My name is Hilary and I'm seventeen years old. I live with my mom and my younger brother in a rather large apartment in a small town in Connecticut. We've lived here for about three years and, until about a year ago, none of us have ever noticed anything strange. The apartment building we live in used to be old living quarters for workers in the mill down our street, so it's very old. When I first started noticing strange things, I was in my bedroom one night watching TV. I wasn't very tired, but I figured that I should just turn off my TV and try to go to sleep. As I sat up in my bed to reach for the remote, I saw out of the corner of my eye a large shadow lingering in my doorway. I whipped my head around to see who was there and I saw a man. Well, not a man exactly. It was a shadow in the shape of a very tall man. I stared at it, and I got the feeling of total depression. I felt cold and my eyes watered up and I could feel a sob rising in my throat. A few tears fell down my cheek and I tried to hold in the sob, and a few seconds later the shadow disappeared. The lump in my throat went away and I stopped crying. I felt scared and confused, so I ran to my mom's room. She was also awake and asked why I was crying. I told her what had happened and that's when she decided to call a paranormal investigation service. There were other strange happenings after that. I heard a woman crying and calling out to me, asking me to help her. I heard a man say to me, "Don't let her in," when I went up to the bathroom and my friend was following me to use it next. One time, after using the bathroom, I walked to the door and I heard a man to my right say, "See ya!" Like he was watching me or something. But this was the scariest moment: A few weeks before the paranormal investigators were supposed to come to my house for the second or third time, I had finally fallen asleep at my normal hour (around elven o'clock). I don't remember how long I was actually asleep for, but I do remember this dream I had. In my dream, I was chasing somebody or something out of my apartment. I ran out of my bedroom door and towards the stairs, but I couldn't see what I was chasing. When I reached the top of the stairs, I felt someone push me down the stairs. I flew halfway down the stairs and them fell onto them and tumbled down. I remember landing at the bottom of the stairs and looking up towards the top, and nothing was there. I woke up in a cold sweat and my body ached terribly. My back was incredibly sore, my neck felt stiff and achy, and my head felt as if I had smacked it really hard on a wall or something. I had that strange feeling again, like I had gotten when I first saw that shadow. Only this time I felt like screaming out in anger. I had a lump in my throat and my eyes were watering up, but it wasn't in a depressed sort of way. I felt angry. I wanted to smash something or punch the wall. The feeling went away and I got up slowly and sort of limped down the stairs. My mom was in the living room sewing and watching TV and she looked up to see me with streaks coming down my cheeks and she could tell I was in pain. She made me sit down next to her and demanded to know what was wrong. I told her about the dream and how much pain I was feeling. She took a look at my back and there were red scratch marks everywhere, along with two red marks that looked like someone had punched me in each shoulder blade. She decided to get our digital camera and take pictures of my back to give to the paranormal investigators. She took four or five pictures and when we looked at them later on the computer (because our digital camera doesn't have an LCD screen, so we couldn't look at them immediately after taking a picture), we saw some my back and the red marks, of course, but there were also bright streaks of light coming from the side of the picture going across my back. When my mom had taken the pictures, she had taken a couple with flash, and a couple without. And these streaks of light were in all the pictures. So, my mom wondered if there was something wrong with the camera. She took somemore pictures around the apartment and, when she checked them, there were no streaks whatsoever. It's been a few months since my dream and I'm still visited by the ghost. The paranormal investigators actually have found out that there are three ghosts in my apartment. One of them is my grandfather who wants to protect us (we know this because the paranormal investigators used a pendant to ask the ghosts questions). I never knew my grandfather, but apparently he loves my mom and her children so much that he wanted to be with us, even after he died. Another ghost is a female who is here to protect us. She cries on occassion, and pleads, "Please... please... help me..." We don't know what's wrong with her yet. The third ghost is a male. We've gotten a picture of him at the bottom of our stairs. You can see a translucent figure in the picture of a man in a red shirt and white pants, and he has no legs from the knees down. He is the aggressive one, and he is the one who most likely went into my dreams and pushed me down the stairs. We don't know what he wants or why he likes to terrorize us, but we think his name begins with a "J", like James or Jeremy. He could have been a worker at the mill more than a hundred years ago. As far as we know, none of the other tenants in the building have noticed an unusual presence, other than my neighbor who was in my apartment with me one day and a glass burst in my hand, cutting it all up. As far as the paranormal investigators are concerned, the ghosts are staying here in our apartment, and for whatever reason they like to bother me the most. Especially when I'm in my bedroom. My only wish is for the investigators to cleanse my home totally so I can get to sleep at night.