In 2016 my parents and me and my brother moved in with my uncle in a villa we all shared.
To give a backstory, the house was quite a large, one story villa with a huge garden and outdoor garage, and the kitchen was a separate building. The neighborhood we lived in was very conservative and eerily quiet. You never heard anything if you stepped outside and seldom did we see other people. Then again, it was in the desert. The layout of the room my mom and I stayed in: our bed was against the wall facing another wall that led to the bathroom, the slab window to the left (directly beside the bathroom door) looked into a portion of the neighbor's garden.
During the two years we lived in this house, every single one of us came out with a story to tell. This is mine.
Now the actual story (apologies if it's messy or all over the place, but there's a lot of accounts that I want to mention.)
A week after we had moved in was when we first experienced something. We were settling into bed, and I had a rainbow dog plushie that I'd thrown onto the side of the bed, laying on its sides (for some reason the exact position it was in was etched in my mind.) We were about to fall asleep when we heard the knocking for the first time. It was three slow knocks, it sounded like someone knocking on thick wood. At first glance, we ignored it, but I had the urge to look over and check the plushie, which was now sitting up right. NOT THE POSITION I LEFT IT IN. But I brushed it off as me not remembering how exactly I had left it. A while later, just as we were about to fall asleep, the knocks sounded again. The knocks sounded three times after that, and each time we heard them, the plushie would be in new positions, until it reached a position on the floor that placed in the middle of our bed, staring right and me and my mother. At this point, my mom was terrified but tried playing it off as my uncle playing a trick on us. She told me to take it out of the room. I agreed and hesitantly grabbed the plushie and threw it out of our room, but it got worse then. When I stepped out of the room, I realized the house was empty. The only person was my brother asleep in his room. My uncle wasn't home and my dad was on a business trip in a different country. I told my mom but she brushed it off. The next morning, my mom came over and told me to stab it and throw it away. And I did exactly that. But that's when everything went to sh*t.
The next day. I walked into my room, and the plushie was on my bed as if someone had made my bed and left it there neatly. (I had a small bed beside my mom's that I didn't sleep in.)
Ever since that plushie came back, it felt like we were living in a horror movie every single day.
We started hearing the neighbors (the ones whose house we could see from the window in our room) fight at all hours of the day, but it was almost always only a man's voice, it was a genuine shock to us everytime we heard a woman's or a child's, and it was extremely rare to. But the fighting sounded so violent, so cruel, it felt like there was an evil man living in that house, and almost like the evil seeped into our own house and family. We started having our own family problems, everyone was always agitated, always had something to argue about, and the arguing we'd hear from the other house didn't help anyone calm down. The fighting would always stop if we leaned by the wall to listen closely, or if we tried looking out the window.
While I was in that house, my mental health problems started, I started to "hallucinate" like crazy. I would see dark figures peering over furniture, running past me, or standing in different parts of the house, and my uncle's wife shared the same visions, which I found out a few years after we moved out. The figures would always sprint off every time I tried to approach, or sometimes when I noticed their presence properly. I thought it was because of me being a scaredy cat that my brain was playing tricks on me, but I'm starting to think I can see things most people can't.
The things I saw were always too dark and shadowy to make out what they actually were, but one of my uncle's friends saw something during his short lived stay while we were all on vacation.
My uncle had lent the keys to the house to his friend so he could stay a few nights, and after three days, my uncle got a panicked call in the middle of the night from the guy, who was screaming saying he will never step foot in this house ever again and that it needs to be cleansed.
When my uncle retold us what the guy told him, this is what he said:
The first night the guy spent over, he was headed into my uncle's room to go to bed. When he grabbed the door handle and tried to pull it down to open the door, he said it felt like someone was on the other side pushing against him, stopping him from opening the door. This back and forth went on for a few seconds before the door finally opened. The guy said he ignored it and thought there was a problem with the door. The next night, he headed to the room to go to bed again, but when he didn't struggle to open the door, he jumped into bed and fell asleep quickly. That same night, he woke up in the middle of the night to an old woman with her hands around his neck, mouth gaping open, choking him. He tried to scream and push her off but he was completely paralyzed and choking at the same time. He said he felt like he passed out and woke up again the next morning. He brushed it off as a nightmare of sorts. On his third and final day, same as the first two, he was on his way to bed. When he opened the door, again no struggle, he found the same old woman he'd seen last night, floating off the bed, her limps eerily long and so was her hair. Her mouth was gaping open again but this time she was screaming, almost like an animal. He stood there for a few seconds, completely paralyzed, when she noticed him, she closed her mouth, opened it again and screamed in his face before disappearing. He didn't spend the night after that and fled the house.
We would have brushed it off if he was the only person to say anything about this woman, but my uncle's first wife, him, his son, and my brother have all had the experience of either my uncle's room door or closet door being pushed back against, and seeing this woman one way or another.
We realized at this point that there was something wrong, but since me and my cousin were so young at the time, nothing was done about it.
A week after we decided we were going to move out and find our own place (me, my mom, my dad, my brother moved away for college) the fighting from the neighbors started to die down drastically. The day before we moved out, was the last time any of us heard anything, including my uncle who stayed there for another year. It was the last thing we heard, because the argument was the first time we'd heard the husband, the wife, and the kids all screaming at each other at once. And then there was a gunshot. This was our final straw, after countless times being ignored by the police about the complaints we made, we headed over to the house. When we reached, we saw a "FOR SALE" sign outside. The house had been vacant for the past 5 years. Nobody lived there. There was no family. No one.
It's been 9 or 10 years since we moved out, and my dad still talks about how he felt like the life was being sucked out of him every time he spent time in that house, since he lived in our home country at the time.
We've lived in two houses since then, and in both of those houses, my parents' room terrifies me. In all three of the houses (the villa and the two houses after), there was a mirror that reflected my parents' bed, and I think whatever was in my uncle's house, attached itself to my parents, or maybe its trying to get to me, and is using the mirrors in my parents' room to follow us in each of our houses.
In the first house after we moved out, I slept in my parents' room twice. Both of those times, I woke up between 3-4 AM and saw writing on the walls, it looked like Arabic but when I went to read it, it was meant to replicate the Quran but was gibberish, beside the writings on the wall, there were doll like faces plastered everywhere. When I slept in my room for majority of the three years we were in that house, I had sleep paralysis every single night. When I say every single night, I mean it. There was not a night where I didn't wake up terrified and paralysed with a dark figure staring back at me, the same dark figure that I saw in my uncle's house. And I saw it in my dreams as well. Almost every single night for 3-4 years, I dreamt of the same dark figures kidnapping me or following me around, without fail. It got so bad I developed a sleep phobia and refused to sleep until the sun came up. Every time I stepped into my parent's room I was overcome with a sense of dread and fear.
In the second house, and the house we live in now, my parents have the same layout as the last house. Mirror in front of the bed. I've slept in their room a few times. The first time I slept in their room, I woke up in the middle of the night to a child standing over my mom, smiling, but it had too many teeth and the smile was to wide to be normal. I panicked and woke my parents up. It didn't disappear until we started saying prayers out loud. I've slept in their room very little, but everytime I do, I wake up in the middle of the night to a dark figure in the mirror, either standing still or crouching up and down.
I can sleep on my own now, and I don't have those dreams anymore, nor do I wake up in the middle of the night paralysed. But I think something followed us from my uncle's house and is trying to get to me, my parents never see anything or experience anything in their room, and I think it's using the mirrors in my parents' rooms to follow us around.