Childhood Ghost Story Haunts a Lifetime

This is a true haunting story, told to you, as it was told to me. Do you have a true tale to share?

Photo by Bonnie King

(SALEM, Ore.) - When Natalie Barragan was about 3 years old, the year was 1977 and she and her family had just moved into a house they had recently purchased in New England. The house was an old Victorian fixer-upper her dad had purchased with the intention of converting it into a three family dwelling in order to earn an income on the property. Nancy recalls that the house was huge, boasting three floors of living space, the exterior was painted brown with yellow trim.

Natalie’s father, a General Contractor and construction worker by trade, promptly began the remodel on the house. About this time, little Nancy began seeing various apparitions in the house, including ‘people’ walking in, out and through her bedroom.

Most disturbing of all she saw a frightened woman who appeared to be hanging by the neck and wearing a nightgown with a bathrobe thrown loosely over her. She had long dark hair and a pale complexion. It was apparent to Natalie that the woman had been badly beaten, her face was disfigured, and blood could be seen on her face and dried blood was caked into her hair, causing it to stick to the side of her head.

She remembers being deathly frightened at the appearance of the woman and screaming out for her parents, “My mother would be unable to move... frozen by the fear she could sense in the sounds of my screams.”

Natalie recalled, "My parents were strict church-going Christians, they thought I was just having night-terrors.”

As the years progressed, things got worse for Natalie and the ghostly sightings became increasingly difficult to deal with.

Natalie says that the outbursts prompted her dad to turn her bedroom into an office, in hopes that moving her out of the room would bring an end to her night terrors. Conflict over the house may have contributed to rising tension between her parents, which inevitably caused them to split up, but nevertheless, Natalie and her siblings ended up moving to New York with their mother, leaving her father with the house in New England. As she and her siblings got older, however, they would return and spend the summers with their dad.

It was during one of these visits, when Natalie was about 10 years old, that she saw the ghostly woman again, hanging in a corner of that same room, near the front of the house; but this time, the woman appeared to be reaching out towards her, as if calling to her.

She revealed this to her father who dismissed it as a figment of a child’s overactive imagination. She says that after that she never told another person about the experiences or what she had seen. Maybe her father was right, and besides, if her own father would not believe her, who else would believe a child? Right?

During another summer visit, while riding her bicycle in the neighborhood, Natalie got up the nerve to talk to a neighbor who lived about three houses away from her father’s house.

She asked the woman if their home was haunted. “What makes you ask that?” the woman questioned. Nancy told her about hearing and feeling strange things in certain parts of the house, especially whenever she was there alone. The woman told Nancy that a doctor lived in the house years ago with his sister and that the sister had died. A few years later the doctor sold the house to an investor and moved away.

Natalie says that another hotspot in the house was the basement where there was a game room, and that she watched pool balls roll around on their own, one shooting across the table violently, as if someone had thrown it, while no one was there.

“When we all lived there together, even my mother refused to go into the basement alone,” Natalie remembers. “You felt as if someone was at the bottom of the stairs waiting and watching you as you made your way down the steps.”

She recalls that on one occasion, “When I was about 15, my father sent me down there to get some tools for him. While searching, I felt someone standing right behind me, breathing on the back of my neck! It was NOT a pleasant experience!”

Nancy says that she turned around only to find (as she suspected) that no one was there, but she remembers feeling a very strange sensation, something she could only describe as “extreme discomfort or oppression”. She said that she felt as if she was about to be sick.

“I went up those stairs as fast as I could - the door was stuck! I heard footsteps coming up the stairs behind me, I almost peed my pants... that is how frightened I was! The lights turned off; it was pitch black and I was screaming to be let out, banging on the door. I looked back and the lights turned back on and I noticed there was something leaking from the wall; it looked like blood to me. I yelled and freakin' pushed on that door and it suddenly opened. I ran upstairs, took a shower and tried to convince myself that it was just my imagination, like my dad had told me before.”

“A few weeks before leaving, I saw the same woman hanging by her neck in the corner of the room. This time I was just fed up, thinking that this has got to stop. I decided to confront her. I asked her why she was bothering me and what hurt her so bad to make her kill herself."

That's when Natalie says that she actually experienced the woman’s pain. “I sensed and saw what happened to her, she was brutally raped by 3 or 4 men and left for dead. In her agony and pain she decided to hang herself. After experiencing that, I never set foot into that house again!”

Natalie now lives in the same area that the house is located in, and it is still there. “Even today as I pass by the house there is something that draws me to look up at what once used to be my room, and I can still sense her there in the window, staring down at me.”

You can visit their site at Team-OPHIR.com or you can contact him directly at: bernard@Team-OPHIR.com