My husband and I used to live in a small two bedroom house in the country. We preferred sleeping in the back, slightly smaller bedroom due to the reduction in road noise and morning sun. One afternoon, as I was lying on the bed with books and my laptop I rolled over to rest my neck and noticed the ceiling fan slowly turning. Strange, because it was turning so slowly, even slower than it would on low. And stranger since I didn't the have fan on anyway!
I watched it until it stopped, not more than a minute or so. Nothing scary, I didn't feel strange or threatened or any of the other feelings you supposedly get with a supernatural encounter. It was an old house so it could very well have been some type of electrical surge which cause the fan to start turning; however, the lights didn't dim and it never happened again. There's a small chance it could have been a draft since the house was old, but all the exterior windows and doors were closed.
Afterward I began to notice our dog wouldn't come into that room. She'd stare into it. She walk by. She stand in the doorway, but never came in. And as I began thinking about it, I realized she had never come into that room. She had never followed us in there at night, or napped under the bed or sat with me as I was working in there. Prior to the fan incident she'd stand in the doorway and bark, only a few times I remember. I just chalked that up to the window being directly opposite the door. I assumed she was barking at the shrubs blowing around or a bird on the sill, or something outside. And, as I said, it rarely happened.
Putting together the fan turning on its own and the dog's trepidation to the room I began doing some investigating. I knew a bit about the home as we had bought it from my husband's father who bought it from a friend. After further digging I discovered the friend's wife's mother had actually built the house in the 1960s. Not so old, so I felt I was at a dead end. However, I also discovered that the mother had lived prior to that in a much older home, circa mid 1800s I was told, which wasn't more than a barn type structure when she began construction on the new home. Since the owners didn't have much money some older neighbors remember the house being built; apparently it was a big ripple that someone of their class could build a brand new house. So I'm thinking I'm onto something.
I try to talk to the previous owner's mother and she didn't have any comments about which bedroom her mother used, or where she had passed, or anything about the much older house on the property. Very tight lipped about the whole situation. I didn't feel it polite to push as she seemed still upset by her mother's passing. However I did find out that she grew up in the newer house and her older siblings were raised in the old one. Courthouse records showed the land and a home, but was hand drawn without exact measurements of where the house stood.
All we ever found of the old house were a few stones from the porch, a couple pieces of broken china washed into a gulley and some rusty tools buried in what would have been the front yard. From this we had an idea of its approximate location. It never really set right with me. The happenings I witnessed, the dog's reaction, the mother's refusal to speak of the house. We moved to the family farm in the same area a couple years later and it still took me a few years of riding by that house to realize that the bedroom window, which dog would bark at, would have been directly perpendicular to the front yard of the old house. This was before the digital imaging/ghost hunting movement and I so wish that we had the opportunity or foresight to take photos. The mother moved from Chicago and built a house in a nearby area and has a mural of her mother's house, our previous home, in her sitting room. I can't help but have the feeling that if the daughter loved this home so much to this day, perhaps her mother did too. Perhaps she never wanted to leave something she had worked and waited so long for.
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