Читать книгу Haunted Too - Dorah L. Williams - Страница 6

The Haunted Experiences of Others in Canada

Western Canada

Behind the Wall

Quite a few years ago I lived in the attic apartment of a very old and grand Victorian-era house. By the time I moved out of there I was a firm believer in ghosts.

I rented the attic in what was a four-plex, with tenants also living on the first two floors and one in the basement. When I first saw the apartment’s advertisement in the newspaper asking such a low rental price, I thought it must be located in a less than desirable area of the city. To my surprise, though, the neighbourhood was actually in a great location, and one that I had always admired. Even a century after the house was first built, and after it was turned from a single-family home into apartments, it still had an air of elegance about it. I knew the rental market well, and I could not understand why an apartment in a building and location such as that would be so inexpensive, but I felt very fortunate to have found it and happily signed the lease and moved in at the beginning of the following month.

I loved my new apartment and immediately felt at home. If it hadn’t been for a strange recurring nightmare I started to have right after moving in there, everything would have been perfect.

But the dreams were really frightening, and I couldn’t understand what was causing them, because I had never had nightmares like that before in my life (or since).

The dream always began with me climbing the stairs to my apartment as I returned home from work at the end of the day, and felt more lifelike than dreams normally do. As I approached the apartment I could hear a young woman crying uncontrollably, and would frantically fumble for my keys, trying to get the door open to see who was inside my apartment and why they were crying like that. But every time the door was opened the sobbing would immediately stop and an eerie silence hung in the air.

At first that was all I would dream. I would wake up and think I could almost still hear the crying in the darkness around me. But eventually, after a few weeks, the action in the dream would continue. After entering the apartment I would realize the woman’s crying was coming from a closet in the living room. I would open the closet door and search frantically through it trying to find her to help.

One night, in my dream, I started to rip out the shelves and pry the drywall off of the back of the closet, as the woman’s cries behind the wall started to become a high-pitched scream. Just as I was about to pull out a part of the wall and peer through the opening, I woke up in bed.

For whatever reason, after recurring all those weeks, the nightmares suddenly stopped and I never had that dream again. But the closet in my living room made me feel really uncomfortable, even after the dreams had ended, and the only thing I used it for was to store my winter clothing.

My friends all liked my new home, but several of them pointed out that the size of the apartment’s interior did not seem to compare to the dimensions of the building’s third-storey exterior. In fact, it seemed like an area about the size of a bedroom was not accounted for, and again I realized that closet seemed to be the cause.

There was a large unaccounted-for area between the living room and my bedroom. The door to the closet seemed to have led into a much larger space at one time, but now it was an area of only a few square feet. This reminded me of the dream, of course, and it did seem obvious that there really was some kind of space, if not a specific room, boarded up behind that closet.

Once I came home from the beach with two of my friends on a really hot summer day. We had planned to meet another friend at my apartment. When we entered the house’s front foyer I saw, through the railing, someone sitting near the bottom of the stairway, which faced the other direction. I assumed it was our friend and called out a greeting to her and told her that we would be there in a minute as soon as we unloaded the car. There was no reply. So while my other two friends brought in the cooler and blankets I went toward the stairway and the person sitting there. As I walked down the hallway toward the foot of the stairs, I passed the profile of the female figure sitting on the third or fourth step from the bottom. Through the railing’s spindles I saw, and even brushed against, her abundance of heavy clothing. I could see the woman was wearing layer upon layer of long woollen skirts and petticoats. And this fact alone, on such a sweltering day, bewildered me. With my hand on the railing and my eye looking in the direction of where the woman was sitting only a few feet away, I pivoted myself around the large newel post, so that I was then facing the stairway. As I did that, I asked my friend why she was wearing so many clothes on such a hot summer afternoon. But within the second or two that it took for me to spin myself around that post to face the stairway, the woman sitting there had completely vanished.

I couldn’t stop staring at the empty stairway, and it took a few minutes for the reality of what had just happened to make an impact. I had just assumed it was my friend waiting for us on the stairs. But, obviously it had not been. She arrived a few minutes later, and was wearing shorts and a tank top.

The woman I saw, I realized, was dressed in fashions from the previous century. But it wasn’t her clothing that was even so startling as the fact that she simply disappeared into thin air. She had looked completely solid, like a normal person, which is why I had mistaken her for my friend. The coarse fabric of her woollen skirt protruded through the railing spindles, and I had even felt it scratch against my sensitive sunburned arms as I walked past the stairwell.

There were only two exits from that particular stairway: one was my locked apartment at the top of the stairs, and the other was out the front door of the house. But my friends and I knew that no one rushed past us in the hallway that day. Whoever had been sitting on those stairs simply disappeared.

I never saw her again, but I know I felt her a few months later. My relationship with my boyfriend had just ended, and I was very upset one day and lay crying on my bed shortly after he had left. I was sobbing, with my face buried into my pillows, when I suddenly felt the bed sag beside me, as though someone had just sat down. Then a hand very gently began to pat the top of one of my hands, as if to console me. I froze. I understood, even through my fear, that whoever it was didn’t mean to scare me, only comfort me as I cried. But it did terrify me. I was afraid to look up from the pillow, where my face was still buried, but I wanted to flee. I grabbed my hand away from the patting and shoved it under the pillow out of reach, and said, as calmly as I could make myself sound, “I’m okay now, please leave me alone”… and she did.

At the end of the year I learned that the Victorian house was being sold. The new owner wanted to convert the building back to its original state, as a single family home, and live in it himself. The tenants were all given notice that we would have to move. This was very upsetting news to me; I really loved living in that old house.

The day before I moved, I returned home from work to discover that the new owner had been in my apartment while I had been gone that day. He had mentioned to me that he needed to take some measurements for the renovation, but I thought he meant for the windows. Now I saw that the heavy wooden shelves from the closet in the living room had been removed and were leaning up against the wall beside it.

I slowly approached the closet and nervously opened the door. A large hole had been cut into the back wall, and a string, from a ceiling light in the area beyond, hung through the opening. Even before I pulled the string to turn on the light I could see into the darkness well enough to make out that there was a large room hidden behind the closet: just like in my dream when I was trying to get to the crying woman behind the wall.

The light bulb must have been very old, but still dimly lit the room. I peered through the hole in the wall and saw that it had once been a bedroom. The hole was not large enough for me to see the whole area, but I could clearly see that the furniture had all been left in place when the room had been sealed up as it was.

I couldn’t understand why anyone would board up a furnished bedroom like that. But in that recurring nightmare that haunted me for so many weeks, there was a woman crying behind the wall of that closet. And the woman sitting on the stairs was dressed in clothing from the same era in which I would estimate the bedroom had last been used.

There must have been an explanation for all of this, but I had to move out of the apartment the following day and was never able to learn any more about it.

Her Friend Elgin

When our daughter was about two years old, she would talk about her friend “Elgin,” who played with her and came to see her at night before she went to sleep. She had begun to talk at a very early age and was very fluent and articulate by that point.

She said he had white hair and a white beard and his clothes were black. We had no idea what or who she was talking about and had never even heard of anyone with that name before (so she hadn’t overheard us ever discussing someone called Elgin and parroted that name).

One day I was in the library and doing some research to see what I could learn about our house. I wasn’t even thinking about our daughter’s invisible friend; I was just curious to see what I could find out about our ninety-year-old home’s history.

Well, I discovered that a man named Elgin had owned the property for a long time, shortly after it was built, until the previous owner, who had sold to us, bought it from him. He had spent most of his long life in that house. And I found a photograph of him in the library. I showed it to my daughter and said, “Who is this?”

She smiled when she saw it, and said “That’s Elgin!”

