Your True Tales
June 2008 - Page 23
The O'Brien Haunting
by Callum O'Brien
I have lived in Ireland all my life. I live in a big family of six: my mother, father, brother and two sisters. We lived in a large house at the time of the haunting that took place five years ago. I was 13 at the time. The poltergeist activity mainly occurred around my sister, who was 12. I will call her M.
It all began one day when my sisters and I were walking home from school. M slipped and hit her head on the curb. She wasn't in any pain and claimed she could hardly feel it. When we got home, she climbed straight into bed and fell asleep, even though it was only 3:30 p.m. The rest of my family sat down for dinner (we decided not to wake M) when M came running out of her room screaming. She was in a great shock. She told us that her blanket slid off the bed and that someone pulled her out of it. My parents put it off as her imagination and sat her down for dinner. That was the start of the haunting.
Weeks later, M had fallen sick and was confined to her bed. During this period, strange noises would be heard around the house, mostly from M's room. It sounded like a hammer banging on the walls. Again, we put it off as the house making the noises. Neighbors would come over and complain about the noises, but we told them we didn't know about it.
When M had gotten better, everything was peaceful for a while. She would complain that her bed would jump from time to time and that she found it hard to sit down in a chair without it rocketing away. My parents began to accept something was wrong after they witnessed pictures flying off the wall and the chairs sliding across the floor. For a while, my parents sent M, myself, and my other siblings away to live with an aunt. When they had realized that it had followed us there, we returned home.
The attacks on M got more violent. She would be thrown out of bed, pushed down and dragged up the stairs, thrown off chairs, slapped occasionally, and would have objects thrown at her. She would constantly be confined to bed as she would constantly become ill. Even in bed, the attack continued, sometime locking her bedroom door so we could not reach her, but only listen to her screams on the other side of the door.
Word spread throughout the community about the goings-on inside our household. Neighbors would come to visit us in hope of seeing something unusual happening. Their hopes would be answered by having stones, plates, and even pieces of turf thrown at them. One neighbor thought of calling the incident "The O'Brien Haunting" and it stuck for the rest of my life.
A friend suggested we get a priest. So we did. Three different priests at three different times. None of them managed to rid us of the entity. But one thing did help. The attacks on M became less frequent. Unfortunately, the poltergeist didn't leave completely. It still liked destroying furniture and throwing objects around. Three months after the priests came, the poltergeist had vanished without a trace. Peace finally overcame our household. Everything was quiet again. M was back to normal, but she missed a lot of school, so that was a downfall.
I'm now 18 and we are all still living in the house that inhabited our unearthly "friend". The exact location of our house is a small town called Kilmallock, County Limerick. The events took place between February 2003 to November 2003.
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