Blood Mirror

Posted by: TacoCriminal

The sealed, séance room at the old farm house.

My grandmothers house is a restored and remodeled farmhouse. The foundation,
and most of the downstairs, is unchanged from when the original house was built
around 150 years ago. All of the materials, the lumber, iron nails, thick door frames,
are all the same. For a better mental picture of the house, the downstairs is very
similar to the house in the 1990 return of the living dead. The difference is the
hidden basement, and the previously sealed room.

Without going into boring detail, a hidden basement was discovered at my
grandparents house about 40 years ago, and there was a strangely shaped room
down there. No one knew what the room was for, until a local psychic looked at the
room and immediately told my grandparents to stay away from it, and to move the
antique furniture out of the room.

The psychic, or as the town called her "witch," left the house in a panic repeatedly
mumbling "bad people," and "cursed." My grandparents didn't do as she said, and
only moved out the furniture when my father and mother bought a house.

Family and friends always thought the old witch was just a crazy woman, until the
problems started. Now, no relative on either side of the family will accept the
furniture, and some can't even bring themselves to look at it when they're at my
parents house.

No one goes in the basement. No one can figure out why the basement has smelled
like rotting meat ever since the furniture was moved. There has never been an
explanation why the door to the basement will unlock itself, and open. The fresh
flowers grandma used to arrange downstairs will always wilt in a day, and everyone
who has stayed and been in the bathroom has heard at least once someone knock on
the basement door and quietly ask "hello?"

Like my parents house. . .except not as worse.

This is the background story before the serious stuff.
The death bed/ The silent mirror.

The worst part of the furniture that was moved was an old wooden bed that was
painted in a faded, pea soup green, and the matching mirror cabinet. Everyone
hated these pieces of furniture after the move.

The bed frame had a huge, plain headboard, and there were pillars in the four
corners of the bed that ended in a dull, arrowhead shape. Because of the design of
the bed, the mattress would rest just below a thick frame that connected all the
pillars. When you laid down in the sunken bed surrounded by its high, wooden
walls, you always felt like the bed was swallowing you. About 150 years ago, an
unknown relative of the family built this bed, and no parts had been changed since.
Every time you rolled on the bed it would creak loudly, moaning under the stress it
has had to endure over the decades.

The matching mirror was a huge and flawless despite its age, and the ornate frame
for the piece showed no signs of wear. The mirror was attached above cabinets, so
an average size man could only see his reflection above his waist. In the room that
had both pieces, the mirror faced the bed. The headboard of the bed faced the door,
and the mirror was on the same side as the door. If you wanted to see your reflection
in the mirror, you had to walk into the room and stand in front of the bed.

The reason the bed is called the death bed is because family members would always
sleep on the bed when they were extremely sick, or going to die. Almost all of my
dads family had died on that bed, and by coincidence, a few of my mothers family
passed always as well there. My first experience with the death bed was when I was
a child, and I had a bad case of strep throat. I had to sleep on the bed.

I had fallen asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but my fever was too
strong, and I woke up in pain around midnight. As I lay in the bed, struggling
against the pain and facing the wall on the left side of the bed, I heard the bed creak.
Not only did I hear the bed creak, but I could feel it move.

I lay motionless until the creak happened again, and I felt someone roll over closer
to me. Thinking it may be my mother who might have come in to keep an eye on me
since I was sick, I rolled over to see if she was asleep. Someone else was there.

A woman, probably in her thirties, was facing me. She was staring right at me with
her eyes and mouth wide open. She looked like she was going to start crying and
wail out in pain, but she just stared. Surrounding her eyes and mouth were dark
blue circles, and her straight black hair was thrown covered part of her face. Her
cheeks were sunk in, and her mouth kept dropping more and more open like the
sorrow was becoming too much. I turned away to try and grab a hold of the side bed
and pull myself out, and when I looked back she was no longer there. I crawled back
into the bed, put the sheets over my head, and didn't move for the rest of the night.

I told my mother what I saw in the morning, and she didn't seem too concerned
until I mentioned how sad and hurt the woman looked. My mother, who was sitting
at the kitchen table with me, stood up, went to the bedroom where my father was
getting ready for work, and starting talking to him. I couldn't make out what she
was saying, but he came out soon after and said "don't go in that room again, and
you're not to sleep in there again, I don't care how sick you are." I asked if it was
because of the woman and he said yes, and then I asked if I'm going to be in trouble
and he said "your great aunt is dead, she won't bother you and she was nice
woman."