There’s No Place Like Home

Our house has had some sad history, and that might account for the things we have experienced while living here, if, as they say, untimely deaths cause spirits to remain earthbound.

When it was built in the mid-1800s it was a modest one-storey house. But as the original owner prospered he kept adding on to the house until it was built into the large home it is today.

He started out as a small local merchant but soon owned many businesses in town. He had immigrated to Canada from England with his parents as a small boy, and in the 1881 census his elderly widowed mother is listed as living with him and his wife and their five surviving children in this house.

I found some information about this family in the library archives, and many more records were found on Internet genealogy sites.

I learned that he and his bride moved into their new house at the time of their marriage, when it was still just the small original structure. Two years later she died of influenza. And their infant daughter also died of that just a few days later.

He remarried five years after that, and had six children with his second wife. Their eldest son was killed when he fell down the steep cellar stairs and broke his neck when he was only ten.

When his second wife died in 1895, he sold the house. We bought it a few years ago, after many other owners, and have done an extensive restoration on it.

So … that brings me up to the haunting part. As I said, we have extensively restored the house and while doing so we had many people working on it with us for months. So during all that chaos I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. It wasn’t until we were actually living in the house that it began, or at least became noticeable.

At first it was nothing definite, just feelings like being watched. Sometimes it feels like you hit a pocket of icy cold air as you walk in a certain area of the house. But as it is a very old house, drafts are to be expected in colder months. In the summertime, with no central air in the house, those icy pockets of air are a bit more difficult to explain. That never scares anyone; it’s just a weird thing that often happens.

And then there are the strange sounds; but again, in a very old house that is not completely unexpected either. When doors open or close and floorboards creak we just try to ignore it as being due to the house’s age.

But there is also a distinctive little boy’s voice and laughter. We’ve all heard it, and usually when we’re all together in the same room, so we know it isn’t anyone else in the family.

We’ve also heard the sound of running. It always starts in the upstairs sunroom area and travels along the hallway and down the back stairway into the kitchen. It’s the laughing that is most often heard, though, and we’ve also clearly heard a little boy call out, “Papa” and “in here.”

Another odd thing, to do with voices too, is that a few times my daughter has come looking for me to see why I called her, when I never did. But she heard someone calling her and thought it was me.

My husband is the only person, so far, who has actually seen a ghost in our house. And this has happened to him twice. One evening, when he was the only one at home, he walked up the stairs toward our bedroom after getting home late from work. Through the railing, he thought he saw me, in my nightgown, walking through the doorway into our room. As he continued up the rest of the stairway he asked why I hadn’t gone to the movie with my daughter as planned. When there was no answer, and he was alone when he walked into the bedroom, he realized whomever he had seen was gone. But he was positive he saw a woman going into that room, and thought it must be me.

When I got home later he was still a bit dumbfounded at what he had seen.

The second time he saw something it scared him a bit more. Again, it was when he was there alone. He had just arrived home from work and came in through the back way. Our dog went to greet him, and as he was taking off his coat and walking toward the front entrance to hang it up, he saw someone, or something, very large come right through the closed front door. He said a red mass (like a mist) came through the solid oak door and then started to form into a very tall man. The dog yelped and hid behind my husband (some watchdog). He stared at it for a few seconds as it took a human shape, and then it dissolved into thin air.

In spite of the haunting, we love living here. This house felt special right from the start, and the longer we live here the deeper I feel the connection with it. I can understand why past residents might want to remain.

Haunted Ground

My experience isn’t really about a haunted house so much as about the land the house was built on.

My husband and I were very excited about the new house we were going to build when we sold our old house. The only problem was that we had a really hard time finding a building lot to purchase. We had two small children and hoped to build in a quiet area of the city, but not many lots were available at that time. Finally we had it narrowed down to three possible lots, but two were in areas that we really didn’t like and the third was about twice the price we wanted to pay. But we had to make a decision fairly quickly, because the house’s construction had to start so it would be ready to move into by the time our old house had to be vacated.

We decided to go with the expensive lot, even though it cost a lot more than our initial budget had allowed. It was a beautiful piece of property with gorgeous, mature trees, on a really quiet street. And something that we also really liked was that it was right beside an incredible 1800s-era mansion that sat on a huge estate-sized lot that took up the rest of the block.

So as we drove by the property, it seemed like, other than the price, it would be an ideal place to build our house and raise our family. But once the car was parked and we started to walk around the property I suddenly became violently ill. I had been feeling well, with no sign of sickness, right up until that moment. It just hit me full force right out of the blue. I was so sick that we headed back to the car as soon as I could make it that far and planned to go right back to our house. As soon as I got back into the car I was fine again, but we left anyway in case the illness returned. It didn’t. I felt completely normal still when we got home, and remained well until we went back to the building site the following week. Although not quite as intense as the first time, I was sick again as soon as I started to walk onto the property. We had not considered that the property could somehow be the cause of the illness at that point, but once again the minute I walked off the property and sat in the car, parked on the road, I immediately felt fine. I had so much to do during that time period that being sick was the last thing I needed, so I was very relieved when the feeling passed so quickly and I was able to resume my busy schedule when I got back home.

A few days later my husband suggested we drive by the building site again to see how the work on the new house was coming along. By then, though, I was starting to sense that for some bizarre reason that property made me feel deathly ill whenever I walked on it. This was a terrible feeling, because our new house was being built on that lot and I knew I couldn’t avoid it forever. So, somewhat nervously, we drove over to the new property. I sat in the car for a few minutes before I felt ready to walk over to where the house was being built. Nothing happened at first, and I was relieved and felt foolish at the same time. I thought it had been pretty ridiculous that I had thought there was any connection between that land and my recent bouts of illness.

We stayed for a while. I didn’t feel sick to my stomach and was very relieved about that, but did notice a strange but obvious tension started to develop between my husband and me. We have always had a great relationship and are the best of friends, but as we stood looking at the foundation hole that had been dug and the other work that was being done, we started snapping at each other over the most trivial things. This was so out of character for us that it must have almost sounded funny, but at the time I felt this very real fury at him, but couldn’t really understand why. I could tell from his tone that he was furious at me too, and we acted like we were enemies. It was lucky our kids were at home with a babysitter because I wouldn’t have wanted them to hear their parents talking to each other like that!

We made up by the time we got home and both felt terrible for how we had treated each other. Like my illness, the negative feelings we had toward each other had just come out of nowhere and left just as quickly as soon as we left the property.

By the time our house was finished it looked great and we were all happy with it. Everything seemed fine for the first few weeks, but then our youngest child became really ill. After consulting several doctors, including specialists, no one could ever determine what was causing the problem. Eventually everything was fine again, and fortunately the illness did not return and everyone remained healthy. But that awful tension definitely came back into our marriage. We were so miserable for the whole time we lived in that house.

After a couple of years my husband was offered a new job and we had to move. When the real estate agent was over to give us an appraisal on what the property was worth, he remarked on what a huge improvement our next-door neighbours had made to their home. I was curious about that, because their house was so beautiful and I had only ever known it to look like that. He explained to me that a long time ago (probably at least fifty years), when he was a young boy, he had lived nearby, and he and the other neighbourhood children used to bet each other that they wouldn’t have the nerve to step onto the “haunted” house’s property, because they were all terrified of that whole area.

At that time the property was completely overgrown, and the mansion was in a terrible state of disrepair because it had long been abandoned. The property that our house was built on was originally part of that huge estate. But the house next door was now beautifully restored and didn’t look anything like the agent remembered. I asked him why it had the reputation of being haunted, but he seemed very reluctant to talk about it further and the topic was dropped. And I never did learn any more about the history of that property before we moved.

