Our Strange House

In my first post I briefly mentioned how my family has a history of weird happenings. When I was younger these were all confined to my father's side of the family. I don't see him anymore but both me and my mother are still close to his mother, my grandmother.

Grandma would have frequently kept me entertained with tales of our family's haunted past. I never took them seriously but still enjoyed listening. My mother never really approved of these stories but also didn't see the harm in what she believed were either tall tales or stories with simple explanations. To her credit, mom was always able to offer an explanation to any story I relayed from grandma.

We moved into our current house about five years ago and this was when I started encountering some weird stuff.

The house was a big project for my mom and one I remember she was very excited about. She had bought it at auction with a view to renovating it fully. The house was in such bad shape it was a few months after purchase before it was even habitable for us. When we moved in, work was still ongoing. I have no idea of the history of the house other than it's old. My grandma remembers a family living there when she was a teenager so that gives some idea just how long it's been in the neighbourhood.

A few days after we moved in I began hearing footsteps at night. The floor of the landings on the first are second floor are old wood and creak with the slightest bit of pressure. To my ears, the sound was unmistakable, like someone was walking across the halls with heavy shoes. Each time I checked there was nothing there.

At first my mom wrote it off as simply the sounds an old house makes and then as my overactive imagination fuelled by grandma's stories. She wasn't cruel about it and never said she didn't believe me but she has always been a sceptic, even after the incident on the road that I wrote about in my first story.

The footsteps were never constant. Within a few weeks they had stopped almost altogether.

A couple of months later, I think in March or April, I was in my bedroom and I heard a door slamming downstairs. My mom shouted up to me, warning me about being gentle with the doors and I had to tell her I was upstairs and nowhere near the door that had somehow slammed shut on its own. The house is old but by then had proper insulation so it would not have been draughty enough for a breeze to slam it shut and there was no wind outside.

Around this time I started hearing the footsteps again. One night I believe I saw a figure dressed in grey flash past my room. As with the footsteps I couldn't find the owner despite going immediately into the hall. Over a number of months when I was sitting with my mom, I thought I could see someone out of the corner of my eye looking in her direction. The figure would be there for a split second and then be gone when I turned my head.

Things like this have happened on and off since we moved in. My mom has often experienced things without noticing them or writing them off as something innocent, including being tapped on the shoulder while in the kitchen despite being home alone or thinking that she heard someone whisper from behind her or breathe on her neck. On at least two occasions she has taken off her watch, a large gold Michael Kors, only to find it has been moved to another room when she went to put it back on.

The attic in the house is somewhere I never go. Although I have never thought that anything in the house would do me harm, the attic creeps me out. It has a heavy feeling to it. There is a lot of cool stuff up there though. Old furniture that the previous owner left behind and we kept. My mom loves it and has restored some of it.

Her latest project was an old dressing table and after a lot of prodding I agreed to help her move it downstairs. It was a normal winter day. Cold outside but our house is always warm. Even so, there was a notable temperature drop as soon as we walked into the attic.

Mom went over to the table and put both hands on it. She gasped as soon as she touched it and both her hands seemed to jump away from the table as if pushed. Before I could do anything she had somehow been knocked to the ground. She didn't move and her eyes were closed. It took me a few seconds to realize she had fainted.

She came to within a few seconds, maybe twenty, although it felt like longer. She remembers touching the table and then waking up with me looking over her. She was very embarrassed and explained that she must have fainted. I accepted this and it's only now after posting my other story that I'm thinking there's more to it. The way she seemed to get shoved away from the table as if someone had pushed her was unnatural.

As with everything in the house, mom sees the simple explanation; that she had simply fainted.

As with the incident on the road, her watch had also stopped but I guess that could be explained by her fall.