She is the only young woman to die on the bed. She died of some type of
asphyxiation that the farmland doctors couldn't figure out. Apparently she stopped
getting enough oxygen being pumped in her blood, and she died being virtually
paralyzed and unable to call out for hours.

The good poltergeist stuff is coming up; this is the calm stuff.
More death bed/mirror

Although this particular mirror (there are three total) never conjured the big
problems like the other mirrors, it did something strange always. The room with the
bed and mirror had blinds that keep all the light out of the room when closed, and
at night, there was no light at all. The room was always pitch black except the
mirror, which would glow. It wouldn't project light or illuminate anything, but it
would glow brightly despite no light being directed to it at all. If you went to look in
the mirror, you could see a clear reflection of yourself, but NOTHING else in the
room. It was like you existed in a void.

Death bed silent man

My first encounter with the silent man was about two years after the dead woman
on the bed. It was during the day, and I was looking through the mirror cabinet
draws for an old stapler. I found the stapler, and I as I was looking at it to see if it
needed staples (or if it would work), I heard a man clearly say:

"Hi"

He didn't say it in a friendly tone, but more of "I see you" sort of tone. What's
worse is I looked up into the mirror and I was alone in the room. I moved as quickly
out of the room as I could, and as I did I heard the same voice, but in a growling,
angry voice say:

"Get back here"

I didn't, but whatever it was now angry, and people started to take notice.

Since the room with the bed was at the end of the end of the hall, you could look
right in to the living room from the doorway. Also, you could always see me leave
my room since. I remember the first time I left my room and froze in fear as I
looked into the doorway of the death bed room. There was something like a man,
translucent, crouched down like a panther ready to pounce. I stared into the top of
the head of the "man" (because the figure was looking down), until I gathered
enough courage to run for the living room where my parents were. As I took off, so
did it, and it jabbed me in the small of my back, knocking me down. Over the period
of a year, this happened a few more times, and I have scars on my lower back the
size of fingertips. There are no fingerprints, but there are unusual and consistent
oval scars.

Also, since my parents room were right next door to the death bed room, the door to
my parents room would slam shut. It would only slam shut when someone was
trying to enter or leave the room, sometimes hitting one of my parents in the face
with the door. My mother was pissed one day that the doors would do that and I
said it was the ghost in the death bed room. She said she knew, and her and my
father could hear something laughing through the walls sometimes.

She closed and bolted the door shut until we moved. Occasionally you would hear
something knock lightly on the door and ask "hello" very quietly. When we moved,
my parents had the bed and mirror destroyed to take care of the problem.
Unfortunately we then decided to keep the old music boxes and the buried mirrors.

On a kinda side note: No one had ever experienced anything bad with the bed, or
anything with the angry male ghost until it was moved into the séance room in the
farm house basement. People don't go down there anymore because something else
also knocks lightly on the closed basement door and asks "hello."

The big stories about the old music boxes and the two mirrors are next.


First the old music boxes.

I hated this fuckin' things since the first time I saw them. They were about 100 years
old, ceramic (mostly), highly decorated with sky and clouds type themes, and the
music that came out of them were perfect. All three of them, the two clouds and
soaring ballerina (the top had a ballerina that would twirl when the box was
wound), were in perfect condition. They just didn't seem right. The people had left
these boxes and everything else their daughter had behind. They were angry with
her because she committed suicide, and didn't want a reminder of such a bad child.
Wow, what a happy family.

We stored everything she used to have in the attic except the boxes (my mom loved
them), and we didn't take down this mirror thing she had in her room. Instead of a
full-length mirror, she took mirror squares and glued them almost next to each
other on a part of the wall. It was like a broken, full-length mirror that faced the
bed. Luckily, I got the room with the horrible mirror.

One day, the dog was chasing one of our cats around, bumps into the dresser that
had the music boxes on them, and all the boxes fall to the floor and break. There
were only two people that were upset that happened: my mother and the daughter.

We were there only one month after that, and it was a nightmare. Our dog suddenly
developed over 50 ulcers in her stomach and died. . .in three days. Even though
there was no smoke, you and everyone around you would start choking and
coughing. Air would rush so strongly by your ears sometimes that you couldn't hear
the world around you. People would start sleep walking (the only time ever in this
house during this period) and leave the house. You would always wake up outside
like it was an eviction of a supernatural kind. Then there was her mirror.

