u/LolPineapplesDawg

Even if the number of homeschooled children is 'low', I don't think children should be pulled out of public schooling without some level of oversight or standardisation the parents/caregivers have to follow.

I think the biggest problem with homeschooling is that its not regulated in most jurisdictions, and it often allows abusive, neglectful, or ignorant and uneducated parents to screw over a child's education, or set them back developmentally.

You can mix and match any combination of those poor character traits, and you'll still inherently understand that this person is not in any position to be responsible for anyone's learning. On top of the fact that many children are pulled out of public school by their abusers, simply so crimes and evidence of abuse can be hidden, with some even dying.

"Hurr durr, let me ignore the final point entirely and make it a single issue about the laws and education" - Basically your comments.

Now, I’m gonna preface by stating that what I’m sharing is a long and personal testimony, and may be complex, and probably not as exciting as other encounters/hauntings since this takes place over the course of 10 years.

You don’t have to believe what I’m sharing or be moved by my experience, but I still ask to be spoken to with at least a modicum of consideration because at the end of the day everything I’m feeling still has real emotional weight to me, and regardless of your spiritual beliefs, the real life events that took place certainly played a hand in my ability to navigate my experiences or make sense of them. 

Because I am working from memory, I apologise beforehand if my timeline of events gets confusing, or if I accidentally omit any important details that would contextualise any creepy incidents. Please be patient with details that may seem irrelevant, I promise I’m including it for a reason. I’ll be using my best writing skills to make this as legible and easy to follow as possible. I also don’t use AI, I just spent a lot of time writing essays in school.

What follows is a lengthy, somewhat complex recollection of events that have been going on for about the better part of a decade.

My testimony begins here:

In spring of 2014, my siblings and I made the decision to run away from our abusive father and live with our mother. Because of this, we were reeling back from a lot of trauma and were particularly vulnerable in many ways. We had to live in a DV shelter for a few months while our mother house-hunted. We first moved into our new house on December 4th of that year. For the first night it was just me and my brothers, getting the house ready for everyone else.

When we got there, we moved our boxes upstairs, and piled them into a pyramid in the corner of one of the bedrooms, our logic being that we would only unpack everything once the furniture arrived. I remember even checking to make sure it was all stable before going back to the living room.

I was curious about the basement since this was the first home we ever had with one. When my brothers and I went downstairs, we found a maroon coloured symbol that seemed to be melted into the concrete next to the furnace, like a rock hard wax. The symbol is an encircled, six sided star. 

(I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out years later while watching a recap about the movie “Hereditary” that this symbol is called a “Seal of Solomon” and yes, it is still there. I am willing to take video and pictures when I have the devices to do so)

We set up a flat screen, a dvd player, and made a bed out of blankets on the living room floor, then watched movies until we fell asleep. I vividly remember watching a movie called ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ as I went to bed. Anyways, that night I was awoken multiple times by what sounded like someone running up the basement stairs, only to stop very abruptly at the basement door. It definitely freaked me out, but I told myself the house was settling, and that I’d come to know each creak and groan in time, which was partly true.

Every time I was close to falling back asleep I would also hear a loud thud coming from upstairs as if something heavy had been thrown, and I could hear it coming from the same room with the boxes. I also explained it away by telling myself I probably didn’t check the stability of the boxes enough. I checked the room when morning rolled around, and I found the boxes scattered, with many overturned and in opposite corners. I found it odd but never brought it up with my family.

In the most recent weeks and months after moving in, I would find myself being awoken by some ice cold touch in the middle of the night. I prefer sleeping on my tummy, and randomly, I would feel this ice cold sensation run down my back which would jolt me awake. I could distinctly feel multiple fingers running down my spine. The touch was so cold that the chilly feeling on my skin even lingered for a bit once I woke up. I remember sitting up in my bed, just looking around my room, all hazy eyed and confused, then trying to go back to sleep just to be woken up by the cold touch again. The third time it happened, I noped out of my room and asked one of my siblings to sleep next to me. I noticed it didn’t happen as long as someone else was with me.

As we settled into our new home, a multi-years long series of incidents took place that only began to emerge as an escalating pattern in hindsight.

2015:

In 2015, I was in high school and dating my first girlfriend. She kept claiming she could hear a sort of growling sound in my room whenever I left her alone, and honestly, I just didn’t believe her. That is until one day we were just sitting quietly when I heard clear as day, the sound of a growling dog beside my bed. It was gruff, and vicious. It scared the shit out of me, and when I looked at her and I could see the mix of ‘I told you so’ and horror on her face. She insisted we just ignore it, and put on some music, so we did.

Later, it escalated to seeing shadows. At first it was just me. I’d awake in the mornings to see a tall shadow figure exiting my bedroom, or as if all the shade in my room was sucked out the door. It had the silhouette of a tall man, nothing sinister outright, but still unsettling.

