I firmly believe that my family is haunted—not the house. Every house we've lived in seems to contain some unexplained event. And I have several of them that I could tell, but right now, I'm focusing on two that I've come to realize may be connected.

For years, my mother has suffered from sleep paralysis. If you don't know, it's when your body goes to sleep, but your mind stays awake. During this, you're aware of your surroundings—you can hear and see—but you cannot move.

Sometimes my mom can work up small, quick movements to alert my father. He now recognizes what it means if her head is twitching side to side repeatedly. As time progresses, it becomes harder and harder for him to bring her out of the state. The most recent time, he sat her up and shook her, but she still couldn't move. He ended up having to pull her off of the bed and stand her up on the ground in order to wake her body.

My mom has always told me about how, in several of her experiences, she has seen the shadow of someone standing in her doorway—whom she thought was me or one of my other sisters. Only later would she realize that no one had been there at all. Once she heard several loud sirens, only to find that no one else had ever heard them.

There have been times that she could see my dad beside her, although he didn't notice her trying to catch his attention to wake her up. Only when she was able to pull herself out of the sleep paralysis, she found him in another room, and he said that he had never been there.

Another instance: She believed that one of my younger sisters was on the floor, playing. On another day, my sister said that she had never been there.

Before my mom ever started having sleep paralysis, she sleep walked. But her grandma told her that sleep paralysis happened when a demon held you down, and it would only release you when it was done doing what it needed to do. It creeped my mom out, but she didn't really believe it. Then, one night she managed to pull herself out of the sleep paralysis. She got one foot on the ground, as if to stand and walk out of the room, and all of a sudden, completely awake, sleep took over her body again, and she fell back onto the bed, unable to move.

Recently I discovered a documentary about sleep paralysis on Netflix called "The Nightmare." I couldn't get through twenty minutes, because I recognized the things the people spoke about, and it creeped me out. I got my mom to watch it, and she was amazed, because when she asked the doctors about it, they said that frequent sleep paralysis was rare. And all of these people experienced most of the same things my mother did.

Now that I've had time to think about it, I've realized a few similarities. I am definitely a sleep-walker. I do it all the time, apparently.

Before I moved rooms, I slept in the bedroom across from my parents'. I used to wake up in the middle of the night, every single night, and see the shadow of a man sitting at the edge of my bed or standing in a corner. Still barely out of my sleep, I would run out of my room, sometimes screaming—every time.

Before I slept in THAT room, however, my bedroom was downstairs in the basement. Long story short, I heard the voice of a little girl whisper-yell, "Hey!" from beneath my bed when I was alone, and I stopped sleeping there. Well, I made the living room area of the basement my bedroom, while my sister sleeps in the old room.

For a while, my cousin Tommy (see "The Peeker," where one of our stories are told by me) stayed downstairs with me, so I was never afraid. But he would always tell me stories of what I'd done while sleep-walking. One night, I had looked down into a hole in my wall (...someone punched it *cough*), and I kept saying, "He's down there, he's in the walls." We ended up covering the hole with a "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" poster. In the center, there's an eye staring through a keyhole, I think.

Tommy ended up leaving after a few months, though, and all of a sudden, I began to wake up in the middle of the night, every night for over a week, absolutely terrified of something I couldn't remember. All I know was that, every time my eyes popped open, they were staring directly at the eye in the Fantastic Beasts poster, just where the hole in the wall used to be.

I still sleep downstairs; after I started sleeping with a Bible at my side, I don't wake up afraid anymore. In fact, I hear things and even feel things, but I'm never afraid. Still...it's creepy.