Bad Feelings About my New Place

It's been a while since I had any psychic-type experiences - to be honest I thought I'd 'grown out' of them. I'd describe myself as only mildly sensitive anyway: I've seen a few ghosts, messed with and been freaked out by ouija boards, and had various empathic/psychic experiences (have a nasty habit of reading people's states of mind more accurately than they like to be read), but none of these things have been exactly dependable, and could be written off as coincidence/imagination if you like.

However, I recently moved into a new house and ever since have been getting very bad feelings about it. The first time was as we were moving in: I'd just dropped off a lot of my stuff in the house and was walking out of the back door when I got a feeling of dread, like something bad was about to happen. The next day we discovered that there had been a massive gas leak due to the cooker being faulty: luckily none of us had tried to use it, or we could have been killed. I sort of dismissed the feeling I'd had - maybe I'd just smelt the gas without realizing, and my subconscious had given me some sort of warning.

Ever since then I've been having increasingly bad feelings about the place, particularly the front room. I've ended up sleeping in there a few times (I have pet rats in my room that wake me up some nights) and I've often felt like something doesn't want me there, like it's trying to drive me out. I've also heard noises like someone's walking around upstairs, even though both my housemates were in bed asleep. This really intensified in the last few days.

On Saturday night I was reading on the couch as the sun went down, and as soon as it started getting dark I started feeling really sick, like whatever energy had been keeping me going had just been taken away. I felt really washed out, and fell asleep at about 8pm. At first I had a dream about someone I vaguely know who was supposed to have left the country a few weeks ago. I dreamt I ran into him working in a bar with some of our friends, and was vaguely confused as to why he hadn't left the country yet. The next day I found out that he hadn't actually left like he said he was going to, and is actually living in a bar and thinking of getting it up and running again.

Shortly after that I started having what I call waking dreams - dreams where you think you're awake, or the boundary between being awake and being asleep gets blurred - and they got increasingly dark. I remember one in particular where I was walking back to the house at night, and knew someone was following me: when I turned around there was an old man right behind me, and I knew he wanted to hurt me.

I woke up from that dream at about 1am, and felt like I wasn't alone, though I didn't feel scared at first. I sort of let my mind drift without going back to sleep (I do this a lot - it's like my body is awake but my mind is tuned into a different frequency, I can see the room around me and know where I am but my understanding of it is different somehow) and I could hear a conversation between a man and a woman. The voices sounded like they were in the room with me, and the man had a slight Irish lilt to his voice. I remember wondering if someone had turned a radio on (though we don't have a radio). I can't remember what their conversation was about, but I know it came to a peaceful resolution, and I felt happy for them, as if they'd managed to reconcile some difference of opinion or come to some conclusion.

A little later I thought I heard a woman coughing out in the hall - again my feeling was of peaceful domestic life going on around me, as if I were staying in a family home. I then slept for a while, got woken up by my housemate at about 3am, then fell asleep again at 5ish.

On Monday night I got woken up by my rats and went downstairs to sleep on the couch. When I pushed open the front room door I felt like something wasn't right, but I ignored it, assuming I was just being paranoid. I made myself a nest on the couch, but as soon as I lay my head down to sleep I got this overwhelming feeling of fear, like something was willing me to get out of the room. I sat up, and the feeling sort of let off a bit, but when I tried lying down again it was worse than before. I tried everything I could think of to make it go away, but I couldn't shake it, and eventually I just ran out of the room and back upstairs - I really couldn't stay in there. I've been avoiding being in that room on my own ever since.

This probably all sounds a bit weird, but I used to get feelings like these in my parents' house growing up, and saw and heard various things (heavy breathing coming from nowhere, the figure of a man outlined in heat haze, lights pulsing on and off, etc) that made me think there might be something in it (my sister saw a man's figure one night as well, and my mum and I both had very similar nightmares about being trapped in one room that I was always scared to be alone in as a kid).

As I say, I haven't had these feelings for years, and I'm not sure what to make of them. I wondered if I'm just projecting my negative feelings onto the house (we could have died in a gas leak, and now I'm fighting with my housemates a lot, so I guess it makes sense that I don't feel safe there; similarly I wasn't too happy in the house where I grew up), but that doesn't seem sufficient to explain it.

Equally it doesn't seem to be anything as coherent as a warning or a haunting: just a general feeling of menace, like I shouldn't stay there. Not sure what's going on, but I really want to try and get to the bottom of this: after living in a house that felt 'wrong' for most of my life, I really don't want to have to do it again. Can anyone offer any advice about what I can do to make the place feel 'right' again?