She looked very similar to the girl in the ring (no drowning symptoms, evil whitish
eyes, or any of that stuff, but she wore a white night dress and has long, dark hair). I
remember being in bed and looking at the mirrors, when I saw her for the first time.
It was like the mirrors were really one big, broken window, and she was looking
through. Just her upper body because she was like peering around through the
mirrors at me, and she was angry. Sometimes she would look scared or worried, but
most of the time is was pure anger. I hid every time I saw something like that, except
when I was leaving the room. Sometimes I would be walking out and I would look at
the mirror at an angle, and I could see her kinda like hiding behind the wall so you
couldn't see her if you looked directly at the mirror.

She apparently appeared in some other mirrors in the house, but I didn't see them.
New tenets moved in after us, and then quickly moved away. The house had been
abandoned for a few years and was recently torn down.

Next are the antique mirrors that used to be buried. (Why my mother and father
wanted them, I have no idea.)

More about the death bed I forgot

Just about everyone that knows the death bed room remembers the mumbling
voices. If you left my room at about 1 a.m., or at noon, you could hear about 10
people "talking," but it was more like a whole bunch of mumbling voices. If you got
to about two steps from the doorway to the room, they would stop but not all at
once. It was like someone said "everybody quiet," and not everybody did right
away.

I had a sleep over, and one of my friends got up to use the bathroom at night. He
said when he was coming back that he heard the mumbling in the room that I told
him about a while ago. However, he didn't go up to the door, but stood there and
tried to listen to what's going on (the angry male ghost hadn't appeared yet, so there
was no reason to be scared). Eventually, the voices quickly died down and he left
about 5 seconds after it was quiet. As he started to walk to my room, the door to the
death bed room closed very slowly, and he says he heard something like a giggle.

When he made it to my room he was so scared he was crying.

would rather have the death bed than this mirror. Sure, I don't live at home
anymore, but the fact that it exists bothers me. It's called the blood mirror because
the seal used to keep the back of the mirror to the frame is blood. Blood isn't like
glue so we were able to crack the frame off easily (we were going to save the frame
and replace the mirror around the first week we had it, but we put everything back
together). One of my mothers relatives (the first woman to kill herself) used to do
this with cabinet seals and stuff, so we weren't shocked when it happened, but we
were spooked.

She tried to put her blood in everything because she was some type of witch, and she
was trying to live forever or something. I know that's going to raise questions but we
don't really know because there aren't any records of her anymore or any solid
information or basis really in witchcraft. She was probably just plain nuts.

Here's a diagram of the upstairs where the mirror is. It will be important later.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brothers Room | Bathroom | Parents Room
| |
| |
|--------------------D------------------------------|
D D
-----------------| Hallway |
Blood Mirror D |
Room |--------------------------------D------| |
| Metal frame mirror room | Stairs |
| | |
| | |
----------------------------------------------------------


It's crude, but there you go. It's all upstairs.

Ghost stairs

There are three types of ghosts on the stairs. The first is the casual walker, who will
walk at a calm pace. Even if you stare at the stairs, whatever it is will keep walking.
This doesn't happen to often anymore, but it was really cool when it did.

The second is the clumsy runner. Someone just takes off and kinda trips and
stumbles on the stairs on the way up. It's like a kid running. Very rare to happen.

Both all reach the landing on the second floor and walk towards the blood mirror
room, past the metal mirror room. That's how I connect the stairs walkers, but I
could be wrong.

The third is horrible.

I was asleep one night and I woke up to a loud thud downstairs. I listened as
whatever it was ran full speed to the stairs, up the stairs, down the hall, and
slammed into the door with the blood mirror in it and kept slamming. . .where I was
sleeping. I started shaking because I just woke up and it sounded like some madman
was in the house coming for me and I wasn't ready. My dad comes out of his room
and yells "what the fuck are you doing at. . " and trails off. No one was there in the
hallway.

The knocker

The knocker comes in two varieties. The knocking with the death bed room is more
of someone making a fist, sticking out his or her index finger, and gently rapping on
the door. The first knocker with the mirror is nothing like that. It's more of a full
fist, all four knuckles rapping on the door. This one comes once in a while and just
knocks on the blood mirror door for about two minutes, sometimes during the day.

"knock knock knock" (quickly but gently)
Me: "yeah, what?"
"knock knock knock"
Me: "yeah?"
"Knock knock knock"
Me: "what?!" (I go to answer the door)
I open the door and there's only dead silence.