What I did learn, though, through friends in the neighbourhood, was that since we left, just a few years ago, the house has had a very high turnover rate, with the next two couples who owned it after us both leaving shortly after they moved in, on account of their marriages breaking up and them getting divorced. And the next owner, a single middle-aged woman, had some sort of nervous breakdown after living there for only a few months, and had to move away to live with her father in another city.

So after that experience, I truly believe now that even if you build a new house that no one else has lived in before, it can still be “haunted” by whatever negative energy the property it is built on, has, especially if there was a disturbing history of some kind.

Sweater Girl

I don’t know if this could be classified as a ghost story, because I’m not sure it was a ghost that I saw. That experience definitely haunted me, though, and whatever it was, it could only be described as supernatural.

About twenty years ago, when my youngest child had just turned one, we moved to a new town and bought our first house there, in the oldest (and busiest) section of town.

The only problem I had with the neighbourhood was the congestion from all the traffic on a street not designed to accommodate modern vehicles. Between three-thirty and four o’clock every afternoon, dismissed students from four different schools in the area surrounding us hurried past, and even inside our house the noise from this was very loud.

One warm, sunny spring day I was playing with my little daughter in our living room. She would get so excited to see all the children racing by at dismissal time that I would sometimes put her into her playpen in front of the large bay window so she could happily watch them.

The traffic started to increase as always, with parents approaching the schools to pick up their children, and I could hear the bells start to ring, signalling another ended school day. And on cue, as always, the kids not getting rides started walking or running down the street, free from school for the rest of the day. So, in every way, it just seemed like a very typical afternoon.

But as I placed the baby into her playpen for a better view of all this commotion, something happened that I will never, ever forget. The sunny

afternoon suddenly (and when I say suddenly I do mean immediately) turned into a cold, cloudy day. And although there had been a constant din of noise and activity right outside the window up until that very second, it was now deathly silent, without a vehicle or person in sight. Even my neighbour who had seen me looking out the window and had just waved to me from his front garden only a moment before was no longer visible.

My daughter stared up at me, and her big blue eyes showed just as much bewilderment as I was feeling myself. I walked over to the front door and slowly turned the knob, feeling I had to investigate what was going on, but nervous to leave the safety of my home. I glanced back at the baby in her playpen, and then immediately looked in the large front window at her again as soon as I stepped out onto the porch so she knew I was still there.

We were both baffled. I stood on our front porch staring up and down the street trying to understand how the cloudless, sunny day had been so altered so quickly into the cold, damp grey afternoon it now was. But, even more so, I tried to make sense out of how everyone else on the street had completely disappeared, including all the vehicles. No children, no parents, no neighbours, no cars or bikes. In fact, one of my neighbours had been cutting some limbs in his backyard, and I realized then that even that noise from the chainsaw had been eliminated. It was completely and eerily silent.

And then I saw her. As I stared up the street, looking for even one school kid, when there should have been dozens, I saw a lone figure walking slowly toward my house. I stared at her with relief at first … at least there was another person, and surely, I thought, more would start to fill the street again soon, as usual. But the silence remained, and the odd chill in the air made me rub my bare arms with my hands, trying to warm them. I kept glancing in the window at the baby, and she kept her eyes fixed on me the whole time. I’m sure she knew something bizarre was happening, but I had no idea what it was either.

As the woman approached I saw she was wearing a very heavy brown sweater. It was early spring, and the temperature earlier that day had been unseasonably warm, which was why I was wearing a sleeveless blouse myself, and the baby was so lightly dressed. I was a bit surprised to see her wearing something that heavy and warm on what had been such a hot day. But the sudden plunge of the temperature made me think she was probably more comfortably dressed than I was at that moment.

She walked slowly but deliberately toward my home, and I assumed she would acknowledge me as she approached, especially with the two of us suddenly being the only ones around. I planned to ask her if this didn’t seem very strange to her too. But when she got close enough for eye contact and to exchange comments, she completely ignored me. It was as if she didn’t even see me standing there, just a few metres away from the sidewalk. She didn’t pass by, though, as I had expected her to. She stopped when she got to the large maple tree growing on our boulevard and stared at it for several seconds with a look of rapture on her face … and that unsettled me. But nothing prepared me for what she did next.

What I had thought was a heavy woollen sweater covering her arms and upper body was actually countless tent caterpillars. I finally realized this as I watched in horror as she slowly started to peel them, one after another, off of herself and place them onto the tree. I stood watching this for a few moments, completely shocked and frozen to the spot. I could not believe what I was seeing. Finally, my anger at her deliberate infestation of our lovely tree surpassed my bewilderment and fear of the strangeness of that whole experience.

I called to her from the porch, “Hey, stop that!”

She either ignored me or was unaware of my presence, because she never even turned to look in my direction. She just continued to peel off caterpillar after caterpillar from her upper body and place them gently onto the trunk of the tree.

“What are you doing?” I yelled again. This time she did acknowledge me. She turned and glared at me in the most terrifying way, and I almost fainted on the spot. I was prepared to just rush back into the house and let her strip every last caterpillar off of herself as she seemed intent on doing, rather than confront her again. But before I could move she backed away from the tree, still wearing hundreds of the caterpillars on her arms and body, and slowly retraced her path back down the street.

Twice she turned and glared at me again, but she finally reached the intersection and turned the corner out of sight. I felt weak with relief. And as quickly as the clouds had set in and the sun had disappeared, the day was bright and beautifully warm once more. And all the usual noises filled our street again within the split second it took me to leave the front porch and re-enter the living room to pick up my daughter from her playpen and hold her close. I was even relieved to hear the chainsaw in my neighbour’s backyard again. I talked calmly and reassuringly to my baby, but I was shaking like a leaf.

After knowing she was all right, I put her in the playpen again and headed back out to the boulevard with a broom in my hand. I knocked as many caterpillars off of the tree as I could reach, but many more had already climbed too high into the tree’s limbs. And, no wonder, we did have a terrible infestation of tent caterpillars in that tree that year. My husband knew that was true, because he was the one who dealt with that difficult situation along with his usual yardwork that summer; but I know he could never really comprehend this story I tried to explain regarding the cause. I don’t know that I could have truly believed it either, though, if I hadn’t experienced it myself.

Everything about it was so eerie and surreal. My daughter was too young to retain the memory, but at the time I was grateful for her company. Her wide-eyed amazement validated everything I also was experiencing that day. I know it wasn’t a dream or hallucination, and really did happen just as I have described. I just don’t understand why or how.

Haunted Neighbour

My neighbour’s house was haunted. It was built on an empty lot, and the house had just been built when they moved into it when I was a teenager. Their son was my age, and we were friends.

He always preferred to be at my house instead of his, and at first I thought he liked the commotion of being in our large family’s home filled with lots of people, unlike his quiet home where he was the only child.

But one day he told me that he was scared living in his house and wanted his parents to sell it and move, but they wouldn’t. He even asked if he could go and live with his grandparents in another city because he hated it there so much, but they wouldn’t let him do that either.

He told me he had seen and heard ghosts in his house, but his parents wouldn’t believe him and got mad if he talked about it. I asked what he had seen, and he listed off a lot of things, but I remember these two the most. An old lady walked into his room one night when he was reading in bed and sat down in a nearby chair and smiled at him. He said he screamed and she disappeared and then his father yelled at him for scaring his mother. Another time a little girl was sitting on the floor in his kitchen when he got home from school. No one else was home. She looked at him for a couple of seconds and then vanished.

Looking back now, I wish I had realized and been more sympathetic to how badly this was affecting him; but I was just a kid too, and unfortunately was more fascinated than sympathetic. I thought it was great, like something out of the movies, and wanted to see these ghosts too. So I started suggested going to his place whenever we got together from then on.

