Mom's Disembodied Voice

This story happened to me when I was sixteen. I’m forty-five now, but anytime I think about it, I still get chills.

I lived with my parents in house that was built in the 1940s, and there had been many families through it, although I’d never heard about anything bad or spooky happening there. All of that changed for me one spring afternoon in 1995.

I’d just gotten home from school. As was my routine, I ran through the front door and straight into the kitchen to get something to eat. Just as I opened the snack drawer, my mom called out from somewhere upstairs.

“Don’t eat too much,” she said, “we’re making lasagna for dinner.”

There was something weird about her voice. It was unusually muffled, like she was standing behind a closed door. I went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to her. I said I was just having a snack and promised her I wouldn’t spoil my appetite. I half expected some funny remark about my teenager appetite sending the family into bankruptcy. Maybe even a sarcastic laugh or something. But she said nothing.

I called up the stairs again to make sure she’d heard me. “Mom?”

Silence for about ten seconds, giving me enough time to wonder if I’d imagined hearing her voice. Then she spoke again.

“Don’t eat too much,” she said, “we’re making lasagna for dinner.”

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I should have heard her voice more clearly than I had from the kitchen. But her voice still had the same weird quality about it, like she was standing behind a door or holding her hand in front of her mouth.

It freaked me out so much that it didn’t even register until later that she’d said the exact same words, with the same inflection. As if someone had hit “repeat” on a tape recording.

I walked up the stairs to find all of the bedroom doors open. Even the bathroom door at the end of the hall was wide open. I called out for my mom and there was no response. I looked everywhere, including the master bedroom closet. There was no one home.

I never heard anything like that again in that house. And I never said anything to my mom about it, even after she came home from the grocery store half an hour later to find me sitting on the front porch waiting for her like a scared kid.

I’ve read stories on your website and others that talk about this kind of phenomenon, where people claim to have heard and even interacted with the voices of people who aren’t actually there. There have been stories that say sometimes ghosts imitate the voices of living people, but I don’t really know what the purpose of that would be. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?