Real Ghost Story: A Family Cabin – The land I grew up on has a lot of history, and I mean a lot. Findings have been made in the area all the way back from around iron age, although no proper excavation have been made due to how far north it is (much of the land was covered in ice during the ice age making archeologist more likely to make their bets in the southern parts of the country) and probably due to political and funding reasons.
Throughout my childhood, me and my siblings made different finds around the lands, but mostly from more recent times. Things like old coins, old ceramic, parts of walls, old shoes and many other little things like this. It was normal to come across these sorts of things during work or play at the farm. My mother also has an impressive collection of old cowbells that she has found around the fields. From massive bells, as big as a milk bottle, to tiny ones as small as a thimble. It is as if the lands reeks of history, you almost get this aura of respect for the hard work that must have taken place there over the centuries.
Hence, a lot of paranormal or at least odd things have happened to me around the house. This time I will tell you about the cabin so that my story doesn’t go all over the place. The cabin is a two-storied timbered house that once was the main building of our property. For whatever reason, it was moved and sold out of family. It wasn’t moved very far though, only a few hundred meters out in the woods from the main road. When I was about eight years old the cabin was put up for sale again and after much negotiations my mom managed to buy it back into our family. The cabin now served as a summer house and the previous owners had painted it red and added a new part to it, what was supposed to become a bathroom but left mid work and never completed.
This cabin was quite an adventure for us kids and we spent many summer nights in it. It did have electricity but no heating (part from a nonfunctional fireplace) so it wouldn’t have been possible during winter. There was something about this place though, this feeling you just couldn’t shake. As if whenever you were there alone you would feel as if someone was standing behind you. This constant creepy feeling of being watched.
The first peculiar thing I experienced there was when me and my older sister were sleeping together in one of those old wooden, pull out beds on the ground floor. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard what sounded like a woman sobbing. As I was very comfortable and almost asleep I didn’t think too much of it, I only dragged the blanket over my head and went back to sleep. The next morning my sister told me she had heard someone singing during the night and at first had thought it was me.
She said it sounded like a woman singing or humming a lullaby. This was weird but we honestly found it more intriguing than scary. I was (and still am) fascinated by the past and wanted to know about the people who might have lived it.
The next thing that occurred was a lot more frightening. This time me and the same sister plus our two cousins were all staying in the upstairs loft. We were eating treats, playing games and having a lot of fun when we suddenly clearly heard someone slam open the door downstairs, proceed with heavy footsteps (as if it was a man wearing working boots) into the hallway and entering the living room. Terrified we all went quiet and looked at each other, not knowing what to do. Finally, my sister bravely said in a loud voice “Dad, did you hear that?! I think there is someone downstairs” as to make the person downstairs think that us children were not all alone up there. Everything went quiet after this and we couldn’t hear anything else. We waited up a few hours until it started to get brighter outside (this happens around 02:00 am around this time of year) then slowly went downstairs to investigate.
It was terrifying, slowly walking down the steep stairs with some of my older brothers’ dumbbells as our only weapon. Downstairs there was absolutely nothing, the door was firmly locked still, there was no other way to get in or out, plus, we would have clearly heard if whoever it was had left again. This same event reoccurred later that summer for my sisters when they were staying there with some friends.
Other small weird happenings we sort of got used to or brushed off as the wooden old house talking, but this one summer a few years later a far scarier event took place. My sister and I decided we would live in the cabin for a few weeks, sort of as a small test on how it would be to live on our own and cook our own food. We had a lot of fun during this time and were working on a tree-house during the days. Sometimes we would work to clear the small stream running by the cabin, it was quite blocked by old garbage as it was running down a long hill. We fished out old vintage beer cans, buckets and other exciting items. So, we were quite occupied and had a blast. We also used the water from this stream to do our dishes as there was no plumbing or water in the cabin.
One morning we made porridge but burnt it severely so instead of even trying to clean the pot that same morning, we filled it up with water and left it out on the porch. This particular day we needed to get back to the main house to fill up our food supplies and we ended up also staying to watch our favorite Saturday Disney show whilst eating popcorn.
Walking back to the cabin quite late we were happy, laughing and relaxed. Upon arriving we immediately took the pots to the stream, tried our best to rinse the burnt one in the running water and filled up another one to boil it and use for proper cleaning. We were chatting to each other happily and carried the pots back to the cabin. Once we were standing right outside the door and I had sat the key in the lock we suddenly froze. I have a hard time explaining this but it was as if we both instantly, without a word knew that we couldn’t go inside.
It felt as if someone was standing right inside the door, waiting for us and was going to do something nasty once we entered. The door had windows, so we could clearly see that there was no one there, but the sense of fear and evil was just overwhelming. Without saying a word to each other we slowly backed off the porch, put the pots down on the grass and started backing away from the cabin. We backed slowly all the way out until the main road, where we started running as if our lives depended on it. We ran all the way back to our house. None of us could explain what had just happened.
This whole staying in the cabin thing was sort of an “grown up” test for us, so that night we secretly spent in another cabin on our property. We made other excuses not to stay there any longer and never told anyone about what happened. Our mom was (unsurprisingly) mad at us for not going back to the cabin to clean and clear out our things. But we were just too terrified to go back there and didn’t get to it until over a month later.
As the cabin have such a long history and used to be the main house of the farm, the possibilities are endless to what might have caused some of this. The saddest things my mom has told me about it, is that one of the families living there lost all of their children over the course of one year. As someone awaiting my first I cannot begin to imagine the pain they must have gone through, but I do believe it could have left an imprint. This makes me think of the sobbing I heard that night.