It was a while longer before I saw anything there myself, though, and I was starting to wonder if he had been making it all up. But one time (the last time) I spent the night at his place we stayed up late watching TV. Finally, after he fell asleep and the TV was turned off, I lay there still wide awake and heard someone walking down the hall with heavy footsteps. At first I assumed it was one of his parents, because their room was across the hall from his. But I knew they had both gone to bed long before we did, and I hadn’t heard anyone leave that room since. I could see from the space under the door that the hallway was still dark (I figured they would have turned on the hall light). And the footsteps came to his door, not theirs.

I could hear (and sense) someone on the other side of that door for quite a while. I was a pretty cocky teenager, but I’ll admit now that scared me, and I wanted to wake up my friend, but kept straining my ears instead, hoping to hear the footsteps walking away. I could hear the muffled sounds of someone leaning or brushing against the door, and I can still remember how it made me feel lying in the dark, not knowing what I was hearing on the other side of that door.

Finally, I heard what sounded like muttering, and then the loud footsteps went back down the hall again.

I didn’t sleep for the rest of that night. Next morning I told my friend what had happened. He just nodded his head and told me he had heard that same thing before too, many times.

To his relief his parents finally sold the house a few months later.

No More Denial

I admit I am currently living in a haunted house. I was in denial about that for a while when we bought this house last year. It’s our first house. My wife and I have been married two years, and we thought it would be a great investment and get us onto the property ladder. It was priced right and didn’t need too much work to be inhabitable. Mostly just some minor repairs and updates in the kitchen and bathroom and some coats of paint have turned it back into a nice-looking house. But how it looks and how it feels are different things.

The first thing I tried to ignore were the smells. Cigar smoke and very strong perfume seem to combine into a pungent odour that suddenly hits you in two areas of the house: the upstairs hallway and near the back door by the kitchen. I don’t know why this is contained to only those areas, but it is.

Our two cats and boxer pup seem pretty nervous (skittish, as my wife would call it) in the house and are always following something with their eyes, unseen by us. They will focus on something about six feet above them and keep whatever it is in their sight as if it’s travelling around the room. If it appears to come to close to the animals they will open their eyes wider in fright, and then race out of the room and go and hide somewhere. It’s hard to describe how creepy this actually is, watching how the animals react to this. I just thought they were having a hard time adjusting to their new home at first, but this is still going on, and they should be used to it here by now, especially the pup who was bought after we moved into the house.

Once my wife let out a scream, and when I went downstairs to see what was wrong she told me she thought I had come up behind her and tickled her waist, but when she turned around no one was there. We both started to feel a bit less comfortable living here after that.

My car keys are always moved whenever I leave them near the front door. We have a table near the door, and I always toss the keys there out of habit when I enter the house. But they are never there when I go to leave again. Sometimes they are even upstairs or in the basement, areas I hadn’t been to during that interval in the house. Once I purposely put them there and waited to see what would happen. Nothing. They were on that table all day, exactly where I’d put them. But when my wife came home and I greeted her at the door they were gone by the time I turned toward the table to show her they hadn’t been moved.

I found them on the counter in the kitchen that time. No idea how they got there, but I stopped leaving them on the table after that and always keep them in my pocket now.

A few weeks ago I got home from work about an hour before my wife did and went into our bedroom to grab a shower and change my clothes because we were going out later that night. My wife and I had left the house together that morning. The door to our room is always kept closed to keep the pets out when we aren’t there, and it was that day too. So I know they hadn’t been in there. When I opened the door I saw a huge imprint on our bed where it looked like a large person had been lying on it.

We’ve stopped trying to make ourselves believe this is a normal household. We know it’s haunted; we don’t know why, though. It’s not really that old. As far as we know nothing terrible ever happened here, and the original owner didn’t die in the house; she just got too old to live alone and lives with her daughter now.

I don’t think we’ll be here long enough to solve the mystery of this haunting, if it even could be solved. We planned to stay for a few years when we bought it, but we hope to move a lot sooner than that now.

House-sitting

Our neighbours were going on a holiday and asked me to house-sit for them while they were gone. This wasn’t a problem, as I lived on the same street so could keep an eye on their property for them, water their plants, take in the mail, etc.

They had a beautiful old home, the nicest in the neighbourhood, if not the whole town. And I had never heard or seen anything unusual while visiting there before, and my friends certainly never mentioned anything to me about thinking their house was haunted. But the first time I was alone in the house, to water the plants while they were away, I started to get an uneasy feeling I never expected to have. When I came in I noticed the radio was on in the kitchen, which I thought was unusual since the house was empty, but I didn’t think that much about it until I turned it off and then heard it playing again as I was looking for the watering can for the plants in another room.

And it felt like I was being watched, but I knew I was the only one in the house. I tried to ignore that uneasy feeling and went into the next room to water the plant in there. As I walked toward the large plant in the corner of the room, the chair beside it slid right across the floor about three feet toward me. I never watered the plant that day. I rushed out of there instead.

But they were gone for a month, and I had already promised to take care of the plants for them, so knew I would have to go back eventually. So I made my husband go with me the next time. He is the most skeptical person around, and didn’t believe for a minute that a ghost had pushed that chair across the floor the last time I had been there. He had a few other explanations (my imagination, the house’s old foundation made the floors uneven, a dog or cat could have pushed it — even though they didn’t have any pets).

He went into the house first and had a quick look around and then motioned to me to come in. His back was to the staircase, and as he made smartass remarks about getting our friends a “Ghostbusters” gift certificate for Christmas that year something started to form behind him, over the stairs.

He saw my expression, and turned to see what I was looking at. And we both saw a vortex-like “thing” (I don’t know what else to call it) suspended in mid-air. It just suddenly materialized, and then evaporated into nothing again within a few seconds. I was so glad he was witnessing this too.

I better not quote what he said when he saw it, but let’s just say he isn’t quite as skeptical about other people’s paranormal sightings anymore.

A few days later I was unlocking their front door to place the mail on the pile on the front stand. Something caught my eye, and I thought I saw someone walking in the living room. I nervously peeked around the corner and screamed when I saw a woman standing there. It was my friend, home sooner than expected, and my reaction scared her too and she also screamed. She thought I had mistaken her for an intruder, but I actually screamed because I had thought she was a ghost. After we both stopped laughing I decided it might be best not to mention what we had seen. I had already scared her enough.

Central Canada

Haunted Childhood

This took place in my childhood home, where I lived with my sister, mother, and father. The house was a typical 1960s-era side-split design, in a new neighbourhood that had previously just been farmland. It was nothing like the Victorian gothic mansions that are usually associated with restless spirits and hauntings.

We had never experienced any paranormal activity in our previous house, and certainly didn’t expect it in our brand new one. And we never could understand why that particular house was so haunted.

After we moved in to the new house it was at least three or four years before anything unusual occurred. It all started on Remembrance Day one year when my sister and I were home, as it was a school holiday at that time, and our parents were both at work. We were sitting on the couch in the living room, arguing about something trivial. Suddenly, across the room, the television turned on all by itself, and the volume kept increasing until it was as loud as it could go. My sister and I looked at each other in shock and forgot about whatever had caused our squabble.

One afternoon soon after that, I returned home for lunch. I had been the last one to leave the house that morning, and knew everything had been quiet when I had closed and locked the door on my way to school. But now, when I stood on our front porch unlocking the door a few hours later, I could hear music blaring from inside the house. It was so loud the windows were actually shaking and our dog was frantically running around, trying to escape the noise.

