I Let Them In (2)

For as long as I can remember, I've been into the paranormal and anything that had to do with ghosts or anomalies, witchcraft, vampires, etc. But, in sixth grade, I had an urge to contact the other side, just for the sake of doing it. So, I began playing this game I called, simply, Pencils.

In pencils, you'd have two people, each holding three pencils by the tips, then place the free ends of the pencils together to form a rectangle. Before we'd start, we'd usually just ask for a spirit to come forth and budge the pencils, which would happen. Then, we'd go through with the rules, explaining it to the spirit, like, "Pushing them inwards means 'Yes', outwards means, 'No'." and then we'd proceed to asking simple questions. We'd sometimes even ask stuff that only one of us knew and it would tell the truth.

Well, one night, my cousin, aunt, mother, and I all went to my room to play Pencils. We got straight to the point, looking for something to scare us, we asked "Point to where you are in the room." and the pencils arched in the direction of my Aunt. We all laughed, but she exchanged places with my Mom anyway. My cousin asked again, "Where are you now?" and this time, the pencils went in the opposite direction, still toward my Aunt. As we continued to play the game, I got the idea to make sure we weren't just moving it ourselves, and I folded a paper into a tent shape, stood it up, and asked, "If you exist, spirit, then make the paper flat." My cousin laughed and said I was crazy, but we all shut up as the corner of the tent flickered, then the whole tent went flat as if a hand was on it. All of our jaws were open in shock, and we screamed when the tent suddenly popped back into the upright position!

This made my Aunt and Cousin decide that they had seen enough and wanted to leave. But before they got up, I managed to ask again, "Where are you in the room?" it pointed to my aunt. I asked, "Are you evil?" as a joke, but it said yes. Then, as we were about to get up, I asked, "Where do you live?" and it pointed to the ground. A few days later, my cousin came to stay the night with me and we played Pencils for a good part of the night, using a home-made Ouija board just incase the spirits needed to spell something out,but we conversed with two spirits mainly, whom we named, with their approval, Sylvia and Raymond. Sylvia was a girl of eight, and Raymond was her older brother of fifteen. At one point, the pencils began to get rough and jerking out of our hands. There was a third spirit in the room.

This one said he was by the window and he was the father of Sylvia and Raymond. He was angry. Sylvia was scared, and told us where she was hiding: under my bed. My cousin got brave and turned to the window where the father spirit claimed to be and yelled at him to leave us. After that night, strange things started happening. My older brother who knew nothing of the spirits or games I was playing, woke up one night claiming he'd had a bad dream where a little girl ran into his room, sat on his bed and whispered something to him, when he heard this angry screaming of someone he took to be her father, saying, "Get back in here!" coming from my room. He then said that the girl got up, shut the door and told my brother to hush, and everything would be okay, as the angry father continued to scream and beat the wall.

I told my brother he was crazy, but I knew, I'd let something in. Another night, as I scrubbed the bathtub, I was home alone, but felt as if I were being watched from the doorway. I kept turning around, but nothing was there. Finally I said, "You guys, leave me alone!" referring to the spirits that I was well aware of by then. As I turned to continue scrubbing, the restroom door slammed shut and the light flicked off.

In a matter of months, I'd heard tapping coming from the other side of my bedroom wall, coming from the guest room that had been empty for two years. I heard footsteps walking around in circles above my ceiling, my bedroom door began to swing shut only when I'd enter. If anyone else came in, it'd be still, so everyone thought I was crazy. I began seeing streaks of black stream across the floors, and became scared to even enter my own room. I'd witnessed a shadowed hand reaching out for me from behind, but as I turned, it disappeared. I'd heard voices chanting something. I'd sometimes come home and the whole house, or just my room would smell like cigarette smoke, doors would constantly shut on me. Only me. And once, my mom and her friend claimed to have seen the hall rug lift off the ground.

This all lasted until my mom did some strange candle blessing to our house, then it went away. Nothing happens anymore, except the occasional light flicker, but my door still slams shut on me!