My mom was having a conversation with a neighbor who was telling her that creepy things happen around here, and they mentioned some sort of dark cloud that appears in people’s homes.

2016:

By 2016, the rest of my family had their own encounters with this shadow. Once while my sister and mother were baking in the kitchen, I saw my sister’s expression freeze as her eyes followed something that moved across the room, and when I looked in the same direction I could see the perfect silhouette of a person on the bathroom door across the hall. A door that was illuminated directly by light.

And by mid 2016, it had escalated from seeing a shadow figure and hearing occasional noise to having things violently thrown across rooms, sometimes right at you. One night while my mother was putting my younger siblings to bed, a Barbie dream car was thrown from the top shelf of the closet, and whipped across the room. There was no possible way for a vertically falling car to be launched horizontally with that much energy, even with a start in motion. That same year, my aunt was visiting and doing laundry in the basement, when a framed picture of my cousin was flung from the windowsill towards her, shattering the glass pane inside. She was inconsolable because she said there was no way it should have lifted itself the way it did.

That September, a classmate of mine came to my door and asked to see our house, and explained that he used to live here when we asked why. My mother said yes and let him in. He didn’t share much details, but he had a smile on his face when he asked if we had any creepy experiences, and when I asked him to elaborate, he just said ‘Nevermind’ and left.

Oddly enough, that same year a new DOOM title was released, in spring, and it was here that my youngest brother (an atheist at the time) developed a sensitivity to occult symbolism. Pentagrams, upside down crucifixes, hexagrams, or any other occult symbol in general gave my brother nasty headaches and made him feel nauseous to look at.

2017:

One March morning in 2017, I was sitting in my basement and listening to music as I was mentally preparing for the day. I distinctly remember the time being just after 7AM, and out of the corner of my eye I could see a shadow on the concrete wall. When I looked at it, I could see what looked like someone hanging from the neck, like a suicide. In the direction of the shadow, I saw it was coming from a punching bag, however the punching bag didn’t have anything sitting above it to project the shadow of a head, and it was too round to have the lean proportions of a human torso. 
Later that morning, I was informed by my mother that my younger cousin had hung himself, his time of death, 7AM. (This also personally haunts me more than words can describe)

This incident also leads me to believe I was intentionally shown something I wouldn’t have otherwise known, AKA forbidden/hidden knowledge.

2018:

Beginning in 2018, the sightings of the shadows changed. They went from standing in doorways, and moving across halls to standing and watching from strange positions. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like the logic of reality became fragile, almost like dream logic. Shadows would appear to peek out from behind furniture that was flush against the wall, or you’d see a head peaking downward at you from the top corner of a doorway. Shapes of people behind spaces they couldn’t possibly fit. Lingering just long enough for me to try and focus my eyes while my blood ran cold, before fading into the light, or the dark, depending on where it was.

It was during this time my brothers and I also began to develop chronic nightmares, and sleep paralysis. Many times, we would talk in the mornings to discover we were all having bad dreams or sleep paralysis at the same time in the night.

When I would have sleep paralysis, I would see pale, spindly, emaciated figures staring at me from the dark hall or my closet. They would lurch towards me in jagged, clumsy steps, and I would wake up screaming. 

My brother, C, would feel hands grasping at him all over his body, as if disembodied arms were reaching up through the bed and trying to pull him through the mattress. He described it as terrifying, saying that each touch alone could make you feel violated in body and mind. My second brother, L, would see the pitch black figure of a man with horns and goat legs, usually blocking the only light source in his room.

L developed a bit of an obsession, or a fascination, after the sleep paralysis episodes began. He would sketch picture after picture of what he saw, depicting a goat legged man blocking all the light. I destroyed the drawings, and he stopped. (On one occasion in 2022, L had a sleep paralysis episode and saw that same devil figure, and later that day my father called to tell him about a weird nightmare he had in which a devil was staring at him as he slept. My brother never shared with him that he had sleep paralysis that night.)

It was also during this time that I started being awoken by the sound of someone else breathing in my room. And it still happens today. I’m a very light sleeper, and I immediately hold my breath, half asleep trying to listen closer whenever I hear that disembodied exhale.

2019:

It was in 2019 when my mother and I both started experiencing dreams, and premonitions of future events. She came to me crying, saying that she believed her brother (my uncle) was going to die. Just three months later, he was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer and passed away very shortly after. I’m hesitant to share what I saw because even I know it sounds unbelievable

2020:

We had the house blessed by a pastor in early 2020, and activity seemed to slow down, or at least stop for the most part. I don’t know what got into me, but I’m guessing the previous 5 years must have desensitised me to being spooked by most things, and I started reading about demonology. I stumbled upon a grimoire called Ars Goetia and stupidly, I read it. I won’t recall everything because I’m uncomfortable to do so, but it was around this time I started hearing a clicking sound inside my house, as if someone was clicking their tongue very loudly. It only ever happened when I was alone, or if nobody else could hear it.(I was so disturbed the first time I watched Hereditary that my eyes wouldn’t stop welling up with tears, and you can probably guess why)

2021:

It would start up again a year later, in 2021 when I was on a phone call with a friend in the middle of a crisis. I heard a hissing sound that seemed to build up next to my ear, before something actually burned my ear. I ran to the mirror, and my ear was red and inflamed, and also hot to the touch. This was when the manifestation became much more physical, and imparting interactions on objects.