When I got the door opened I ran into the dining room and saw that a Christmas album was playing on the record player in there, with the volume turned up to maximum. I knew the house had been silent when I left for school that morning, and no one had been using the record player for several days prior to that. But now, when the house had been unoccupied since I had left after breakfast, the record player had somehow been turned on, with the volume fully cranked. Our dog was relieved when I turned off the music, but it took a while before she stopped shaking.

It then became a fairly common occurrence to hear music playing within the house. Sometimes it would be audible but faint, and walking around the house would not help in determining where the noise was originating.

Conversations between at least two people, and sometimes what sounded like several, could be heard as faint murmuring too; and this, even more than the music, confused and frightened us. The voices would continue until we entered the room where they seemed to be, and then they would abruptly stop until we left the room again.

My sister and I seemed to observe the most activity, although on one occasion our mother nervously admitted she had seen a young man with a guitar slung over his shoulder walk down the hallway and stop at her bedroom door. He looked in the room to where she was lying in bed, reading a book. They stared at one another for several seconds and then he just simply vanished.

We were surprised to hear our mother share this experience, and to see how frightened she was, because she had not seemed to believe our own claims up until that point. After that, though, she did not so easily shrug off our constant stories of doors opening by themselves and appliances (the television, and radio, etc.) being turned on and off by unseen hands.

Although the haunting was really frightening at times, nothing harmful ever happened. The ghosts definitely made their presence known, but not in aggressive ways.

One day, though, my sister and I were sitting on the bed talking in her bedroom when, from several feet away, a small rubber Super Ball suddenly shot up off of the dresser (neither of us had been near it or touched it). With incredible force it bounced itself off of every wall in the room and whizzed by our heads. We ran screaming from the bedroom. And as soon as we left the room, the ball stopped, and it was sitting still, on the dresser again, when we felt brave enough to return. That incident definitely scared us the most.

Ten years after our family moved into that house, my mother died suddenly after a brief illness. The paranormal activity in the house, which had occurred so frequently up until then, completely stopped from that day on. And although we remained in the house for several more years after that, I can’t recall there being another single incident.

Maybe my mother’s spirit was protectively watching over us and wouldn’t let other spirits bother us anymore.

The House Beside the Mill

My experience is very much remembered through the eyes of a child, as I was only about eleven or twelve for the bulk of the time that I lived in this house. My family, particularly my aunt, who owned the house, would provide a far more insightful articulation of this story, but I doubt it is a story she would care to retell. The experiences in this house were not at all pleasant and were the impetus for her to relocate her family to another home.

My aunt was puzzled by the high vacancy rate of the house and the surprisingly low lease payments that were being asked by the owner, who was trying to sell it. She was, however, ecstatic about the find and gratefully signed the lease and moved her family in.

The house was located in a small town (population around three thousand), at the end of a small dead-end street beside a mill that had burnt down sometime at the turn of the twentieth century and been rebuilt.

The house itself was beautiful. It was built in the colonial style and was two stories, with white wood siding and four ominous (but stately) dormers across the front. Upstairs, there was a master bedroom, a regular bedroom, and a third bedroom that had a small room off of it. At one time it must have served as the quarters for a nanny or wet nurse. The main floor contained a kitchen, dining room, living room, and drawing room. The floors were connected by a grand spiral staircase.

One of the strangest features of the house was the basement, which contained many antiques and treasures that must have come with the original house and that, surprisingly, no one had taken. There was a door down there that led out, underground, to a tunnel connecting to a smaller house on the street behind. This, apparently, was the tunnel that connected the main house to what was perhaps the servants’ quarters behind it. While the house was by no means a mansion, it was somewhat strange and out of place in comparison to the other houses in this small town.

I lived in this house for two months one summer, when my parents shipped me off for summer vacation, and I spent many weekends here as well. I can’t quite recall how long my aunt actually lived there, but I don’t think it was much longer than a year.

I realized very quickly that there was something unusual about this house. The day my aunt moved in I was around to help unpack the boxes, and I remember feeling a weight in the house that was unsettling. It’s hard to know if this was a child’s intuition or simply the discomfort that comes with being in an unfamiliar place, but it was there nonetheless.

The darkest and most unsettling room was the bedroom on the second floor that served as the nanny’s room. It is hard to describe, but it was a cold and damp and heavy-feeling room, quite unlike any of the other rooms. For the duration of the time that my aunt lived there, it remained very unused. It served as a guest bedroom that everyone refused to sleep in, though no one ever really articulated why.

My aunt’s two-year-old son slept in the small room off the nanny’s quarters, and her baby daughter slept in the master bedroom with her parents. The other bedroom was also a guest room, and my room when I stayed for the summer.

The first occurrences in the house revolved around the sound of a child crying. In the first instance this was not unusual, as my aunt had two small children. But when she went to check on them she would find her children fast asleep or playing peacefully with no sign of being distressed. Later, we would get used to hearing the sound of a child on the stairs, sliding down on their behind, one [step] at a time, and laughing.

There was also the constant sound of someone pacing in the hallway, back and forth, for hours on end. Only when we climbed up the stairs to see who was there would the pacing stop. There were days where we would hole up in the kitchen, with the pacing overhead, clinging to the hope that whoever, or whatever, was up there would not come down the stairs and show themselves.

My aunt’s young son seemed most tuned into the presence, and would often blurt out, “Who’s that man?” He would point to the corner shadows of the room where no man was ever seen standing. Some nights he would wake up screaming, obviously afraid, and would refuse to return to his small room to sleep. Near the end of my aunt’s stay at the house, everyone crammed into the master bedroom to sleep.

Doors slammed, household items disappeared and reappeared, floor and walls shook, and voices were heard whispering as everyday occurrences. An old bureau in the bedroom where I slept held a mirror that, if you pulled it away from the wall, could be flipped around. (I am not sure if you are familiar with this particular piece of furniture, but it is fairly common. There was a mirror on the front side and wood on the back side, and it was built to accommodate all the various superstitions around mirrors.) Often, I would leave the room only to return to find the mirror had been flipped around (an impossibility considering the piece of furniture was extremely heavy and the mirror could only be flipped when it was pulled clear from the wall).

My aunt had a number of psychics and clairvoyants through the house and tried an endless number of things to rid the house of the ghosts. She tried to hold seances, she put salt in all of the corners to “absorb” the energy, she lit candles, she prayed, and on and on and on. All to no avail.

Strangers who came to investigate the haunting would leave the house after poking around (particularly in the basement), and almost all of them met with some bizarre accident or illness upon leaving: car accidents, broken bones, strange illnesses, etc.

The last day I slept in the house, before returning to my parents’ house, I was carrying my suitcase from my room upstairs to the front hall on the main floor. As I was descending the stairs, I felt a weight behind me, and I found myself lying at the bottom of the stairs with an incredible pain in my back. I pretended I was fine and waited for my dad on the front steps to pick me up. I remember irrationally thinking that if I told my aunt about the pain she would take me to the hospital and somehow I would be forced to recover from the fall in her house, as opposed to going home. This was an unfathomable thought for me, after living two months on edge. I remember getting home and crying for days (and finding out three years later that I had a slipped disc in my back from the fall).

After that summer, I think my aunt stayed for a few more months before moving out. My uncle, who refused to believe that there was such a thing as a ghost, came home one night and saw the ghostly image of a man standing in the drawing room. Wasting no time, he grabbed a hunting rifle and shot at it, leaving a bullet hole in the wall and scaring the life out of my aunt and his kids. This was the last straw. The next day my aunt moved out.

My aunt did a lot of research into the history of the house, including the fire that destroyed the mill next to it. She still believes that the sounds of the children crying and playing have something to do with the child labourers who died in the mill fire.

