Childhood hauntings

By: Charlotte

When my mother was a young child she lived on a farm "Help Ons" (translated from Afrikaans it means "Help Us") in the Free State, South Afica. On that farm they experienced many supernatural phenomena which caused my mother ,as a child, to stammer. The house was a long way from the road and countless times they would see a car or a horse buggy driving down the road towards their house only to disappear once they went outside to meet it. This is one of the milder stories. Every night at about 21:00 a huge ball of red fire would come "flying" from the wind mill, this sounds highly suspicious, I know, but I have heard of similiar sightings across our country. It would would circle the house and return to the mill and disappear. Other "normal" everyday encounters included hearing the sugar being poured out in the kitchen, the next morning nothing odd is found, keys would rattle, footsteps heard in the passages and the windows would rattle and this freaked my mum out to no end and she ended up screaming every night (even today, every now and then we still have to get up to calm her). Nighttime visits included the half-bodied man (his lower half was missing) standing at the foot of the bed leaning over the children watching them until they woke up screaming. My uncle would be waking up with a heavy weight pushing down on his chest and would be paralyzed, the only thing that ever worked to get rid of it was to "pray it away". There was the funny encounter of the time when my mum's sister and her very young son came to visit and he woke everybody with his laughing at the funny "skeleton man" looking at him. But the strangest of all was the following which only happened a couple of times: they would wake up in the morning to see a huge mound of sand somewhere in the field, only to get there and to find a huge hole in the ground where the mound was and the next day nothing odd was there. All of this happened almost 24 years ago, the house no longer exists, it's a barn now. The farm still exists but is no longer held in the family. it would be interesting to know if the new owners experienced the same oddities... Today we are still haunted by various spirits and oddities, might this be a family thing?? We are all aware of the activities, but none of us are as freaked out about it as my mother as she remembers being traumatized as a young girl.