Of Hauntings and Ghosts

First a bit of background. The house we live in now is the same house that I grew up in. It belonged to the aunt that raised my mother. The core of the house was built in the 1930's and added on after the fact through the years.  When my wife and I were first married we lived in a single-wide on the property (we took the wheels off and everything.) We moved to Tennessee after living there about three years and returned to Alabama to live in the old house.

The old stories:

Dad was taking a shower here at the house and heard a woman's voice. He thought it was either my mom, my aunt (her sister) or both of them. There either was a conversation or not a conversation because the water was running. Bottom line; he gets out of the shower and nobody is there. Mom and my aunt have been next door the whole time.

There's another one from dad, about one of mom's long passed relatives sitting on the foot of the bed telling him to take care of mom.

My sisters, years ago, reported seeing a woman in a yellow dress in the house.

More recent stories:

Early in our marriage I worked second shift in an office. My wife had made a trip from our house to the old farm house (that was empty at the time) to pick something up and called me from there. Our oldest, less than two at the time, was with her in the house. About five minutes into the phone conversation we both heard what sounded like a wild cat caught in a fan belt, or a woman's scream.

Shortly after our son's second birthday she took him up to the old house to pick up his birthday cake that was in the refrigerator. Upon retrieving the cake she saw/felt something move in the house so she grabbed our son and quickly returned to the car. The whole way down the short gravel road he stood up in the back seat looking behind the car and urgently told her to "drive faster mommy, it's following us!"

Both our son and daughter reported seeing the lady in the yellow dress in the woods behind our little house.

This picture was taken with a very cheap, manual focus digital camera sometime before 2000. The only people in the house at the time were my wife, our daughter, and my aunt. Both my aunt and my wife are behind the camera. My daughter is the blurry figure to the viewer's left of the door (large rectangle of light on the left.) We have no way to account for the other figures in the picture- the hooded figure on the right, the other small child in front of "hoodie", or the forearm and lower leg on the far right. 

This is a very rough diagram I made of the layout of the room (on a post-it note.)

A couple of years ago, now all of us living in the old house, I awoke to see a woman's face on the ceiling of our bedroom. It was made of foggy swirls and smoke. I tried to wake up my wife next to me by whispering her name, never daring to take my eyes off the face. She was already awake. 

I asked her, "are you seeing what I'm seeing?"

"The woman's face on the ceiling?"

"So you see it too?"

"I sure do."

We watched it dissolve and lose shape, turning into a formless smudge and then fading away completely, Before the face lost resolution, I saw the skull underneath as the skin washed away.

I leave you with a picture I took a few Octobers ago when the wife and kids were on vacation and I was left to my own devices and Photoshop.