Someone to Watch Over Me

I grew up in a very volatile environment due to my parents’ alcoholism. One night when I was pretty young my mother and father had a particularly horrible fight, and I was terrified.

After everything calmed down and everyone else was sleeping that night, I was still lying in bed, wide awake, frightened and crying. There was a night light on in the room. At one point in the night I remember a strong feeling that someone was watching me, so I looked up from my pillow and saw an enormous shadow filling two walls: the wall beside the bed that I was on, and on the other wall, right behind the bed. It looked like a huge shadow of a nun’s head and shoulders. We weren’t Catholic, and I hadn’t been praying, just crying. It wasn’t any religious influence that would have made me think that, but I could immediately see that is what it seemed to be.

From the position of the shadow, it looked like she was right above me and looking down protectively, and that gave me immediate comfort. And I felt so much better when I saw this. I stopped crying and just stared at the shadow for a long time, and was so glad it was there with me.

Finally, though, I began to get curious as to what was actually casting the shadow. I got out of bed and looked around the night light and the rest of the room to see what could be creating it. But there was nothing that seemed to be causing it. Yet there it was, right above my bed, and so clearly defined. And I knew it had not been there for the first few hours I was in bed, it just suddenly appeared.

I climbed back into bed, exhausted, but kept opening my eyes to make sure the shadow was still there. It stayed above me all night. I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up in the early morning, the shadow was gone. I never saw it again. But I have never forgotten that, and I think it must have been a protective spirit, or angel, letting me know she was watching over me.

Do You See What I See?

I was helping my friend move into an apartment. After unpacking all of the boxes and getting everything organized, we went into the living room to take a break. The living room was situated at the end of the hall that led to the bathroom and bedroom.

While leaning against a wall in the living room I could see out of the corner of my eye that someone was approaching us from the hall. I turned and saw a middle-aged brunette woman in a navy blue dress walking up the hall toward the living room. She stared straight at me, and our eyes met for a second. She didn’t look very happy to see me standing there. Then she slowly turned around and headed back down the hall toward the bedroom.

My friend was also looking toward the hall in a curious way, and asked if I’d just heard someone walk toward us, stop, and then walk back down the hall again.

I explained that I had just seen that woman, but had not heard any footsteps. So we both thought that was really strange; I had clearly seen an apparition, or whatever it was, of a woman but hadn’t heard any sound. My friend had clearly heard the sound of footsteps walking toward us and then away again, but did not see anything at all.

We did a thorough check of the hall/bedroom/bathroom area, of course, but no one was there. We were the only two people in that apartment.

Ouija

When I was growing up my family had a Ouija board, and sometimes we would play with it. I never felt comfortable with the idea of communicating with spirits, though, so I never directly participated. But I was always curious enough to want to see what would happen when others used it.

My cousins were using the board one day. One of my cousins and I have the same unique name (and the same unusual spelling). So when the two people using the board asked who the next message was for, my name (and my cousin’s name) was spelled out. I was about twelve years old at the time. We asked which person they meant, and then my last name was also spelled, so it was clear the message was intended for me and not my cousin who had a different last name.

I was uncomfortable by the whole idea of a Ouija board and sure didn’t want to be singled out for any specific message from it. I asked my cousins to put it away, but they said they wanted to see the message and went ahead using it. The message was that I was going to die when I was thirty. Even though thirty sounded pretty old when I was only twelve, I was still upset about that message. If anyone else had been using the board I may have suspected they were just trying to frighten me and made that message appear themselves. But I could tell my cousins were almost as disturbed by what was spelled out as I was, and I knew they hadn’t caused it to spell that.

When I asked, with forced bravery, how my death was supposed to occur the word cancer was spelled out.

I asked my cousins to put the board away, and that time they listened to me, and we never used it again when they came to our house. And although I tried to tell myself it was just a silly game that couldn’t possibly have the ability to predict the future, I still couldn’t help but think about that message occasionally as my thirtieth birthday approached. But fortunately quite a few years have come and gone since that age and the message was proven to be false.

My next, and last, experience with a Ouija board was after graduating from college, when I shared a house with a few roommates. One day two of us were out shopping and happened to pass by a thrift shop. We saw an old Ouija board was for sale in the window, so thought it might be fun to buy it. We were having a get-together with some friends that night and thought it would be funny to play with that. I didn’t expect to have a repeat of my last experience on that other board from my childhood, and thought it would just be entertaining, if it even worked at all.

The board we bought was old, and it didn’t have the planchette with it in the box still, so to improvise we used an upside-down glass. Two girls at the party put their fingers on the base of the glass, and we all proceeded to shout out questions about our careers, love lives, etc. Nothing happened at first, and we thought it wasn’t going to work. Then, just as we suggested giving up and putting the board away, the glass tipped over. The two girls using the board jumped, because neither of them even had their fingers on it at the time.

One of them then asked, “Is anyone there who would like to speak to us?”

The glass immediately moved to the YES on the board and kept sliding back and forth across the word in a very strong movement.

At first it seemed as though the two girls had to be moving the glass themselves, because how else could it slide around like that? But the more questions that were asked the quicker the response seemed to be, and at times the girls were barely able to even keep their fingers connected to the glass because it was moving around the board so fast, spelling out the responses.

The answers to the questions were very innocent at first. But after a while the tone (maybe intent is a better word to use) seemed to change, and the answers became nasty and sounded angry.

One of our friends couldn’t be there that night because she had to work a very early shift at work the next morning so she was at home in bed. Nevertheless, after a few more minutes, no matter what questions were asked, the message kept only spelling out that our friend wasn’t there with us that night. We all thought it was strange that it kept doing that but didn’t worry about it too much at first. But then it started spelling out how our friend was soon going to be murdered. It gave the exact time, day, and month this would happen and described it graphically.

I got angry and told the two girls that they shouldn’t even joke about something horrible like that. They insisted they weren’t doing it, and one got up and asked if I wanted to try it for myself to see that the glass really was moving on its own.

By that point I was getting a little nervous of the board and really didn’t want to get too close to it, but I didn’t want those kinds of messages to continue and really thought once I had my fingers on the glass I would make that stop.

When I put my fingers on the glass I was barely touching it, and I could see the other girl was just lightly resting her fingers against it too. But no sooner had I sat down and touched the glass than it began to slide quickly around the board spelling out more gruesome messages. I knew I wasn’t making it do that, and I could tell the other girl wasn’t either because she even had a hard time keeping her fingers on the glass at all because it was moving so quickly.

We got so scared from the messages it was spelling out about our friend that someone telephoned her to see if she was all right. (I’m sure she didn’t appreciate having us wake up her that late, when she was asleep.)

When we all expressed how relieved we were that she was safe and sound at home the board again spelled out the specific time and date this murder was predicted to occur in the near future. It was so scary.

The glass then tipped over again by itself. When we put it back in place the other girl using the board asked if anyone else was there who wanted to talk to us.

This time the glass began to spell out words in a much more gentle and slower manner. It said it was her father spelling out the messages now. He had died several years previously.

The words being spelled out over and over were: “Stop using this now … it is not a game … stop using this now … it is not a game …”

There was some giggling in the crowd, and the glass began to move quicker and with more force as though in response to the laughter, and repeated the message: “Stop using this right now … it is not a game …”

The two of us using the board decided that was good advice, and not only did we not want to use it anymore, we didn’t even want to keep it in our house. So we put it into a big paper bag and went together to the side of the townhouse complex where there was a large, empty Dumpster. We threw the bag into the garbage and ran back into the house, relieved to be rid of it.

The next morning my roommate yelled to me to come quickly, and I ran downstairs to see what was wrong. I looked outside and could see the bag was now back at our front door. My friend thought the board had crawled back to us!

