A True Paranormal Encounter
A True Paranormal Encounter
It’s never easy to share ghost stories, especially when you’ve spent a lifetime being teased about them. But I’ve stopped hiding.
Where to start? Well, I grew up in a house in New York City that was alive with something else. The hallways whispered when no one was there. I was certain, still am, that place was haunted.
Back then, people laughed when I talked about it. They said I was too imaginative, too obsessed with the paranormal. Eventually, I learned to stay quiet. Decades passed like minutes. The world moved on. But some things don’t stay buried, and silence doesn’t banish the dead.
Now, in my fifties, the haunting has returned. This time, it didn’t creep from the corners of that old house where the neighborhood kids and a Ouija board occupied many of my days; Now it found me here, in a different home, a different life.
My only witness was my dog, a loyal pit bull I’ll call BigDog. She’s never feared anything, not storms, not strangers, not the animals. But the way she froze that evening, the way her eyes followed something I couldn’t see, told me the truth I’d been trying to forget.
Ghosts are always around.
The Cowbell
I remember, as a kid, my cat doing the same thing. But honestly, it was a cat, and cats are strange little creatures to begin with. They stare into corners as if they’re seeing things we can’t, pupils dilating on a whim. You tell yourself it’s nothing.
But dogs are different.
And that’s what made this so much worse.
So, I’ll start here, in my quiet suburban home. Four bedrooms, two baths, an in-ground pool. Ordinary. Safe. The kind of place where the dark shouldn’t have a voice.
When I first adopted my dog, I bought a cowbell from the local hardware store. The idea was simple: train her to ring the bell when she needed to go outside. Within a week, and with a box of liver treats, she had it mastered.
But it didn’t take long for the trick to turn against me.
BigDog began ringing the bell constantly. Sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes when I was right beside her. The metallic clang would echo through the house, sharp and hollow, until it became part of the background noise of my days. I stopped reacting. I stopped hearing it.
Until one night, I heard the bell again.
But this time, BigDog was asleep, on the floor, upstairs, beside me.
The sound was faint, just one soft, deliberate clang from the front room. That heavy, familiar ring that had once meant something simple. Except now, it was different. There was no movement. No breath. No reason.
Just the echo of metal in the dark.
The Bell That Wouldn’t Stop
And then, it never stopped.
The bell began ringing at random times, on its own, always with BigDog nearby. Sometimes it would chime softly, like a warning from another room. Other times, it would sound with such sharp insistence that BigDog would bolt down the stairs at full speed, growling all the way down.
That was when the real fear began.
I would find her standing rigid, her head low, every muscle locked in tension. The fur along her spine would rise, her breath quick and shallow, a low growl rumbling deep in her chest. And sometimes, she would plant herself between it and me. Whatever “it” was, her body a barrier, her eyes wide.
It was as if she were saying, Stay back. Don’t look. Please.
But there was one thing I couldn’t ignore: it only ever happened when I was alone. Never when my husband or sons were home. That made the story harder to prove, harder for even me to believe.
So, at my son’s urging, we set up a camera facing the cowbell. I thought, finally, we’ll catch something. But the footage never showed the bell moving, no matter how many times I heard it. The motion sensor never triggered. Apparently, whatever was ringing it moved too subtly, too carefully, to be caught.
The only thing the camera did capture was something else entirely.
One night, again alone, BigDog suddenly jumped onto the couch, fixated on the window. I didn’t notice anything unusual at the time, but then came three distinct knocks.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I remembered how I had gotten up, turned on the outside light, opened the door, had seen nothing, and gone back to the couch. But BigDog hadn’t moved. She stayed at the window, tense and watchful, her eyes following something on the porch. (That part I hadn’t seen until I played back the Cowbell camera footage the next day).
So upon seeing how the dog had reacted, I nagged my husband until he checked our outdoor cameras, but nothing. No visitor. No delivery. No animal, no one had been there to knock.
That was the night it started to feel like something, or someone, was watching us.
That was the beginning of The Curious Case of Jinny, and I began to post videos on social media to document the story.
Haunted and Waiting 
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