I've always been a very sensitive human being. Since I can remember, I've always been able to kind of feel the energy of any given person or environment within seconds of being there or being in someone's presence. I can look at someone and immediately tell if we're going to be friends or not – I think that's part of the reason why I don't have many of them. My mom and dad used to make fun of me because, since I was four years old, I would try and expel some visitors – including family members – from our house, claiming that they "weren't good people." Nowadays they don't make fun of me anymore because, as it turned out, most of the people I've tried to distance myself and my family from when I was a kid didn't become such great individuals.

Mind you, I'm not saying, not even in the slightest, that I'm some kind of psychic or anything like that. I think that I'm just really tuned in to people's energies, intentions and moods. Plus, I have a crazy accurate intuition. I just know things, sometimes. My parents and my closest friends are the only ones that know this, but usually when I feel some way about something, I'm rarely wrong. They freak out about it, sometimes, but they've gotten used to it by now.

With that in mind, I'd like to share some of the weirdest things that have happened to me, since infancy to adulthood, that I think could be tagged as "paranormal".

My first paranormal experience happened very early in life. I was three or four years old, living with my parents in an average sized house, my bedroom next to theirs. I had never been one to have nightmares, despite having a very vivid imagination. On the day this happened, I remember having felt some kind of imbalance in the energy of our home earlier in the day. Being shy and mindful of other people's opinions about me, I didn't mention anything to my parents. I didn't want them to make fun of me as they usually did when I would start talking about my feelings regarding things that, in their opinion and experience, didn't exist.

Night fell, I went to bed as usual, saying my prayers, as I had been taught, before covering myself with the blankets and falling asleep. On that night I was mentally or psychically assaulted for the first time. While asleep, I dreamed about leaving my body – I could still kind of see myself on my bed sleeping, but in the dream I had stood up and was going toward my bedroom door. In the dream, I open the door and step into our kitchen. It was night. Darkness reigning free. I walk across the kitchen until I reach the doorway to our laundry room, which is connected to our garage. I feel something bad, like really bad. An evil energy. I just know that if I keep going I'm going to end up seeing something I will regret. I get chills and think about turning back and going back to my room, but I don't. I keep going until I reach the doorway, which gives me access to the garage.

Funnily enough, our car isn't there. It's all just darkness. I can see well enough in the dark to discern shapes, though, so I take a look. I freeze with fear.

There's a shape there, its back turned to me. It's a tall – and I know, anything seems tall to a four year old kid, but this thing was ridiculously tall -, slim frame of a man. It is wearing what now I can describe as a ceremonial outfit with a hat very similar to the ones members of the KKK used to wear.

I am frozen on the doorway, feeling wave after wave of negativity and evil intent emanate from that thing, but I can't stop looking. Neither can I run. I can see the moment it feels my presence. Its shoulders raise slightly and the little movement it was making, like it was floating, immediately ceases. With unnatural speed of movement, it turns completely toward me.

I remember never having felt such fear in all my life – which, granted, hadn't been that long at the time. The thing has no face, no feet. It's floating some inches above the ground, not moving, just staring at me.

I turn around and run. Looking back, I see the thing is coming after me. Somehow, it doesn't catch me until I reach my room. I see myself there sleeping and jump on the bed.

I'm not dreaming anymore, I'm trying to wake up, but something is keeping me from doing that. The pressure in my head is incredibly strong and overwhelming. I remember feeling like something was fighting to get in – or to keep me out. Seconds and minutes pass. I wake up crying. I open my bedroom door, intent on running to my parents' bedroom and asking them if I can sleep the rest of the night with them.

As soon as I open the door, there's a shape on the doorway that leads from the kitchen to the laundry room. It's the same figure I dreamed about. Panicked, I run the few steps to my parents' room and jump on their bed, all the time feeling those freezing waves of negativity reaching for me.

I remember that my mom, at seeing me crying, asked me what had happened and hugged me, covering me with her part of the bed covers. I couldn't even tell her what had happened. I was so scared. I just buried my face on the side of her neck and cried, unable to sleep. At some point she fell asleep again, her arm around my chest. I was laying between her and my dad, completely awake.

Suddenly, I feel waves of evil energy approaching once again, I look to my parent's bedroom doorway. The shape is there, staring intently at me, floating a few inches above the ground. I cannot move my gaze from it. The veiled depths of its hood call to me. I know I should turn my eyes away, but I can't. The darkness inside the hood is like a magnet to me.

Minutes pass, and then it does something I cannot, not even more than twenty years later, forget. It raises itself from the ground, floats into the room and above the bed and stretches its arms out to try to get me. Something kept it from succeeding and it hisses, I ghostly, rusty sound that makes my blood curl. Failing to get me, it laughs. A hollow, humourless laugh that makes all my hairs stand on end. It is like it is mocking me or whatever force keeping it from harming me. Like it is implying, with its laughter, that it getting what it wants is inevitable; just a matter of time. I still have nightmares with that laugh.

From that day forward, I started having more and more nightmares, to the point where I became insomniac. The nightmares would always be very intense, but at the same time abstract. I would see shapes, hear voices, feel presences, but nothing corporeal. The only logical ones that I'd had would come to me in the form of premonitions, for lack of a better word, most of them involving the occurrence of injury and even death to people I care about.

