We moved into our current home four years ago. It's a four-bedroom colonial in a little family-oriented subdivision that was built in the sixties. There are a handful of original owners left but it's mostly people with young children or families with older kids or empty nesters. We bought our house from the children of a recently deceased original owner, who paid $33K for their brand-new house in 1966 and raised three kids here. I secretly hoped it would be haunted before we moved in and while I can't say for sure that it is, there have been a number of incidents that have given me pause.
The day I showed up to meet the inspector is when the first incident happened. We were standing in the kitchen; he was entering some info into his laptop which he had set on the counter and I was standing on the other side of peninsula looking at my phone. Suddenly I heard what I thought was a door slamming hard behind me and I jumped about a mile and whipped around to see what it was. I didn't know if either of the two doors I could see had been open in the first place, and they are both that hollow kind of door it's impossible to properly slam (believe me, I've tried!) anyway, and by this time I had hopped around the peninsula to be closer to the inspector, whom I asked, "What was that!?" He looked up from his laptop, which was now closed, and said, "What was what?" I said, "You didn't hear that door slam?" He said no and offered "Maybe it we me closing my laptop?" I suppose it is possible that in the empty house the sound of a laptop closing could have echoed and seemed much louder and also to be coming from another direction, but I was very skeptical of his suggestion at the time.
A couple of eventless years later a bunch of things happened all within a couple of months. The first was the time I was showering and my then four-year-old boy was playing in my room just outside the bathroom. I had left the bathroom door wide open so I could hear him and planned to be in and out quickly. I heard him enter the bathroom and peeked out and asked him what was going on. He said nothing and ran out and I heard his door close. I got out and dried off and went in and he was sitting on the floor, so I asked what he was doing. He was not one to play in his own room ever or close the door unless he was mad. He told me he had been playing in my room and he heard a lady say on the other side of my door "Boo!" I said, what? A lady? My husband and I casually questioned him about this event for about a week and he never changed his story. He was playing, a lady right on the other side of the door said Boo! And he got scared, ran into the bathroom, then went into his room. My husband didn't know what to make of it and neither did I.
Shortly thereafter, I was in the kitchen doing the dishes one afternoon. My son was outside playing. Over the running water, I realized I was hearing another sound, a motorized noise. I turned off the water and listened and determined it was coming from the garage. I opened the door from the laundry to the garage and saw the garage door up. Obviously I thought that was weird so I pushed the button and closed it and returned to the dishes. A minute later I heard the noise again and sure enough, the door was open. This went on for about 15 minutes. I'd close it, and a few minutes later it would open. Finally it stopped and it never happened again and the garage door has functioned totally normally since. I should mention that I cook and do dishes A LOT and I frequently think I see something to my left, toward the doors that I checked when I heard the slam, and find myself constantly looking, thinking there's someone there.
Next weird thing, and this one I could not explain at all. Again, was doing the dishes. Kid outside. Window in front of me open, nice mild day. Suddenly a WHOOSH! Of wind seemed to come at me simultaneously from behind and above my head and below, from the sink up into my face. I first ducked, then whirled around and looked up, thinking the ceiling fan had come on or something. It was off. It was the oddest thing, the strong suddenly wind coming from the back and front at the same time.
Sometime after that I was in the living room reading or something, I'm sure my son was outside again and my husband was in the basement with his bandmates recording a song. Suddenly I heard the sound of glass breaking, so I got up to investigate. I looked first in the kitchen, found nothing. I went from room to room and couldn't find anything, no broken window, no glass on the floor, nothing. I kind of forgot about it and went back to my business. Later on that evening I was in the dining room setting the table and I spotted a little brass & glass lamp upside-down on the floor. It is a small, maybe six or eight inch high brass hummingbird figure extended from a brass arm to appear to be circling the tulip-shaped ochre-tinted shade, which has a small bulb inside. It sits on a short bookshelf that I keep cookbooks in in the dining room, but now it was upside down about a foot from the bookshelf, a crack at the base, splintering the shade in two. It was so far from the bookshelf I could not figure out what had happened, or how it had flipped upside down. It seemed that since it was so bottom-heavy, if it were to fall naturally for some reason, it would not turn over like that. I am not a physics expert so if this is the most likely way for an object like this land, then okay. But still, why did it fall, and why so far? I asked my husband if he thought the drumming downstairs could have created enough vibration, because that's the only thing I could think of, but he doubted it. Nothing else has ever fallen or moved and we have a lot of band practice over here.
Some time after that event I was preparing to make some bread and needed my dough hook to attach to my mixer. I opened the drawer I keep all my measuring cups and mixer attachments in and could not find it. I looked and looked and looked again and it just wasn't in there. I thought maybe my husband had emptied the dishwasher and put it in the wrong drawer as he sometimes does because my kitchen-utensil organization system is alien to him. So I looked in the drawer I keep stuff like corkscrews and garlic presses in. No dice. I looked in the large-tool utensil drawer where I keep the hand mixer and citrus juicer. Not in there either. I looked in the cupboard beneath the drawer it was supposed to be in, thinking maybe it somehow fell out and landed down there. I looked in the muffin and cake pan cupboard. After about ten or fifteen minutes I was going bonkers. I stopped looking for a minute and just tried to gather my thoughts and figure out where in the hell this thing was, and then I saw it, sitting on the counter right in front of me.
This final event is also the most recent. My husband was sleeping in the guest room at the end of the hall one night and in the morning came in and woke me up and asked if I had needed something from him in the night. I said no, why? He told me he had been lying on the bed with the door closed using his laptop when the doorknob turned several times. He said he heard it turning and looked up and it continued to make the sound that our old squeaky doorknobs make and then stopped. He couldn't see anything because it was too dark over by the door. I said that it might have been the wind because sometimes the windows make a rattle in that room but he insisted it was the door knob, and he pooh-poohed just about every event I described to you above as being nothing. This time he was unable to explain what he had heard and seemed a little spooked.
That was about a year ago and I haven't had any other experiences. I'll write about the place I lived two houses ago next time!
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