This all started for us back in 2009. My daughter, Maya was 7. We had just moved into a 200-year-old farmhouse in the countryside on 100 acres. We thought it would be amazing. It was just myself, Maya and my youngest daughter Maddy who was 5 at the time.

We only rented the house and lived there for less than one year because strange things kept on happening. Maya kept telling me that there was a growling sound in her bedroom and that there was a shadow standing in her bedroom door. She kept insisting that her little sister was talking to a little red haired girl named “Charlotte” who “hated Maya” (even though her sister denied this). We kept finding the back door open and thought the handle must be broken because the house was so old, so put a sliding bolt on it and I was woken up twice to incredibly loud bangs in the middle of the night like someone had hammered on the door, but it was winter and there were no footprints in the snow around the doors.

Weird things started happening, our Doberman Pinscher started aggressively barking at the walls and closets and then would start backing up as if something was having a standoff with him. It started to get creepy and I gave notice to my landlord. We all started sleeping down in the living room together.

The final straw before we moved was the smell in the house. I kept the house scrupulously clean. I had my dad check the attic to make sure it couldn’t be a rat or a mouse, but by the time we moved out (when everything was at it’s worst in the house) the house smelled like rotting meat. It was at its worst upstairs, I had my landlord check the cellar, the attic, the closets, everywhere to try to determine the source of the smell. Some people couldn’t smell it at all, some people could quite strongly. When we were home alone it was nauseating.

We moved out of that house into a house in a subdivision surrounded by lots of other houses and we thought all that creepiness was over. We didn’t really talk about what had happened, just that it was a creepy old house and that what had happened was unexplainable but was over now.

We don’t go to Church, but I do raise my Girls with a knowledge of religions and spirituality. I want them to choose the Faith/Spirituality that best suits them. Their rooms are filled with crosses and Dreamcatchers and Angels and Crystals. I think the inclusion is beautiful. So I didn’t have a knowledge yet of demons or spiritual oppression or shadow people or any of that. I still thought naïvely it was just a run in with a creepy old house.

It was about 3 months after we had moved into our new house (rental) that Maya started complaining about the voices in her bedroom. She said they would come out of the heating vent in her bedroom floor and wall and from under her bed. Then they started coming from her stuffed animals she kept on her desk. Then her bed started shaking. I kept assuring her it was just her imagination, but one night I was woken to her screaming, I ran into her bedroom and she was balled up by the headboard of her bed. She had tried to run from her room to mine (which were separated by a staircase, and had looked down the stairs to see a small boy crouching at the bottom of the stairs. As soon as Maya looked at him he darted up the stairs inhumanly fast).

I told Maya that everything was alright. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to “buy into this thing” by agreeing with her that she had seen this (at this point I 100% did NOT believe in ghosts etc), but I DID want to say SOMETHING supportive to calm her down. I said that she didn’t have to be afraid of anything in the house because mommy was the biggest & strongest thing in the house and if there was ANYTHING at all in the house that was up to no good it would run in fear from me. As soon as I said that I felt the coldest wash of air go over my head, left arm, side and left leg, like someone had opened a front door in the winter. Then it was gone. I wasn’t scared though, I was furious, but kept my cool in front of my daughter and didn’t say a thing.

From that night onward my daughter started to complain almost constantly of seeing 3 tall skinny shadow figures. They all had red eyes and one had its head almost totally decapitated. It got to the point to where she refused to sleep alone and then her little sister started complaining of hearing bangs from her closet.

My daughters started sleeping in Maya’s room together and I slept in my youngest daughter’s room to “investigate” the closet bangs. As I was falling asleep there were several really loud thumps from her closet. I thought for sure the cat must’ve climbed inside. I turned on the light and opened her closet but it was empty.

A couple of weeks later Maya was at her desk drawing and started yelling for her sister & I to come quickly and look. We stood at her bedroom window and looked outside. I didn’t get there as fast as her sister, but Maya said that a figure had been sitting across the road from our house on the sidewalk looking up at her window. She said it looked like a cross between a man and a baboon. Her sister saw it too this time. This was the only time her sister ever saw anything, though her sister heard things. The next morning when we woke up there were scratches on the wall downstairs, through the paint down to the drywall, 3 in a row (like 3 fingernails?) the girls said they did not do it and the dog and cat would not be able to reach up that high.

I pretty much at this point was ready to tear my hair out. Both my girls were convinced our house was haunted, they were both sleeping in my room with me and our dog was starting to act strange again, rushing windows and the fence constantly.

Maya started having “sleep paralysis”. At the time she thought something in her room was attacking her. She would wake up but be completely unable to move or speak or anything and the shadow figure in the corner would move closer to her. Then the “shadow men” were joined by “huge shadow spiders”.

At this point I was at my wits end and took her to see a Psychiatrist because she wasn’t eating or sleeping anymore and was seeing these shadow men even at school. They did an assessment and diagnosed her with Bi-polar Disorder and Anxiety and put her on medication and she started seeing a Mental Health Counselor & Psychiatrist on a regular basis. She told me that she would never get better in that house because it had “bad energy”, so we moved out and bought our own house, one that we had built for us, so new house, new energy and right by the water which is great energy for her.

We moved in Spring of 2014 and we had a blissful few months of no apparitions. Then Maya’s sleep paralysis started back up, then the shadow figures, then she started seeing balls of light in the upper hallway of our house outside the bedrooms. She sees one shadow figure so regularly now that she has actually given it a name and thinks it might be watching over her. She drew a pic of it for her doctor and it looks pretty demonic to me. She has seen a girl running toward her with her jaw hanging open and black blood spilling out of her mouth and she has also see figures totally bathed in white light.

They keep increasing the dosage of her medication but all of this is not going away. Other than this stuff she is a healthy little girl. She has had a full physical, there are no underlying health issues here.

I’m just desperate for some help or advice from anyone because her health team wants to institutionalize her for a 6-10 wk program within the next 3-6 months where they will most probably take her off her meds and try others. It’s an inpatient program in a city 2 hours away with family visits only on the weekends and she is only 13yrs old and does NOT want to go.

My head tells me this is the right decision, but my heart tells me to keep her close and safe.

The doctors say this is all make believe, all in her mind. All a manifestation of Anxiety.

But I have seen so much bizarre stuff, heard so much bizarre stuff, felt so much bizarre stuff these last few years that I am SO conflicted!

Please help. And PLEASE only legit and grounded advice.

Respectfully yours,

Karen.