Has anything genuinely creepy or unnerving ever happened to you?

On a visit to a friend's house about 3 months ago, just before I left to go home he asked me if he could talk to me about something serious, but that there was a chance I'd split my sides laughing and tell him to fúck off when he told me. I told him to progress, not knowing what I was about to hear. I will say those words to you that he said to me, you can laugh but I think the forum charter forbids you from telling me to fúck off!

Yes this account is long, but here I offer you a start, middle and end. There are happenings, reactions, revelations and solutions and whether you believe it or not is not my intention here. But the whole thing left me and those of us who knew about it a little speechless. If I'm lying, I've been lied to. Anyway, here goes...

Occurrences

Let's call my friend James. That night he revealed to me that he and his then pregnant wife and toddler were experiencing paranormal activity in their home. Having just moved into the house 18 months before, its modern look doesn't immediately strike you as the location of a haunting, but I listened to what James told me and I definitely didn't laugh in his face by the end of it.

What led he and his wife to believe that their house was occupied by a presence(s)? For a start, things moving completely of their own accord frequently. The first occurrence was the keyring rack on the kitchen wall. One night going to bed, there were 3/4 bunches of keys hanging on the rack in their usual place, the following morning all bunches were placed neatly on the table in the conservatory. Both the keyring rack and table on which the keys ended upon were way out of reach for their toddler, who was also in his cot upstairs sleeping at the time the keys would have been moved.

Other times, the couple would be sitting in their living room and then a racket would go off in the kitchen all of a sudden. They would go out to sometimes find all the cutlery drawers pulled out and cutlery on the floor, with their child either sleeping upstairs or in the living room with them. Remote controls and coffee/tea jars knocked onto the kitchen floor from positions that only an earthquake would have knocked them from. There were times James was doing the dishes and he would see a chair from the kitchen table move 5 foot across the room in the corner of his eye.

To add to moving objects, there were also sensual irregularities in the home. Several times, James and his wife woke in the middle of the night upstairs in their room to get a strong smell of something baking in the kitchen. Of course upon inspection of the kitchen, there was nobody baking anything but still that strong smell was prominent.

Almost the most regular occurrence - Despite having the heating on in the house and it being a well-insulated structure, the kitchen's temperature would become abnormally cold at any given moment.

So yeah, I can see why James thought I might laugh at him and tell him to eff off upon telling me all of this. He said this had been going on about 10 days at this stage, and they were starting to feel quite uncomfortable in their own home. Thankfully we have a mutual friend who is a priest with previous spritual dealings and James had already talked to him about it. He was coming in to do a blessing/service. After telling me all of this I was a little shocked, because James is not a fabricator of stories, someone who needs attention or someone who has extra minutes in his day to fill up as it is. When I asked him was he freaked at this point, he said a little but he was only starting believe it himself and figuring out what to do. So I left his house that night a bit blown away and to be honest a little creeped as I drove the dark country road home.

The Priest

One week later I was talking to James. By now he was devoting a lot of time to trying to solve this escalating problem. He had been researching the history of the village in which they lived through several historians, as well as briefing himself in whatever he could find online in terms of similar cases to his own. The priest had come to the house and carried out his blessing, but the phenomena hadn't stopped. The one thing that was clear though was that this had to stop. James wife was about to give birth to their 2nd child and she was up the walls with what was going on in the house.

It did not help at all that the priest said this has to be sorted before the forthcoming new baby is brought into the house, or there is a chance that whatever presence is in the house would be visible to the baby. When James asked what would there be for the baby to see? The priest said not necessarily a human-like figure, it could be a collection of colours, a light dark or bright, but this would obviously not be good for the new child. When James told the priest that he's noticed his toddler looking up at parts of a wall for minutes on end and making gestures to things that don't appear to be there, the priest couldn't rule out that his 2 year was reacting to a presence in the house.

The priest did advise though to carry on with life as normal as possible in the meantime, and it was important to act unaffected by whatever presence was in their home and to talk of it and acknowledge it as little as they could.

The Historian

By now the strange phenomena was happening a month in James' house. He had spoken to 3-4 local and national historians about the town-land, but whatever information they could find on the area did not allude to anything sinister in the past. They did however admit that records, as always, are incomplete and sketchy.

The priest had pledged to return with several other experienced colleagues to conduct another service but he did not want to come back to do this until they knew more about what they were dealing with. James' wife was now approaching her due-date and strongly considering moving back to her parents house until things subsided. James didn't have that choice as his home was also his office and he needed to work.

James persevered with his quest for knowledge. His search for records on the village now had him making calls to historians in England, thinking that since the area was under English rule up until 100+ years ago maybe they would have something the Irish guys wouldn't. Well that's where the progress comes in James' story. I'll call the village where the house in question is built 'Paulstown'.

