A Disney Trip That Took a Darker Turn
Mid-2022, a young woman, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin rented a small Airbnb near Kissimmee, Florida. The plan was simple: five days of sunshine and Disney World. What happened instead would become, in the poster’s own words, the most intense paranormal experience of her life.
The original account was shared by Reddit user u/EntertainmentLow7036 in r/Ghoststories and quickly lit up the paranormal community online. The poster describes herself as someone who has always had a heightened sensitivity to the paranormal, not a medium, not a ghost hunter, but someone who gets a deep gut feeling when something isn’t right. Her mother, she notes, was a lifelong skeptic. That would change by night four.
The rental was a modest place. Front door opening to a kitchen straight ahead, a small dining room and hallway to the right, and a living room to the left. Bedrooms were tucked at the back. Nothing about the layout suggested anything unusual. The first night passed without incident. It was the second night that opened the door to something none of them were prepared for.
Four Nights of Escalating Activity
The first sign came quietly. Around 11 p.m. on the second night, with everyone else presumably asleep, the poster heard the buttons on the microwave being pressed one after another. No hum of heating food. Just the clicks. She assumed her cousin was warming up leftovers and let it go.
The next morning, she asked who had been up with the microwave. No one had left their room. Her cousin confirmed she had heard the same thing and been annoyed by it. They exchanged a look and went on with their day.
Night three was when things became harder to explain away. Around 10 p.m., soft knocking started on the wall behind her bed. She chalked it up to neighbors. Then she turned off the light.
“A white orb came out slowly floating from the corner of the doorway,” she wrote, “and made its way to the middle of the room, just to dart back where it came from.”
She turned the lights back on immediately. The knocking resumed, this time clearly coming from the bathroom wall as well as the wall behind her bed. The microwave buttons started pressing again. The activity continued without pause until around 2 a.m.
Night four was the breaking point. Her aunt and cousin had left for a volleyball tournament. It was just her and her mother now, and her mother still wasn’t convinced.
By 8 p.m., the knocking was back. The poster moved into her mother’s room. The knocking followed, bleeding through the bathroom wall loud enough for both of them to hear clearly. Then it spread. Faint knocking came from every room at once, growing louder by the minute. The feeling in the poster’s gut was, by her description, the worst she had ever experienced.
Then a bottle in the now-empty room down the hall was thrown hard enough for them to hear it from 30 feet away.
They started packing.
The Moment Everything Stopped
As the poster carried her duffel bag through the living room toward the door, she heard heavy, deliberate footsteps right behind her, close enough to feel like someone walking on her heels. She picked up the bag and said out loud, “Okay, we are leaving.”
Dead silence.
The knocking stopped. Every room, simultaneously. The gut dread lifted. They left and checked into a hotel for the night.
The detail is striking not just for the drama of it, but for what it implies. Whatever was present in that house appeared to respond to human speech. The moment it was acknowledged, the moment departure was announced, the activity ended as abruptly as it had begun.
In the comments, user u/andingatacho offered a perspective rooted in their own cultural tradition: “In our tradition we have house spirits that look over the house and get curious when new faces arrive as it disturbs their routine. Hence everything stopped when you said you were leaving.”
What Could Explain It?
Before assuming anything supernatural, the rational checklist deserves a look. Knocking in walls can come from plumbing, thermal expansion in pipes and studs, or animals in the structure. Several commenters raised the possibility of rodents. The poster pushed back firmly: “When I say exorcist movie, I mean exorcist movie. Pounding on all walls. Unless the house was about to fall down, I highly doubt it was just settling.”
User u/malmurphy17 backed her up on the rodent theory: “The sound that rodents make when in the walls is very distinctive. Anything but a knock.” And while microwave buttons can malfunction, a consistent pattern of pressing across multiple nights is harder to attribute to a simple electrical glitch.
The ghost lore community has long catalogued phenomena like unexplained knocking, objects moving on their own, and visual anomalies like orbs in haunted locations. The floating white orb the poster described is one of the most commonly reported visual phenomena in haunted space accounts, though skeptics point out that light refraction, reflections, and lens artifacts can produce similar effects.
The thrown bottle is harder to file away neatly. No one was in that room. No open windows or drafts were mentioned. It was loud and deliberate enough to be heard from across a 30-foot stretch of house.
A Pattern Seen Before
The poster is not the first person to report an Airbnb stay that felt off in ways that are difficult to explain. In the comments, user u/Sea-Rip3902 described a large family who rented a house for a New Year’s party and ended up leaving after multiple people, including skeptics, saw the same apparition of an old man walking through the living room.
There is something particular about short-term rentals that makes them interesting from a paranormal research perspective. The turnover of guests, the variety of energy and emotion that passes through a space, and the general lack of personal attachment to the property may all factor into why reports like this one are not uncommon.
The Kissimmee property itself has a thread of follow-up data. The poster was eventually able to locate the address and share it in the comments. A fellow user pulled up the Zillow listing and noted the property had seen significant tenant turnover. The Airbnb listing quietly disappeared in September 2025.
Did They Ever Tell Anyone?
The poster left a note for the host. It read, according to her: “Stop renting out this place, it’s haunted as shit.”
Whether the host took that advice is unknown. What is known is that the listing went dark about three years after this stay, with no official explanation.
The poster’s mother, the lifelong skeptic, left Florida a believer. Four nights was all it took.
If you have had a similar experience at a short-term rental or vacation property, you are not alone. More of these stories exist than ever make it into formal reports. Seen something unexplained? Email Reports@ParaRational.com.
