What my grandpa didn't tell me was that the devil does not like it when someone turns towards God, and if he is allowed, the devil will do everything in his power to thwart that person away from God. In my case, a lot of the things that happened to my mom and her family in the house she played with the Ouija board in, began to happen to me too at my dad's house. I would've written off my experiences at my dad's house as my imagination if my dad's dog didn't react to the same things I was reacting to.
I stopped sleeping with the dog at my feet, and instead let my little half-brother sleep with him, because every night, between 2 and 4 AM, I'd wake up to my dad's dog growling with his hackles raised at the distinct sound of footsteps wandering up and down the hallway between my room and my dad's room on the other side of the house. Occasionally, my dad got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water from the sink downstairs, but he never went downstairs in the darkness. Whenever I heard those footsteps, I'd get up to check and the hallway would always be pitch dark except for a little bit of light from the moon, as would the living room and the kitchen, which I could see from the hallway through the banister railing.
I never wanted to alarm my dad or make him think I was going crazy, so I kept everything to myself. He never asked me any questions either. Even when I became too afraid to stay at the house by myself, or refused to sleep with the lights off, he never asked me why that was, and I was glad he didn't ask. He wasn't religious at the time, and regarded those things as silly stories people make up around campfires. Or so I thought.
Years later, after I'd long since moved out of the house, and my dad moved too, he opened up to me about his experiences in that house during lunch. He arguably experienced the worst of the activity in that house, because he was home most of the time for work.
He never saw things move in front of his eyes, but he heard things moving, and would see that they moved when he had his back turned. He turned the basement bedroom into his office, and while the kids were away at school, his wife was away at work, and his dog was at his feet, my dad and the dog would both hear footsteps and movement upstairs pretty often.
My dad would go upstairs to investigate, and usually there was nothing there, but sometimes he'd find things out of place, like the keyboard to the upstairs desktop on the floor on the other side of the room. When he found things laying around or open that weren't originally laying around or open, he was led to believe someone else was in the house that wasn't supposed to be there. But every time he checked the windows, doors, and the attic for signs of human activity, he'd find no evidence of anyone there. It was a very safe neighborhood, and there were neighbors around all of the time who would call my dad or his wife every time they saw an unfamiliar vehicle or person at their house. Yet, for some reason, he'd still find cabinets and doors standing open that he knew were closed earlier, or random objects lying in the center of rooms that weren't there before. Nothing of value ever disappeared, so my dad didn't have the evidence to conclude he was being robbed in broad daylight almost daily, while his car was in the driveway.
He continued to work from home despite the strange events that continued to happen, at least until he went into the basement bathroom one day and found the heat bulbs that had been securely screwed into their metal sockets for years, both shattered all over the floor like something straight of a horror movie. My dad rushed to clean up the mess, and then moved his office upstairs that same day. He never told anyone this, because he too, was afraid he was going crazy.
Interestingly enough, like my grandparents' old house where my mom played the Ouija board, that house also had a severe spider infestation my dad just could not get rid of no matter how hard he tried, or how much money he dished out for expert exterminators. When he was helping some hired moving guys move some bookshelves out of the basement, they found literal piles of spiders underneath the shelves. In some places, the layer of dead spiders under the shelves was inches thick, and some spiders were about as big and fury as tarantulas. To my dad, that was the kicker. That, in his words, was what turned him from an atheist into an agnostic.