The second knocker is a full-fist pounding that shakes the door. This has happened
twice.

The first time was 10 seconds of beating on the door at 2 in the morning. I go to the
door because I think it's an emergency, and no one is there.

The second time I heard the pounding and didn't get up (this was about six months
later). Every ten seconds something would pound on the door and pause for about
one minute. Then I heard the doorknob wiggle. Scratching on the door. The
doorknob shaking slightly.

Then BAM!! One big hit smacks the door and I hear something run downstairs and
into the kitchen, where there is no more noise.

Scratching.

Scratching has been heard on many separate occasions, from either inside the closet
or from behind the mirror. I would have to say from behind the closet is scarier to
me because I saw the movie House when I was young, and if you've seen that movie
you know that a certain part can leave an impression on a kid.

The scratching is very light, and not in one spot. The scratching will go from low in
the closet to high like something trying to figure a way out. If you see the original
haunting, there is a scene when something is trying to get into a door and it sounds
just like this. The pounding on the door wasn't similar, but the scratching is dead
on.

Behind the mirror you hear scratching sometimes, only around 1 or five in the
morning. Sometimes there is a tapping sound, but mostly scratching.

I got more, but I got to take a break for a sec if that's ok.

Why I hate the blood mirror.

Sure it attracts things that knock on the door and run up the stairs. Yeah there's
scratching and tapping from the closet and mirror. When you look at it though, it's
just noise. The blood mirror, however, is more than just noise.

It could be any day, at any time, with any one in the room, and then it attacks. Since
the mirror has no way to directly hurt you, it makes you hurt yourself. I have been
quietly watching TV or talking to friends that are in the same room with me and the
blood mirror, and you can feel it come alive.

The room temperature will drop 40, 50, 60 degrees within minutes so you can see
your breath. You can't concentrate or focus on what you were doing. Your eyes
can't focus on one point, and you're unaware of what you're body is doing. All you
can really hear is your heart pounding at a rhythmic pace. Suddenly you, and
anyone else around, is in a haze. . .a trance.

When you regain focus, you realize you're bleeding.

The most common thing people will do is scratch themselves with their fingers on
their left hand on their right arm or upper chest. Without thinking, people will dig
huge gashes into their bodies with just their fingers and not know it. Every time
they will look at the mirror when they realize what they just did.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's truly frightening. The best example I
have is when I brought my now ex-girlfriend to show her the room because I had
told her about all the ghosts in my house. When we walked in I said:

"Here's my old room, and there's the mirror."

And as soon as I said that and pointed to the mirror, the temperate began to drop
drastically. I went over to some shelves to see how much of my stuff my little
brother had taken since I had left, and I took my eyes off her. When I looked back
at her she was staring at a wall, with a desperately sorrowful face, and digging into
her right arm. I grabbed her, and as I did I must have woke her up out of her
trance. She looked scared until she saw the cuts in her arm and screamed. She was
out of the house before I could leave the room. As soon as she left, the room
instantly got warmer. It wanted her. . .something about her she liked.

The blood mirror still stands today behind an old dresser. My mother always gets
crippling arthritic pain whenever she goes to take down the mirror and get rid of it.
The pain is so bad she can't even grip silverware. . .until she decides to do something
else. I moved the dresser drawer to hide the mirror, to bury it, so it won't bother
anyone else. Some day the dresser drawer will be moved and the mirror will reflect
the light of day again, and I know it will be even angrier than it was before I hid it. I
pity the person that inherits it then.

Thank God for eBay.

Sorry for the crappy joke. Anyways, I need to clarify some earlier stuff I wrote
about so I'll do that in another post if you want me too. Also, I've got some other
stories, some of which are my friends if you want them. Thanks for all the support
so far.


In regards to the séance room in the basement:

Furniture from upstairs was moved downstairs, and into the séance room
accidentally. The furniture was later moved out when my parents bought a house,
and put the death bed and mirror into the third bedroom for guests. I have no idea
why they would want to use the family death bed for a guest bed, but I guess it was
free.

If you want a mental picture of the basement, here it is. The basement is a simple
rectangle, maybe 20 feet long, and 15 feet wide. Then there is a séance room, I forget
the specs but it's built for "satanic" type rituals, attached to the basement walls. The
séance room is right by the steps up to the basement door.

The basement door was hidden on a wall in the huge downstairs bathroom. The
mirror faces the basement door, so you could be looking in the mirror and hear the
knocking behind you.

