it, and then stood with her hands on the glass just looking out. My wife wasn't sure what she was doing, but she assumed it was my mom and she simply covered her head and "went back to sleep." Not long after, my actual mom woke up, and my wife recounted the story to us both. The creepy thing is, I too heard the door open and close that morning, and I just assumed it was someone letting the cat out—but it wasn't.
Now:
Today, things are a bit different. As a married couple in our own house, we have not had more "Elsey" experiences, and my parents have said most of the weird stuff has stopped. There was the day a Christmas popcorn can seemingly unscrewed itself and rolled across the floor, but that could've been anything. (Maybe it wasn't on tight enough?) Other than that, our Elsey story has seemingly come to an end. We still have no explanation for the dozens of smaller things that happened over the years, nor for everything our guests have seen. Everyone we've known and talked to has only ever seen this lady in a white nightgown once, and I myself am still not sure what exactly I saw. There was white, but it moved too fast to see... Plus, I'm still not fully convinced I wasn't just tired.
Either way, these memories will forever be burned in the back of my mind, and ghosts remain one of the few things that creep me out in games and movies. I know it is weird to say considering I'm still not completely sold on the whole ghost thing, but at the same time, I can't help but have the thought in the back of my mind: "What if they are real, and what will I see next?"
What About Video Games?
So I told my story about Elsey, but I didn't fully explain how this fit into my video game playing, or even fully talk about the things that happened to me while playing games.
With all of these strange events first starting in 2005, my Nintendo DS actually became my lifeline when it came to playing games late at night. Rather than staying in my room, I'd go lay on the couch, throw a blanket over the back of the sectional, and basically make a "fort" where I couldn't see anything. I would then pull out my DS and spend countless hours late into the night working through whatever my current game was.
Animal Crossing: Wild World became a pretty big one between me and my friends, and it allowed me to continue talking to them without having to sit by my PC. Later on, my PSP would also join me on the couch, and as I got older, the 3DS and Vita were there by my side instead. I didn't have a smartphone until I landed my first full-time job, which is why my ceiling fan video was taken from my Vita. I would even use the web browsers on these devices to continue visiting websites and messaging friends through the browser version of apps like Skype.
Of course, I didn't always stay away from my room at night, as after high school I did finally start sleeping in there again, but I eventually realized that most of the "strange" things began happening after 1:30, and closer to 2:00. If I was wide awake, I made it a point to not be in my room, but if I was even a bit tired, I would go to bed, sometimes hiding under the covers as I watched something on Netflix while using my earbuds to block out all sound. (I'm sure I'm one of the only people in the world who had hundreds of hours of Netflix playtime on the 3DS!) And if I were to break this cycle and stay up later than usual while still in my room? Well, then things like the piece of chair hitting me would happen.
The other major incident that still stands out in my memory is one I didn't mention before because it relates directly to the game I was playing at the time—Beyond: Two Souls. Now, this is a game about spirit-like things and ghosts, so it really isn't too surprising that playing it late at night would start to bother me. I kept pushing through it, however, and tried to keep "Elsey" off of my mind, but one night, something made it impossible to do so.
I still remember it like it was yesterday. I reached the chapter where Jodie is a little girl in her house, and the objective was to basically just explore. By doing so, you can eventually go into the family's bathroom, and when looking in the mirror, a minor jumpscare happens. This dark, ghost-like face appears for half a second, scares Jodie, possibly scares the player, and then you move on. It's such a small, simple scene that I'm sure most people think nothing of it. For me, however? I think of what happened next to me. Or maybe to my house?
Thinking back, we're still not sure what it was, but shortly after seeing this moment in the game, my own house seemingly shook with a loud BANG and POP echoing from my closet. Despite it being close to 2 AM, it woke up both my parents and had them both running to see if I was okay. Of course I was, minus my heart pounding, but was our home okay? What made the sound, and what shook? We checked my closet and found nothing out of the ordinary—just clothes hanging on the hanger, and nothing had fallen in the basement. Everything was how it should be, and we never did find anything that said otherwise.
Still to this day, I cannot play that section of Beyond without thinking about that incident. We never figured out what caused it, and it never happened again.
And More:
Honestly, there are countless mini-stories I could tell, but we'll cut it off here. Typically, every holiday when family came over, at least someone would see or hear something too, but these experiences are not my own, nor do I know all of the details. Sometimes it was as simple as someone asking if anyone else saw a white light, while other times it was the sound of footsteps when no one was seemingly around. They were all strange, to say the least, but nothing that I can confirm truly happened. Still, it is a bit unsettling that some of these stories came from those who didn't know about Elsey or were visiting the house for the first time, so I guess there is always that to consider as well... Oh well, I guess it is just another part of the overall mystery that will never be solved.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my story! We'll save my car one for another day.
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