For some the sheer thought of ghosts makes the hair stand on their arms. I find them fascinating myself because since I was a child I have had good and bad encounters with spirits. My first ghostly encounter was when I was 7 years old. We had just moved into a new apartment complex and my brother and myself went exploring into the woods behind our building. There we came across tombstones covered by brush and leaves. The names on the stones had faded from the weather and no doubt were very old. Upon discovery of these once we got back to our home strange things started to happen. That very night my father went to bed and my mother stayed up watching television beside him in the bed. Several minutes into his sleep he told my mother to stop pulling his chest hair. She laughed and said quit playing games I’m not touching you. She turned around to catch what seemed to be the transparent image of a child’s hand running through his chest hair. And then heard a faint laugh and footsteps running down the hallway. Two nights later I was laying in bed and felt an uneasy feeling of someone watching me. Just as I was about to close my eyes my closet door slid open and my small suitcase flew off the top of the closet shelf and came flying at me. I screamed and ducked only to be missed by an inch from the suitcase. With the sound of it hitting the wall I ran to my door trying to get out I noticed it had been locked. My mother was on the other side of the door trying to get in also and asking me what had happened. It unlocked finally and I told her what had happened. She didn’t believe me. A few nights later I was awoken by my hair being tugged on. It was being braided, by something I could not see. I called my mother in and she came in and witnessed what was happening. My brother had not experienced anything yet but soon would. A few days before Christmas he had started talking to my mom about the grave stones behind the house in the woods. That’s when the activity started to pick up. Glasses from the wine rack started to shake and fall off of the rack. Doors in the house started slamming and opening and then slamming again. The smoke alarms went off and our cat started going crazy and hissing at nothing. We left the apartment and came back when my dad got home from work. Nothing happened again until New years day. My grandfather had arrived on Christmas and stayed with us. He was sitting on the couch one day just talking to us about school when we saw his hair raise up as if it was being pulled. He knew what was happening but didn’t say anything to us. Just sat there staring at us until it stopped. A few days later a priest came in and did a blessing on the apartment. Nothing happened again until October. We were having a huge Halloween party with all our friends from school and during the costume contest we heard a popping sound come from our kitchen. When we went to check on what it was we had noticed a lighter had blown up all over the counter. One of the guests said the guy in a black cloak had threw it. No such person was there. After we had gotten our cameras developed we had looked through the pictures. In all of the pictures there were green spots and a dark shadow somewhere in them. And then one picture showed an image of a face of a man screaming and another showed a girl curled up into a ball on the floor. We moved out of that apartment a few months later.