It had been a windy night, and obviously the bag had just been blown out of the Dumpster and landed back at our front door. But after looking into the Dumpster and then around the property we never could find the board again, so we weren’t sure whatever happened to it. We all had a good laugh at our friend thinking it had “crawled back,” though, and teased her about watching too many horror movies.

But, regardless of whatever happened to that Ouija board, I will always remember that experience. Our friend is still alive and well, and the gruesome prediction of her murder proved false when the date the board had spelled out came and went without incident, thank goodness.

I really think Ouija boards can be sinister. If my cousins didn’t purposefully spell out that message about my death just to scare me, and I am sure they did not, then why would it spell out a thing like that? I don’t know what it is that makes those things actually work the way they do, but if it is spirits communicating, it makes me wonder what kind of evil spirit would want to frighten a twelve-year-old like that. And obviously that message about our friend’s murder was spelled out just to terrify us too, which it certainly did.

Out-of-Body Experiences

My experiences aren’t about being haunted, but are about a spirit. My own, and how it has left my body twice during near-death experiences.

I grew up in a very large family, and am the third youngest of ten. My father died when I was only five.

Not long after his death I got measles. I had pneumonia too, and was very sick.

I was lying on the chesterfield downstairs in the living room, feeling so ill and scared, because I saw how frightened my mother was when the doctor examined me and then asked her to step into the hallway with him to talk. I could hear her crying, and I remember closing my eyes and starting to cry too.

Suddenly I felt completely better in every way. I opened my eyes in relief, but immediately realized that something very astonishing was happening. I was floating up at the ceiling and looking down at myself still lying on the chesterfield below. I wasn’t frightened being up so high, although I have been terrified of heights all my life. I stared down at myself, thinking how small and sad I looked, when I heard my mother crying again out in the hallway with the doctor. As soon as I heard her, I wanted to be with her, and as soon as I thought that, I was then immediately in the hallway with her, still floating up at the ceiling, but now looking down at my mother and the doctor where they stood by the front door.

He kept saying to keep me as comfortable as possible, and that he was very sorry. I knew he was trying to comfort my mother, and I knew it was because she was so sad about me. But I felt so good now, and I wanted her to know I wasn’t sick anymore.

As soon as I thought that, I was back in my body, lying on the chesterfield, and then feeling so badly again.

But my fever broke, and my mother said it was a miracle that I survived. I was told it must have been a dream when I tried to explain about floating out of my body the way I had. But when I was able to tell my mother, verbatim, what she and the doctor had said to each other, she realized I could have only known that if I’d been in the hallway with them because they spoke in whispered tones of my serious illness, and it would have been impossible for me to have known exactly what was said from where I lay in the other room behind closed doors.

I know my spirit briefly left my body as I had that near-death experience.

Many years later when I was married and had just had my third baby, the delivery was very difficult and I had almost not survived it. When I was finally out of the hospital and back at home recuperating, but still bedridden, my mother was staying with us, caring for the two older children and the new baby.

One day, as I lay in bed, I started to feel very strange. I called out, but no one came, and I realized I was alone in the house, and I was sure I was dying and wanted my mother with me.

The shades were pulled down in the room so it had been dark, but suddenly it was almost blindingly bright, and at first I wondered what happened to the wall in my bedroom because now I was looking right into the backyard. But then I realized I was actually outside myself, and no longer in my bed. And, again, I was floating.

It was a gorgeous sunny day, and I could see my two older children playing on the swing set in the yard, the baby was in his carriage, and my mother was leaning on the fence as she talked to our next door neighbour.

And, as with my mother and the doctor when I was young, I could hear their entire conversation about how worried everyone was that I was still so weak. But I felt incredible, not sick at all anymore. And just as I was feeling so lucky to feel so well again, I was suddenly back in my body, in bed, in that darkened room. And I quickly recovered after that.

Definitely Not Welcomed

We lived in a haunted house for over ten years, and for the most part it was easy to coexist with the ghost. Knocking on walls and the smell of freshly baked bread were the most common occurrences. Sometimes our shoes would go missing for days and then show up again right at the door where they’d been last seen. Our dog would get very agitated and often stare at something near the ceiling and whine. But all in all it was never anything too unusual, and never threatening in any way.

Then came the night of our daughter’s first date. When she invited Stan into our home, we all met him and thought he seemed like a nice kid. As she led him down the hallway and into the family room at the back of the house I could hear a series of loud crashes and went to see what was going on.

By the time I got to the family room too, I saw what had caused all that racket. A family portrait (of ancestors from over a hundred years ago) had somehow flown down the hallway and smashed on the floor right where Stan was standing in the doorway of the family room. And another very old picture (of a great-uncle from that same family as in the other portrait), in a very heavy brass frame, had smashed on the wall right beside the boy’s head as he started to enter the room. This photo had been on the windowsill on the opposite side of the room. No one had been anywhere near either of these photos.

I only heard the noise, but my daughter and her date saw them actually flying through the air right at him. My daughter was shaking, but poor Stan was too shocked to even move.

After cleaning up the glass from the shattered frames, I reassured the kids it was just a freak accident and not to worry about it (but wasn’t so reassured myself).

They dated for several months, and the longer we knew him the more we all started to realize Stan was not such a nice kid as we had once thought. He was a good actor, though, and it took a while before his true character was known. But the moment he walked into our house, something or someone was very protective of our daughter, or just hated him, and definitely didn’t want him there.

I don’t think there was a time during the length of their relationship that something didn’t hit or trip him while he was in our house. He constantly said it felt like someone was trying to push him down the stairs (and succeeded many times). And one particularly scary incident was the time he went into the kitchen to get a snack and a large butcher knife fell (flew?) off a counter on the other side of the room and landed on his foot with enough force that the blade impaled the top of his foot, right through his shoe, and he received a deep cut.

No one else was ever subjected to any kind of abuse when we lived there. But Stan couldn’t walk into the house without something falling off a wall or flying across the room right at him. It would actually have been fascinating if it wasn’t always so startling and violent.

After that relationship ended, nothing like that ever happened to anyone else ever again. The ghost treated him (and only him) like that.

Eastern Canada

Cottage Life

We once bought an old cottage that had belonged to an elderly man and woman for about fifty years, but when the husband died, the wife never used it again and so it was vacant for a while before we got it.

When we purchased the cottage, all the furniture and contents were included, so the only thing about it that changed was the ownership. After listening to some of the nearby neighbours’ stories about the old man who had owned it, it was clear how much he had loved it there. We knew that before he died, he and his wife and their dog had spent a lot of time up there, and their grown children and grandchildren often visited too.

The first summer we were there we were all playing cards around the kitchen table one night when our oldest daughter jumped about a foot in her chair. She said a medium-sized white dog had just rushed past the table and out the kitchen door into the living room. No one else had noticed anything, but she was so positive of what she had seen, and so flustered, we all got up to search for the strange animal. But we couldn’t find the dog anywhere.

We might have been inclined to think she had just imagined the whole thing, but a while after that, my husband and I saw this dog too. It suddenly appeared as though it had run right through the cottage wall from the outside. Like it was chasing something or someone at top speed. Then it either just disappeared or went right through another wall back to the outside again. It all happened so fast it was almost just a blur of white. This was more amazing than frightening, though, and I was glad my husband was with me to see it too.

Our son woke up one night and cried out for us, saying someone was standing near his bed. By the time we got to his room whoever it was had gone, but that left him feeling pretty frightened.

We also all saw an old man walking around the exterior of the cottage on a number of occasions. A few times we would hurry out of the cottage to see who it was when we saw him looking in at us through one of the windows, but once we got outside there was never a trace of him. It would have been really difficult for someone to run away from that cottage without being seen or heard.