For the record, when James talked to historians, he obviously didn't say "Hey I think my house is haunted, what can you tell me about the area?", he kept his cards quite close to his chest. One day, he got hold of an English historian who expressed a bit of surprise when James said where he was calling from and that he was looking for information on Paulstown, Co. xxxx, Ireland. The historian told James he had never been to the area, but only recently uncovered some information about Paulstown from a period around the mid 1700s while he was browsing previously lost documents in his day job. The detail that stood out, was that for some undocumented reason there was a large number of deaths in a short time frame in the village around 1750. The historian could only say that all of the deaths were of women and children.

He then asked would there be a way of finding out where a mass grave was located. The historian said that short of digging up half the town-land, it couldn't be done. The historian did say though that if he was to take a guess where such a burial site might be located considering his experience and the time period involved, he would say look for the tallest, oldest structure in the village and possibly beneath that you will find at least some bodies buried, if not this possible mass burial site. In those days, it was common to use the biggest structure in an area as a burial site, the structure would serve as a marker for the location of a burial. Upon hearing this, some things clicked in James' head, I'll come back to why in a minute.

Before bidding farewell to the historian, James asked him when exactly did he stumble upon the information about the mass killing in Paulstown. The historian told him exactly when, and it was about 5 weeks prior to this conversation between them.

The Priest, the Historian and the Biggest Tree in The Village

I would frequent James' house as both a friend and part-time employee of James in his business. Times when I've been working there in the past I would go out to this back garden to indulge my weakness and smoke a cigarette. James' backyard is nicely laid out, but is dark and damp 365 days a year. I could be standing outside there on the warmest day of the year with not a cloud in the sky, but I would still be in the dark and freezing cold. Why? Because in James' small back garden sprouts one of the biggest trees I've seen in our small island that wasn't part of a forest. You can see this tree for a kilometre or two on the way into the village.

I'm no tree-expert, but it is well over 100 ft high and its branches span out over the backgarden and over the side of the house, without another tree around to be seen. James and his wife previously used to curse the tree because of the quagmire the backgarden would be in with the constant shade, plus the tree seemed to spawn an ungodly amount of large house spiders that would nest themselves into their house below. Well to add to that now, it seems this tree could be the headstone of a grave for a number of parted souls.

James brought the historian's findings to the priest and this now alighted a fire within our holy friend. Never mind the revelation of the tree possibly being a mass burial site, but the timing at which the historian uncovered this information seemed to satisfy the priest most. By the historian revealing what date he uncovered this information about Paulstown on, James was able to corroborate that with the date when his keys first took a jump from one room to another and the whole saga began. For the priest this clicked in his head, and he wanted to talk to the historian himself.

It was at this point the historian found out why all of this information was being sought in the first place, and it blew his mind. He wanted to come from England to the house in Paulstown as soon as possible, at his own expense too. Now that the priest knew what he was dealing with, he said there would be enough people present when trying to banish the phenomena and advised against the historian making the trip. The historian confirmed that with the documents he learned about Paulstown circa 1750 and the mass killing of women and children, that he would have been the first person to lay eyes on these uncovered records in at least 60 years, possibly many more.

Conclusion

The priest summoned several colleagues, previously unknown to James, to conduct a service in the house. The priest went in under the new context that there are troubled energies surrounding the tree, for some reason centering in the kitchen which is the room in the house closest to this tree. The plight of those energies attached to the tree has gone unknown and unacknowledged for generations, and the fact that the historian uncovered this information in one country and James' house took on an unwanted visitor at the same time says that these energies are looking for rest.

A service was conducted in which the English, Irish and Latin languages were all used in the best effort to communicate with these centuies' old spirits. It didn't go down like Hollywood according to James. The walls didn't bleed, the windows didn't blow out, they didn't see a cloud of smoke vanish out the window, his toddler didn't levitate or speak in ancient languages, but there was peace.

From then on, and up until now anyway, there hasn't been any more strange occurrences or signs of a haunting. James' wife gave birth to their 2nd baby 2 days after the apparent removal of unwanted energies from their home and now, 2 months later, this dark chapter seems to be closed and put to rest and everyone is getting a peaceful night sleep in the house beneath the tree.

The only thing I personally experienced in the brief time I was there during all of this was the severe difference in temperature between the kitchen and all the other surrounding rooms. On two occasions I was there, it was like walking into a meat freezer but there were no windows open and a double radiator switched on. I don't know how most of the things that happened to James and his family can be explained in scientific terms. Apart from he and his lovely wife suddenly becoming compulsive liars out of the blue for no apparent reason, some funky shít went down in a house in 'Paulstown'.

TL;DR Never take where you live for granted, your house could always be enveloped by a big tree from hell that disperses spiders and unrested spirits upon you.