The most extreme premonition or vision that I remember having involves my dad and happened when I was six or seven years old. For most of my childhood, my grandparents – my dad's parents – lived a couple hours over from us. He would constantly go visit them with my mom and me. On the day this happened, however, my mom and me had decided not to go with him to visit my grandparents because my dad, for some reason, had decided to leave too early in the morning. My mom didn't think waking me up would do me good, considering that most of the time I couldn't fall asleep easily or have a full night's sleep, due to the nightmares. Therefore, he went alone.

At some point, after my dad left, I was asleep next to my mom on their bed and the vision/dream came. I vividly saw, from a point above the scene playing out before my eyes, my dad driving his car through the mountains. Everything was fine, until he made a sharp turn and a big red truck threw him off the road. His car didn't tumble over or anything, but, in my dream, he was thrown off the road and his car fell into a grassy patch next to the road. Nothing happened to him, thanks God. Regardless, I woke up screaming and crying, desperately saying to my mom that something really bad had happened to my father. I was hysteric. I just knew that what I had seen was no dream. I made her call him.

Imagine my reaction when my mom calls my father and immediately starts crying, asking if he's okay. I freaked out. She told him that I wanted to talk to him and passed the phone to me. I don't remember much of the conversation, only that he reassured me the car was a little damaged but that nothing serious had happened to him. That he was okay. I asked him what was the colour of the truck which caused his accident. He said red. I froze and let the phone fall onto the sheets.

Since then, I've had more and more dreams like that, but they've gotten darker. As in, involving certain death.

To this day, every time someone close to my family or me is about to die, be the death caused by accidents or illness or whatever, I know it beforehand. Why? Because I wake up on the previous night of someone passing with my room infested with shadows. Big humanoid cloaked shadows staring at me from around my bed. Little, impish shadows dancing around my room. A feeling of a presence trying to force itself into my body from behind, causing pain on my back. When they vanish, I usually go and tell my mom that it's happened again, and then a few minutes or hours later someone calls to let us know that a certain loved one has passed away. It's happened several times, even recently. I've had such experiences on the nights before a cousin died of leukaemia, or before a friend of my dad's died of stomach cancer, before my aunt died of cancer, and several other instances.

Regarding the entity that oppressed me as a child, the one wearing the KKK outfit, as the years progressed, I would constantly have the same dream with it. I stopped dreaming about the evil, ghostly shape only after confronting it head on, when I was about thirteen years old. Until then, every encounter with it resulted in a fight for control of my mind and, perhaps, soul, ending with me waking up exhausted, my head exploding and my body feeling like it had been run over by a parade.

As all living things, I got older and somewhat learned to deal with it. At some point, I started reading books about the spiritual world and learned to set boundaries around me. Regardless, I've always been reluctant to discuss my experiences with anyone that isn't my parents and closest friends. I feel that, sometimes, it's best to just let the supernatural world to itself; to not mess with it.

However, sometimes these things will still happen to me when I am least expecting them to. Weird things still happen around and inside my house, occasionally.

For instance, the other day I was going to the bathroom. I was wearing a flannel shirt. It was unbuttoned. I don't like doing "number two" wearing anything that isn't a light shirt; I feel uncomfortable. So yeah, I lock myself in the bathroom and take my shirt off, leaving it hanging on the door handle, still unbuttoned. Mind you, I clearly remember that I hung it there with all the buttons unbuttoned – seriously, why would I button my shirt before hanging it on a door handle, knowing that in a matter of minutes I'd put it on again? Well, I sit there and do my business, wash my hands and turn around to grab my flannel shirt to put it on.

Imagine my surprise at seeing all the buttons have been buttoned. Every single one of them. I freeze for a second, astounded. Then, turning my neck around to take a look over my shoulder, I say, "Hey, friend, what's up? I just want to let you know that, no matter what your intentions are, you're not welcome here and you have to get out." After that I left the bathroom and told my mom what had happened. My parents have learned to believe in me at this point. She immediately hugged me and said she would pray and, if there was anything in the house messing with me, her prayers would make it go away.

We talk a little about something else and I go to bed. During the night, I wake from my usual series of nightmares and, for some reason, feel I should talk to my mom. I felt there was something bothering her. I didn't even know if she was awake – it was passed three in the morning -; chances were, she wasn't. Regardless, I get up and go to check on her. When I get there, she is awake, sitting up in bad, looking like she's seen a ghost.

I ask her what happened and she tells me that she was woken by scratching noises on the wall behind her bed, which seemed to come from the outside of the house. She describes it as being a slow, steady scratching noise, like what would come from someone walking deliberately slowly while dragging a fingernail on the wood wall. I ask her if she's seen something, she says she hasn't. Says that she's prayed and asked for God to send whatever it was away from us. And then the scratching had stopped.

Anyway, these are a few of the things that have happened to me and those around me during my twenty-four years of existence. Curiously enough, I stopped believing in what most people consider and envision as being God a long time ago, when I was around fifteen years old, but I do believe in energy. In good and evil and in balance. After experiencing so much evil around me since a very young age, I like to think that there's something good out there to counter all of that nastiness. I believe that there's indeed an equal amount of good and light out there who can protect us from such malign beings.

There are a couple more things that've happened to me, but this is becoming way too long. Thanks for the opportunity of sharing a little bit of the mess that goes on in my life with y'all. I feel lighter already. Peace!