I remember having this scary experience when I was very young where I woke up in a cold sweat to strange noises coming from the kitchen of my house. It kind of sounded like the noises water heaters make, but it wasn't at all the normal noises. It was like big water bubbles rising and bursting and a metal pinging noise. I remember it was in the dead of winter and very cold. I also remember being very afraid and feeling that something was wrong. I even sort of felt a presence. I tried to cry out and scream for my mom, but nothing came out. I know that this is a fairly common nightmare, but to this day I remember it as happening in real life and it not being a nightmare.
I do remember my mom and her siblings recounting seeing ghosts at the house where I, and they, grew up in. Believe it or not, but they used to have an outhouse when my mom was little, which was in the early 60s. My mom and my auntie recounted seeing a ghostly man sitting in a chair when they went outside with each other late one night to go to the bathroom. They also said that they would often see and hear owls and ravens in the trees whenever going outside to the bathroom.
In that very same house that I and my mom grew up in my dad once claimed to have seen a woman standing in the kitchen by the refrigerator. It was said to have been my gramma, who had died young from diabetes-related illness a year before I was born. In fact, my gramma died in her bedroom at my grandparents new house that they had moved to in the late 60s. It was said that she haunted that room. I remember spending the night at my grampa's house and being so afraid to walk down the hall at night to go to the bathroom. The hall had two lights and the switches were at the corner where it made an 'L', which was right in front of the door to the room where my gramma died. I remember always running in the dark first to turn on the hall lights and then closing my eyes all the way to the bathroom.
I don't know if the experience I had and the presence I felt that one night when I was little was my gramma's spirit or not, but now that I think of it, if my gramma did indeed haunt our old house and my grampa's house, it was probably because she died so young and didn't want to let us go. I like to think that perhaps she or her spirit was looking after us. I've said before that I don't really believe in ghosts, but certain things like these have made me not entirely closed to the possibility.