I had befriended an ojibwe medicine woman, and invited her to my house. She didn’t spend much time at my place before she concluded that there was another presence in the home. She described being able to sense a lot of anger, jealousy, hate, animosity, and cruelty from this entity. Startlingly, she led me to points in the house where she felt the presence was strongest, and these were all parts of the house that made you feel watched. She gave me cedar to hang above my door, and smudged our house, and it helped for a while. I asked her if me or my family did anything to bring this upon ourselves, and she reassured me that whatever is here has been here for a long time, and probably tormented the previous family.

And I’ll be honest, I was under the impression the previous family was doing something bad before we moved here until she said that. Given the whole seal in the basement…

2022:

It had been a little over a year since the last incident with the entity when I invited a friend over to drink with me. We were having liquor when I got up to go get some soda, and I saw the translucent outline of a man standing in the kitchen curtains. I could tell he was facing towards the inside of the room, and when my eyes followed his legs down, I could clearly see his feet pointing to the middle of the room. Being half drunk and kind of playful, I told my friend “Hey, that ghost is downstairs if you wanna see it for yourself”

He laughed and doubted me, but despite being a skeptic he humoured me anyway and went to check for himself. When he came back, his face was pale and he was panicked. He told me that when he peeked into the kitchen, a head shaped shadow leaned out from behind the wall and looked straight at him.

After that, the figure regularly appeared behind the kitchen curtains, facing the inside of the room. Sometimes it would disappear, leaving the vague impression that it had been there while the curtain settled back down from the shape of a silhouette.

That same year, I was also chasing a woman I really liked. But the very last time I saw her, I had this sick horrible, yet concrete feeling that she was going to die. She had overdosed on fentanyl just 3 weeks later. I still sometimes panic, thinking I could have saved her.

It was also during this year that my brother, C, confessed to me that he had been dreaming of this black smoke that attacks him. He had detailed to me this cloud-like entity that had an angry human face. He told me it would become violent and angry whenever he began praying during his nightmares. So angry that he claimed his vision would blur and shake during the attacks, right up until he was able to say ‘Amen’

I then started experiencing the exact same nightmares. What bothered me about these nightmares is that they were like waking dreams. In the dreams, the details of my house would be the exact same as when I went to bed. But even more disturbing, if anything like my belongings, or furniture in the house had been moved or changed throughout the night AFTER I had gone to bed, it would also appear as such in my dream only for me to discover it in the morning.

It was around this time that C also told me he thinks he’s been remote viewing, against his will. Ever since then, he doesn’t sleep without listening to bible audio.

2023:

In spring of 2023, I had a disturbing dream in which my youngest brother, L, sustained a grievous head wound that killed him. I dreamt that he was violently crushed to death. I saw the gore in my dream and woke up crying, thankful it wasn’t real.

Then on August 1st, 8am, my brother had an accident in which his skull was crushed by a 200 pound weight. He had sustained multiple skull fractures, and was dead for a minute. When he was resuscitated, he claimed that Christ came to him and urged him to come to God, and this began my brother’s journey with Christianity. Despite the fact that my brother is okay now, I still get flashbacks of the accident and suffer from dread and panic attacks. I suffer from depression because of what I saw, and it haunts me that I dreamt of it before it happened. I’m always wishing that I could have stopped it.

C was also heavily traumatised by this incident. It was after this that he began crying and screaming in his sleep. Sometimes I stay up just to wake him in case he has a nightmare about it. I know it was revealed to me, but for what purpose I do not know. Maybe just to torment me with things I couldn’t prevent.

2024

In April of 2024, I came down with an infection and was hospitalised for a week. During that time, I had a heart attack in the hospital and nearly died. The following night that it happened, the man in the bed to my right was praying aloud, so I stayed up with him. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, but he passed away that morning. After they wheeled his bed away, I awoke later that night paralysed in the dark, and to my right, where he was, I could see the curtain/separator draped over the silhouette of a man, who appeared to be wearing a trench coat and hat. In short, he looked like the hat man. I could see from his nose that he was looking right at me. I don’t remember what happened after, I was so overcome with fear that I froze until I passed out. When I woke up, I found out that my brother, C, had messaged me during the night asking me to pray because he had a bad feeling for me. I didn’t tell him what happened until after I got discharged.