Whatever it is in the basement "talked" to me three times in one day. The first time
it knocked and asked hello, the second time it knocked and asked hello but a bit
more worried than before, the third time it just angrily "breathed" out at me. If you
exhale lightly at first and then exhale strongly and quickly at the end, you can kinda
get the idea of what I heard.

As for why my parents keep these things, I have no idea. My parents are addicted to
anything that has been passed down through the family, and their house is now
loaded with stuff from both sides. My mother hates the mirrors, but she only wants
to take them down and not throw them away because they've been in the family. It's
a weird mix of stuff from both sides of my parents families. My father has old, ratty
stuff like the old death bed, and my mother has expensive stuff from when her
family was rich and lived in a mansion. It's like we have stuff from Night of the
Living Dead, and The Haunting all in one place.
My mother has the family opals, which are exquisite pieces of jewelry that only
women in the family can wear, not because of tradition, but of some type of super
bad luck. She also has these 80+ year old ruby glasses. The glasses aren't made of
rubies, but they are a beautiful blood red and flawless. When she inherited them
about 10 years ago, she said she had to put them in a sturdy china cabinet or they'll
fall and break. That's because every other day you can hear someone run through
the dinning room and to the china hutch, where the glasses are.

My dad has this old trunk from Ireland that has the creepiest lamp (that used to be
kept in the séance room too) in it, pictures of my Indian (native American) relatives
that we no longer know who they are, and some sentimental news clippings from a
cousin of ours in Ireland who was with the IRA, but was really a child killer. No one
wants this stuff, the trunk used to be in the basement next to the séance room, and
it's ugly to boot, but it's old and has stuff from the family.

They just won't get rid of stuff that's old and has been in the family. Destroying the
death bed was kinda hard for my dad to do, but WE STILL HAVE PARTS FROM
THE MIRROR. All of it is ugly, everyone knows the pieces are cursed or at least
haunted, and we don't need any of the pieces at all, but they still keep them. I mean
Christ, those opals, once put on, cannot be taken off until right before the coffin
closes, and you are to be buried in the ground. If you take them off the body earlier,
or accept them as a gift while the original wearer is still alive, you will go mad.
Apparently that's not enough to call the pieces cursed since it has only happened
TWICE in the past 40 years. It also happens 100% of the time too, but that doesn't
matter.

I'll take as many pictures as possible while I'm there. It's like sentimental pieces
from a haunted mansion all over the place.

About why there are things happening in the basement to our house, I don't know.
There are things everywhere in the house, and the basement is no exception. I'll do
an outline of the house, and when I get a Chicago ghost hunt going, we'll stop by my
house for a quick tour.

Basement:

Only thing here is the shadow man and the swinging boxing bag. The shadow man
has only been seen twice, and has "charged" every time he knows you're looking. He
doesn't come straight at you, but follows the walls around.

The swinging punching bag was really fun. It happened about every other time
anyone was downstairs, and it was really cool. I had a 110 pound leather punching
bag attached to the ceiling of the basement. Really simple construction: just a swivel
hitch bolted into the ceiling, and a three chains attached to the hitch. You would be
sitting downstairs, watching TV or talking to friends, and the chain would start to
creak. For a while we thought vibrations somehow moved the bag, until two of us
saw how it started. The bag would be perfectly still, then it would move about a foot
in one direction, and then swing back. It was creepy because you knew something
was moving that bag.

Ground floor:

All you get are the occasional runner, the night light painting, and I guess orbs.
Once in a while you see a quick flash of light like a firefly, usually in the spring or
fall.

Upstairs:

This is where the mirrors are and the knocking. Sometimes you hear mumbling,
something moving papers (and always fucking up the system you have), lots of
motion in the mirrors (bathroom and metal frame), and one of our dogs growling at
something in the hallway briefly. If you have cat in your room, the cat will wake up
sometimes and just stare at the door for a good five minutes, and then sometimes go
under the bed. The upstairs is where the fun is.

Oh, and I should mention that our new dog won't go into the dinning room where
most of our inherited stuff is. He'll whine and cry if he looks in there, won't come if
you're offering him tasty hamburger, and will fight you if you carry him in there.
He gets over it, and then one night you hear the china cabinet move in the dinning
room, and he freaks out.

Until this thread, I never really thought about all the fucked up stuff we have in our
house. I knew we had some bad things, but I just realized how much we have there.