“Paradise” Valley

I am a University of Arizona alumni. I loved going to school in Tucson, and moved to Phoenix about a year after graduation. I was in my early twenties and it was a fun place to be at that stage in my life.

For about a year, I dated a guy I’ll call Mike. For the length of our relationship, he was doing a long-term house sitting gig at the family house of a college friend. The house was located in a pretty ‘burb at the north end of Phoenix, named Paradise Valley. It was a lovely ranch/desert style house, nestled in a hill with a manicured backyard and a pool.

When we first started dating, Mike had invited me over for dinner. He cooked dinner for me (I can’t recall what it was) and he had dimmed lights around the dining room and lit some candles. As we sat down to eat, I could clearly see a dark figure run through the living room of the house. I may be aware of a presence, but it’s really rare for me to see an apparition of any kind. My internal alarm bell went off and I thought maybe I had imagined it, but the image was so clear that there was no denying what I had just seen. I went out on a limb and said something like “This may sound really odd, but did you just see a dark figure run through the living room?” I was surprised when he answered that he had. We didn’t talk much about it and went on with the evening.

After that dinner, I was no longer comfortable in that house, although I spent a lot of time and spent many nights there. I couldn’t sleep well at the house, wondering where that figure was. I thought I saw a hazy presence near the bedroom once, but I think I was just bleary eyed in the middle of the night. In the living room and toward the part of the house Mike wasn’t using, it didn’t feel so great. We used a jacuzzi tub in that side of the house one night, and the feeling of something observing us was really strong. I left that area pretty quickly.

Mike once called me at home in the middle of the night, saying that he could hear the kitchen cupboards opening and closing, and that something had touched his hair while he was sleeping in his bed. He asked if I could come over. I said sure, and drove over, armed with a Bible. I don’t know what I thought I’d do with it, but it seemed like the right thing to bring at the time. By the time I got there, the activity had subsided and nothing else happened.

The Paradise Valley house was often a hangout for our group of friends. We would watch movies and sports, and drink beer and eat chips and salsa. I could sometimes feel something come by me, accompanied by temperature dips, that classic sign of a presence. Much like my childhood home, my experience was more one of sensing and feeling something being around me rather than seeing things or experiencing many overt displays of activity.

However, the presence did make itself very known one Sunday afternoon. Mike had acquired a puppy and a young cat by this time. We were watching a football game or something on TV, and the animals were cuddled up together on the floor of that room. Suddenly, the animals awoke from their sleep and looked up. Then, they got up and stared at the center of the room. That was odd, but then they slowly backed up halfway across the room into a corner, appearing to be moving back in response to something unseen approaching them. Mike and I watched this in stunned silence. Now stuck in the corner, the puppy began to bark and the hair on the cat’s back rose. We stood up, not really sure what to do. We then heard loud pounding on a table in the room next to us. Bam! Bam! Bam! The objects on the table jiggled a bit. I grabbed my purse and we went screaming out of the house. I didn’t go back there for awhile, and eventually the relationship fell apart for reasons unrelated to the house.

While dating Mike, I had become friends with his friend, Scott (not his real name), whose parents lived in the house in Paradise Valley part-time (and thus, needed a long-term house sitter). Scott told me that he had grown up in the house, and that his sister had seen a presence in the house several times when they were kids. It was validating to hear that.

It is easy for me to blow off feeling creeped out – maybe it’s my imagination, and maybe I didn’t really see a figure run through the room. But it is really hard to ignore that something is happening when you see animals react, or to hear pounding on furniture. That event was memorable and scary, and is the only time so far that I have had a witness to a paranormal experience.