I came across this website recently, and I thought that I would share some recent experiences that occurred when we moved to Utah from Boise, Idaho. I transferred to my company's Salt Lake City office in June 2007, and we didn't know where we wanted to live yet, so we decided to temporarily rent a house located a couple of blocks from my in-law's place in Roy, UT. The neighborhood was the one in which my wife grew up, and she knew the homes and the people very well. The home that we rented was only about 4 or 5 years old, built at the end of a cul-de-sac near the main road through Roy (1900 West).
We were all excited to be back in Utah, and weren't at all prepared for the events that would follow. That first night in the house, my wife and I were awakened by the sound of little feet bounding noisily down the hallway and then down the stairs to the basement. I looked at the clock, and it wasn't even 5:00am yet. We have 3 young children, and I didn't put it past one of them to simply be excited to be in a new house and want to wake up early to watch morning cartoons in the basement.
Groggy and annoyed, I made my way downstairs fully expecting to see Sponge Bog Squarepants or something like that blaring on the TV in the basement. As I reached the TV room in the basement however, all was dark and quiet. I was pretty surprised and confused, and thought that maybe my kid saw me coming and sneaked up back to bed, afraid that they would get in trouble (...though, such sneaking was highly uncharacteristic of my kids.) I went back upstairs to check on each one of the kids, and all three of them were sound (and I mean SOUND) asleep and snoring away. "Ok..." I thought, "either my kids are REALLY good actors or something really creepy just happened..." My wife and I talked about it, and she got pretty freaked out because she heard the footsteps as clear as I did.
I decided to put it out of my mind. A few days later, I was awake pretty early getting ready for work. I went into the bathroom with my clothes for the day to take a shower and get dressed. I hung my clothes next to my towel on the towel rack, and I draped my belt over the rack. After I finished my shower, I opened the shower curtain and reached for my towel. As I was reaching for it, the belt started swinging back and forth violently for about 15 seconds, and then it slowly stopped. I froze with shock. The belt was completely still, I reached for the towel, and then the belt just started swinging right in front of my eyes! I thought that I was losing my mind. I checked the heater vent to see if it could have been the cause, but it was clear on the other side of the bathroom.
I thought that maybe I had bumped the towel and had caused the belt to swing, but I had to be honest with myself - I hadn't touched it, I was in the act of reaching for it. I thought that maybe pulling back the shower curtain created a draft that caused the belt to swing. I played with the curtain for few minutes trying to get the belt to swing again, but it didn't even budge. At this point, I was pretty freaked out myself, and I decided not tell my wife about the belt incident so as not to cause her more fear or panic.
After these events, the house just had an unsettling feeling. I don't know if it was because I was just freaked out, or if there really was something else in the house with us. Those feelings seemed especially intense early in the morning before the sun came up. I would feel the most fear and dread when I went downstairs during those hours. Even if the lights were on, I still felt a sense of unease that I never felt at any other time during the day or night.
We only stayed in that house for 6 months before we moved to the Provo area so that I could finish my graduate degree at BYU while I continued working for my company. After those first few events, I never saw or heard anything unnecessarily strange again until a few nights before we moved. I was home alone with the children in the evening. My wife was gone to a church event, and I was getting dinner ready for the kids (...good ol' Mac and Cheese). I had a pot of water warming up on the stove with the lid on it. As my kids and I were all sitting around the kitchen counter talking and laughing with one another, the lid on the pot of water started rattling violently - enough that it really startled my 5-year old daughter.
I told her that it was nothing, that the water was simply boiling and the steam was making the lid rattle. I went over to the pot and lifted the lid, and water in the pot was perfectly calm and still heating up. "Was it the boiling water, Dad?" my daughter asked. "Yep, it was. See I told you," I lied to her. I put he noodles into the cold water so that she would further believe me.
Ok...I'm an intelligent, methodical, and well-educated guy who doesn't deny that this kind of stuff can happen to other people, but never thought that it would happen to me. Were these events real, or was the stress of moving my family and getting a new job just affecting my mind? If they were real, why didn't anything else happen for months following the first few events?
I'd be curious to contact the people that are renting the house now, and find out if they've had any weird, unexplainable experiences. However, I don't want to get too involved with this, and just leave it as one of those really strange experiences that you have in your life and that you hope you never have again.
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