Paranormal Activity in New Windsor, Maryland

Fool's Day 2008, Ed Mittelstedt starts a blog called "Our House is Haunted". Four years earlier, Ed had this house built on the outskirts of New Windsor, Maryland - an old town, with a history dating back to the late 18th century. The house was built on the eastern side of gentle rolling Hawks Hill, overlooking a small valley of corn fields now slowly being turned into a limestone quarry...

On an unusually warm January day in 2004, Ed and his wife Holly brought his parents to the construction site, with the will still only framed out and the floors still plywood. As they were mounting the steps from the garage into the kitchen, they all heard heavy steps, like boots, slow and determined, on the second floor directly above them. Ed and his dad went upstairs, but there was no one. Maybe some local teen had escaped out one of the windows. Although the jump was too high and all the windows were shut...

Four years later, on April 1, Ed realized that this had been his first ghost encounter in the house, that it happened during daylight hours... and that his house was not even built yet, and already haunted.

Why did he suddenly want to expose now to the world what was going on in his house? "I guess because I'm pissed off," he says. "I'm pissed because if I dare stay awake more than 10 minutes after the lights go out at night, I will start to hear things moving around in my room, like someone walking softly on the carpet. I will hear things being moved, picked up, softly put down. It's terrifying. Hopefully someone out there will see this information and will be able to provide some insight into what's going on."

What follows is a story that often sounds like a minor Amityville Horror. On April 15, 2004, Ed and his wife Holly and their three daughters moved into the house that was custom-built. "Little did we know then that only four years later we would be experiencing paranormal activity. And now I ask myself every night: how can my new house be haunted?"

This was the start of a story with the stuff movies are made of, like Paranormal Activity or the Amityville Horror: full story here!