This story is a collection of memories from my mother and some of my own experiences, all have been recorded straight after they happened so this is an accurate account. I shall begin by explaining the history of the house. I used to live in a house in Divis Drive, Belfast in N. Ireland. The house is now 94 years old. It was built by a small construction company which shut down soon after it built my house. Nobody had bought the house before the bankruptcy so it was sold to a friend of my grandfather's for a miniscule amount of money. My grandfather purchased the property by challenging his friend to a bet which he won.
The 'Troubles' in Ireland had now flared up and a militant assassin used a sniper rifle to murder my grandfather on the front porch of the house (while he was smoking a pipe remember this). Nothing of particular historic interest happened after that.
I begin my story with my mother's memories; I will not mention them all because many of them are similar or identical to each other. She and her husband had just moved into the house sometime in the 1970s, it was a gradual move because of many different factors I will not explain.
My grandmother joined my parents for dinner. They commenced to talk and be cheerful until my mother smelled pipe smoke. In that period in time pipes were common and the smell was well known. My mother asked who was smoking a pipe, nobody else smelled it. She attempted to ignore it but failed and she went to investigate. The acrid stench of smoke was so thick in the hallway that my mother gagged and coughed. She could see nobody there but she felt as though she was being watched and she kept seeing little flashes of something unexplained moving near the door which always vanished before she had time to focus on it. This is an experience which my mother had experienced on many, many occasions over the thirty yeas she lived there. The details of this do not vary a lot from time to time.
The next is also a memory but of my brothers. My brother was eight years old at the time and my mother recorded his story straight after he told it. My brother was asleep on the top bed of his set of bunks. He was very young and often rolled off the top bed and landed on the one below which was wider than the top (he still gets teased for this twenty five years later) so he was unharmed.
Usually he would think nothing of it and climb back onto the top bed and go back to sleep but this time when he fell he did not get back up because he heard footsteps. The footsteps sounded as though they were coming from the ground floor of the house. My brother could tell by the volume of the thumps that they were coming up the stairs. He waited for whoever it was to reach the the top but nobody ever came except for formless footsteps, the footsteps sounded sharp on the wooden floor and they brought a choking stench of cigar smoke. He could hear illegible grunts and mutters from the invisible specter. The all went quiet. He was terrified and he ran to tell my mother.
The final story is from my own memory. My mother was always very sensitive to this spirit but I was not. I encounter spirits where ever I go but I did not once even sense the one which lived in my own house. The day we moved out of the house was the only time I ever encountered him. We had packed everything and were about to leave the house forever when my mother turned round and talked to what looked like thin air. I remember exactly what she said "We are going now and won't be back, would you like to come with us?" I found this very odd since I did not know what she was talking about at the time. After she said this a powerful odor of pipe smoke appeared in the hallway and a strange coldness appeared, the lights flickered and then it was gone. We left without comment and never returned.
I am guessing the spirit was my grandfather since it smoked a pipe which my grandfather did and stood at the porch where my grandfather often stood and die.
When we moved the spirit chose not to accompany us but to stay in the house he won in a bet.
We met the new occupants of the house three years after they moved in and we subtly asked them if anything at all strange was seen about the house they replied no!
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