Ghosts of childhood.

First and foremost I'd like to say that I believe in ghosts.
I don't have an explanation for them or could tell you exactly what they are. It would be extremely presumptuous of me to say that I understand what "ghosts" are... They may be departed souls, after-images from life, inter-dimensional beings, et al. Who knows.
What I do know is that I've had several experiences over the years that I can't explain. For lack of a better explanation, I'll call them ghosts.

My history with "ghosts" goes back to early childhood. The first true encounter I can remember came at the home of my Aunt and Uncle in Massachusetts. Unfortunately I can't remember what town they lived in at the time, but I believe it was either Whitman or Abington.
They held a family party; one of those summer-time, backyard barbecue things. No special occasion that I can recall (this was in the mid 1980s.)
I don't remember having had any other encounters during my early childhood. This event, however, remains with me, fresh as what happened this morning.
During the late afternoon I had entered the house to use the bathroom. I was alone, walking down a hallway toward the front door. There were several doorways off of this hallway and I walked past my Father, Uncle and other men watching a baseball game in the den on my left.
The front door itself was not used and left locked. To give you an idea of the setup, the front door was behind a second door, that of a mud room.
The mud room door was all glass, as were the windows on each side that ran floor to ceiling. That glass was frosted and therefore opaque. The house sat facing west so the setting sun was shining through the doors and the mud room glass doors/windows.
As I approached the doorway about to turn right and onto the stairs leading up to the bathroom a figure of what, even given a childs perspective, was incredible height stepped out into the area between the front door and the mud-room door (So as to be behind the opaque glass, but inside the mud-room itself.).
The figure was dark (not black, but very, very dark.) and stood, as if startled by my presence, turned toward me with it's arms extended out slightly from its body. The oddest thing about this figure was it's head. I can remember it vividly; It's head was conical and enormous compared to that of your average person. What it reminded me of was the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live. (Sounds silly, but trust me, it was frightening.)
I stood staring at the figure (and it, apparently, at me.) for what seemed like minutes though it was mere seconds. I turned on a dime and bolted back down the hallway toward the den and my father.
I was calmed and i remember little of the rest of the day, just bits and pieces.
It was years later that my cousin was at one of my family parties, talking about our old places of residence, that she mentioned the "haunted house" she used to live in.
Apparently the family had experienced several "ghost encounters" of their own at that same house.
This cousin and I were not close and I rarely saw her or her family outside of larger family functions and her admission regarding her former haunted residence only served to confirm , at least to me, my experience.
Just a year ago another cousin of mine ,who was living with me at the time, and I were talking about the paranormal. Specifically, some experiences we both had at our place of employment (more on this in another post) when he started telling me about an encounter he had had as a child...Can you see where this is going?
It turns out he had a similar experience at that haunted family house. Not only an experience, but one eerily similar to mine. He had spent more time at that house and is a few years older so he remembered more about it.
As he told me the story I started getting gooseflesh. Over the years I had all but convinced myself that what i had witnessed was perhaps just the overactive imagination of a little boy. Between the one cousin confirming that the house was, in fact, haunted and the other cousin relating a tale so oddly similar to my own that I was left with no doubt about the authenticity of my encounter.
This was, indeed, my earliest run in with a ghost, but by no means the last.
When i have some time i will write about some of the scarier things that happened, most of them at the aforementioned place of employment. I'm still freaked out by these all too real and all too frightening occurrences.

Thanks for reading!

I had a good handful of supernatural experiences like those as a kid. It happens to a lot of children. I've got a theory that the whole 'monsters under the bed/in the closet' thing was derived from these encounters. Children are most susceptible because of they're innocence, they haven't yet been tainted by the world. And also because these entities hate humankind with a passion, and they like to take advantage of them in their vulnerability during the 'imprint stage' of life to sow seeds of fear. In regards to your experience in a house you refer to as haunted, I don't think they were ghosts. Things can happen in homes and other buildings that can open doors to certain entities that are very territorial. I can totally understand why you'd try to rationalize that it was your imagination. Those things tend to stick with you, and gnaw at you sometimes.

I have my story(s) on my own thread, but I will say here that I saw my first ghost at age 6, and it was with me from that moment on ( at my house ) until I was 14. Even then it still came around from time to time. I think I was around 22 the last time it let me know it was still there. I had to close my mind off to it before it would leave me alone. I have had other encounters with other entities since then. Guess I just have something about me that they are attracted to.

The "ghost" you described sounds more like one of the Nephlim beings instead of a human spirit. Creepy!
I look forward to reading the rest of your stories.

Again, thanks for reading. I'm hoping to post more tomorrow night. Being as most of my other experiences came as an adult, They are a bit more detailed and, at least to me, a whole lot scarier; Full-bodied apparitions, recurring incidents, noises, voices, et al.
I hope you guys all check them out... AND SHARE.
The next story is, by far, the creepiest and involved not only myself, but numerous witnesses and the history to back it up.

Until then.