Once after seeing him outside we heard a knock on the door. This did frighten our daughter a bit, so she called out and asked who it was. He replied that he wanted to talk to her mother, but by the time I opened the door he had again vanished and we never saw him again after that.

The Mailroom Ghost

During my first year of college I worked part-time in the residence mailroom on the campus, and being before the days of e-mail, my shifts were very busy sorting all those students’ letters. I hardly had time to look up from the piles of mail I had to distribute into the alphabetically arranged compartments.

My shifts were usually late at night, and no one else was ever around. The only sounds were the ticking of the clock and the rustling of the envelopes as I sifted through the endless piles. The radio would never work in that area for some reason, and I usually just left it off instead of having to constantly tune it, trying to pick up a signal.

One night I was working alone as usual, but had a very uncomfortable feeling. This was not normal for me, as I had never been bothered by the solitude of that job before. But on this night I could not shake the feeling I was being watched. Every time I looked up from my work I expected to see someone standing there because the feeling was so strong, I assumed someone was there.

The radio was not turned on. I had tried to get a station to come in at the start of my shift and had given up and shut it off because I hated the static. As I sat with my back to the open door in the mailroom, trying to resist the urge to constantly turn around, it finally got too strong, and I couldn’t keep myself from turning to look again to see if anyone was there.

And that time there was. A young man, in his early twenties I would say, was leaning against the doorjamb looking at me as I sat at the desk across the room. I wasn’t sure if he was actually staring at me or just daydreaming in my direction, because it seemed to take a minute before he realized I was looking at him. When our eyes connected it seemed to startle him as much as it did me (maybe even more); and just as I saw him jump a bit, the radio on the desk suddenly turned on. That really startled me.

When the radio came on, he took a step backwards from where he was leaning and then seemed to freeze, as though he couldn’t decide if he should leave or stay. But all the time our eyes were locked, and I thought he was going to say something to me.

Now normally back then, being a young woman alone in that isolated mailroom late at night, just having a strange man show up out of nowhere would have been enough to alarm me. I always made sure the main door leading to that area was locked behind me when I came in for my shift, and the door to the mailroom itself would have been inaccessible to anyone without a key to the main door beyond it. But neither of those facts occurred to me in that moment.

I didn’t feel threatened, though, but he definitely seemed nervous of me, or at least of being seen standing there. And just as I wondered why he wasn’t saying anything, he slowly started to disappear. He slowly faded into nothing. I was left staring at empty space, but could still feel his presence there. It was the oddest experience I have ever had. And even at the time I wondered why I wasn’t more afraid of what I was seeing.

I sat very still for a few moments and decided to leave early that night, because I didn’t want to stay there alone any longer. But I didn’t go screaming out of there. I packed up my things, with a feeling like I was moving in slow motion, and locked up. I kept looking all around me, still feeling like he was nearby. Even on the quick walk back to my dorm room it seemed like he was walking along beside me.

The next day I had to return to the mailroom to pick up a textbook I had forgotten the night before, and saw one of the daytime staff there. She was a middle-aged woman, and had always just ignored me any time she saw me before.

But on this day she was friendly to me and even called me by name, which surprised me because I didn’t think she even knew what it was. She asked if I enjoyed working the part-time night shift, and winked when she asked if the “ghost” bothered me at all.

Her wink made it seem like she was joking, but I still felt myself tense a bit when she said that. I just smiled, though, and told her I didn’t believe in ghosts (I didn’t want to talk about my experience with her). But she surprised me by telling me that she was a firm believer now. She told me it was haunted in that office, and then she told me why.

About twenty years ago, a group of boys were walking outside of that building and two of them got into an argument that led to a fight. They ended up inside somehow, possibly one was trying to get away from the other, but the one boy fell, or was pushed, and hit his head against a pipe by the main door. He died instantly. It was such a senseless tragedy. A young guy’s life cut so short like that. I shuddered at her story, thinking of him dying right there.

She told me everyone who worked there, including herself, had seen his ghost. I asked for a description without admitting I had also seen him just the previous night. She described him exactly, even the birthmark on his left cheek. But I still didn’t want to talk to her about my own experience. She treated the haunting almost as a joke, like it amused her somehow. Maybe that was just nervous tension on her part.

But to me, it was so sad that he lost his life like that, and his spirit still remained at the scene all those years later.

I don’t know if the mailroom employees are still seeing him to this day. I hope not. I hope he is finally at peace by now.

My Grandmother’s Spirit

This isn’t really about a place being haunted so much as an experience I had with a ghost. And since it was my grandmother, I prefer to call her a spirit.

When I was nine, my parents signed me up for a week away at a summer camp with our church. I didn’t want to go. I had never been away from home before even for one night, never mind a whole week. I begged my parents not to make me go, but they kept telling me it was for the best.

I knew something was going on because my mother was so sad and there were a lot of long-distance phone calls from far-away relatives, which usually only happened on birthdays or Christmas. My parents seemed to want to get me out of the house, and that made me feel even worse and want to leave even less.

When I asked to see my grandmother before I left, and was told I couldn’t, I really broke down. My grandmother and I were very close. I thought she would talk my mother into letting me stay home if I could just explain to her how scared I was to go. But no one would let me visit her, or even talk to her on the phone. So I felt completely miserable by the time I was put on the bus for camp at our church the next week.

I refused to admit it in the letter I wrote home, but I did enjoy myself there after the first few hours of feeling sorry for myself. The last night that I was at camp I was lying in my bottom bunk with my eyes closed, but I wasn’t sleeping or dreaming. I felt the bunk sink down as someone sat beside me. And when I looked up, there was my grandmother, smiling down at me. She gently brushed the hair back from my eyes and cupped my cheeks in her hand, as she always did.

Looking back now it is surprising to me that I only felt comforted and excited to see her. I never wondered how she got there or why she had come alone, so late at night, to see me. I was just glad she was there. She sat there on my bunk holding my hand until I fell asleep.

My parents arrived to take me home the next morning, and I was eager to see them, but my mother looked even sadder than before I left. When we got to the car my father told me that my grandmother had died the night before. She had been very sick and dying in the hospital when I left for camp; that is why I couldn’t see or phone her. My parents thought it would be best for me not to be there during that time, and that is why I was sent to camp that week.

I thought they were obviously mistaken and excitedly told them that my grandmother had come to see me the night before. I could see the glances they gave each other, and no one spoke for a while.

Finally my mother asked me how her mother had looked when I saw her. I told her she looked really happy. My mother cried a lot when I told her that, but said it made her feel so much better.

Bad Vibrations

We like to take Sunday drives in the country and would often pass a quaint turn-of-the-century farmhouse that sits on top of a hill along a rural road just outside of town. I always thought it was abandoned. It wasn’t boarded up, but there was never a vehicle or person anywhere around.

And I could never understand why it was not being lived in; I always enjoyed looking at it whenever our drives took us in that direction. So one day when we noticed a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn and another sign at the base of the long driveway indicating there was an open house that afternoon, I was curious to have a better look at it.

My husband wanted to see it too, so we pulled over to the side of the road and parked the car. As we walked toward the house, I realized for the first time what a fair distance the house was from the road, and as we got closer I started to get the weirdest feeling. I almost felt sick, I was feeling so anxious. I felt so stressed I just wanted to leave before we even entered the house, but had no idea why. I had felt fine in the car. That feeling just came out of nowhere and hit me so hard.

There were a few other couples wandering around the house and grounds. Every room had been freshly painted, and the floors had all been redone. But I couldn’t shake that awful feeling, no matter how nice it looked. My husband was more interested in the plumbing and electrical service, though, and said he didn’t have that same creepy feeling that I did.