My Haunted House
Around 1963 I married a gal who was divorced and had a little girl about
three years old. We found a nice little house for rent out on the edge of town at a reasonable price and moved in. We were still in the process of getting furniture and getting everything set up, so on the very first night we were there we just fixed a bed on a couch that folded out. I turned out the lights and crawled into bed when suddenly a voice that sounded like it was three inches from our ears said my name real loud and in a scolding tone! We both heard it and jumped up and of course I searched the house but there was nobody else there.
The house had a basement and a second floor. In the basement there was an old coal furnace that had been converted to gas and the two bedrooms and a bath was upstairs. It was an older frame house, but snug and cozy with a nice lawn.
Here's some of the things that happened. We would hear someione shoveling coal into the furnace in the basement and then the heavy steel door of the furnace would slam shut. There was no coal in what used to be the room where the coal was stored. We (and others too, visitors, friends, etc.) would hear someone in the kitchen washing dishes and the cupboard doors would slam shut. We'd be sitting at the dining table eating and we could hear foot steps going from one bedroom, across the hallway and into the other bedroom and the bedroom door would slam shut - while this was happening the light over the dining table would start to swing from the person walking over it upstairs.
My wife worked in a bank and on Friday's had to work late. One evening I had put the little girl to bed and was downstairs watching TV and a ball the girl had been playing with was over against the north wall. I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and turned and looked and saw the ball slowly coming across the floor toward me. It stopped about three feet away. It crossed the entire room!
One time my wifes parents and her sister came to visit and we began talking about some of the strange things happening in the house. The girl was about fourteen and said she wasn't afraid of any ghost and went up the stairs to the second floor and overlooking the living room and she sat down on the top step. Suddenly one bedroom door behind her opened and then slammed shut, the footsteps went across the hall, the other bedroom door opened and slammed shut and she came screaming down the stairs. Her parents left and never came back to the house.
There was a neighbor who lived behind us and we shared a driveway. They had to pass our house to get to theirs. One weekend we went away and asked these neighbors to keep an eye on the house while we were gone. The lady belonged to a bowling team and on Saturday night went bowling with her friends. When they finished it was late and her friends drove her home and dropped her off in front of our house at the driveway. She started walking down the driveway and saw there were lights on in every room of our house and there was music playing and she could hear people talking. Then she remembered we weren't home.
She turned and ran back toward the road and went down the road to another friend of hers place and had them call the police and report there was someone in our house. The police came, she walked back up to the house and the lights were all out and the place was silent. The police checked the house and everything was locked up as we had left it.
The garage door (manual) was also in the basement - the garage was on a lower level, and we would hear the door open and close. You could often hear someone walking through the lower part of the house, a radio in my den would turn itself on, one night someone shook the bed we were in. And one morning the little girl thanked me for bringing her a drink of water during the night. She said she had got very thirsty. I never went and got the child a drink. When I went to sleep, I really went to sleep. But there was a partial glass of water beside the little girls bed on the night stand.
There was never any indication this enity wanted to cause us any harm. It was just there, it lived there with us.
One evening my wife and I went out for dinner and ended up at a local bar. We started talking to another couple there and they asked where we lived and I told them. I also told them the house was owned by a man named B____. He said "oh, I know that family very well." Then he went on to say that Mr. B____'s mother had been a teacher in the area for many years and after her husband died, she became despondent and hung herself in that house.
Now we knew who our ghost was, even had a name for her. After that, if she was shoveling coal that wasn't there or making noise when we had company, we would just call her name and ask her to stop and she usually would. Not always, but most of the time.
The things I've listed here that happened are just a tiny fragment of everything that took place in that house. It was literally something every day.
And like I said, there was never any indication that she meant us any harm. She just lived in her house with us and the feeling we got was that she was happy to have us there.
TT
