Today I tweeted that the paranormal activity had returned to my house after a relatively quiet period. A couple people wanted details. These are hard to provide in 140 characters, so here we are.
The current house I live in with my husband and stepson is not the first house I've lived in with freaky, unexplainable occurrences. In fact, my first experience with the paranormal didn't happen in my own house.
Rewind to my childhood in New Jersey. I was a young adult, maybe a tween, when I had my first "encounter". This happened at my friend's house, who also happened to live next door. We were hanging out in her living room when a loud bang erupted from the kitchen. We screamed, jumped and crept (in stealth mode) into the kitchen to investigate as we were the only ones home. A mug was on the floor, shattered into pieces. My friend's mom had a rack of mugs on the wall which were used more for decoration than function. Anyway, the design was similar to a coat rack, with a knob on the end to prevent the mugs from sliding off. Someone, or something, had to physically lift the handle over the hook to remove a mug. This, of course, sent chills down our forearms. Then something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned and saw, coming down the three small steps, which led to the kitchen, an apparition; cloudy, mist-like and transparent. Some facial features could be made out, but nothing definitive. My friend couldn't see it, but she wasn't too far behind when I ran shrieking from the room.
Fast forward to college, my senior year, and to a house in the Fairmount area of Philadelphia I rented with three friends. First, random things started to go missing. An item of clothing here and there, a serving dish, and other miscellaneous items. We really didn't think much of it since none of us were neat freaks. My cat, Winston, would act strangely at times...as if he was following something with his eyes, something we couldn't see. Plus, there were the cold spots, but it was an old house. All of this wasn't exactly paranormal and can easily be explained. What happened next couldn't. Two of my roommates were alone in the house, hanging out in the living room and watching T.V. It was winter, the windows were closed, we didn't have a lot of foot traffic on our street and the television wasn't that loud. It was also daytime and our neighbor, whose house adjoined ours, was at work. How they explained it was that, out of nowhere, it sounded like they were smack dab in the middle of a party; several voices murmuring and a piano tinkling in the background. This freaked them out and they abandoned ship.
My parents were the next to experience something strange and unexplainable. They were in town for my graduation. I stayed at a graduation party while they went back to my house to go to bed. My roommates weren't there and they had the place to themselves. One of the cool features of this late 1800's rowhome is that the owners had modernized it with a black metal spiral staircase which ran through the center of the house, from the finished basement to the roof deck. My parents were sleeping in a room near the staircase. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, they were woken by the sound of someone going upstairs, past their floor to the third. Moments later, on the third floor, my roomate's radio turned on, but he wasn't there. Noone was.
Needless to say I was happy to move out after college! I made my way north to Portland, Maine and moved in with my parents temporarily. They had relocated to a gorgeous cape while I was in college and it took me a while to get settled in and used to the sounds the house made. There was the usual creaking and settling, especially during the bitter cold winters. Footsteps walking upstairs, when your downstairs and nobody else is home? Not normal. So I asked my mom if she had seen or heard anything. She said she wasn't surprised because the father of the family they bought the house from had died. He succumbed to cancer after a long and painful battle. Initially I was unnerved, but his spirit was harmless...still is.
A year after moving to Maine, I set out across the country and settled in Phoenix, Arizona. I lived in a series of fairly new apartments and didn't experience anything out of the oridinary (except the gypsies that lived in the complex, but that's another story). I met my future husband and we moved in together, eventually renting a house in Glendale. A few weird things happened there, but really only a few. For example, the clothes dryer would turn on by itself and my husband got his ass slapped in the kitchen (once, and not by me, I was in the bathroom and we had 2 cats at the time - I don't think they could have reached that high). It was after we were married and had relocated to Clarkdale, Arizona, when the real fun started to happen. We rented a house from the original owners (they had built the house, which was less than a decade old). We had sweeping, panoramic views of the Sedona Red Rocks from the front yard and were in the foothills of majestic Mingus Mountain. We eventually bought the house, despite it's "character".
I can't recall when the activity started exactly, but I know it was summer because the windows were closed with the air condtioning on. This is significant because we didn't have a breeze or source for a draft. My husband and I were sleeping when our bedroom door slammed shut, forcing us awake. It was daylight and we both laid there in our sleepy state looking at the door when the knob turned and the door swung open. My stepson, who was seven at the time, was living with us and I expected him to be in the doorway, but he wasn't. No one was there. His room was on the other side of the house and he was still asleep.
The door slamming thing happened every once in awhile and alternated from closet, to bathroom, to office door. Then the thermostat would go to radically high heat or extremely cold. The most memorable phenomenon happened one night when my friend was over. We were all in the living room watching TV. The house had an open layout, where there was a wall which divided the kitchen and the living room, with the dining area a large, shared space. My stepson's bedroom was off of the dining room and our two dogs were passed out on his bed. So, there we were in the living room when a shrill whistle, similar to the one I used to call the dogs, came from the kitchen. We all stared at each other with our mouths hanging open and even more so after the dogs came running out of my stepson's room and directly into the kitchen. I was convinced after that we had something unusual going on.
Now here we are back in Portland, Maine. When we first moved here, we stayed with my parents. Myself, my husband and stepson all heard the footsteps (hence the he's still harmless part). A few months later we found a house and moved in. Just like in Philadelphia, things started to go missing. Namely our silverware. First the forks, so we bought more. Then the butter knives started to disappear, so we replaced them. Then the spoons started to dwindle in number! A flurry of activity has occurred since. We live in a ranch, so the main living space is all on one floor and we only have two bedrooms - our house is compact. We have a full basement, which is used all the time, and an attic we have yet to explore. A breezeway was contructed to connect the house to a two-car garage.
One day I was getting dressed for work (my stepson was at school, my husband at work) and it was just me and the cat in the bedroom when I heard the footsteps. Someone was walking down the hallway, from the kitchen, towards my open bedroom door. I called out, thinking my husband had come home. No response. My cat heard the footsteps too and she went over to the door to see who was here. Of course the hallway was empty.
Since then we've had the basement door open on its own, the bathroom faucet turn on, and knocking on the walls. We've heard a little girl singing. Her voice drifts up through the floorboards from the basement. Usually after one of is laughing or using a sing song voice, she'll carry on after we've stopped. That's definitely one of the freakiest sounds...ever.
Over the past six months or so, things have quieted down...until today. I was home alone this morning and in the kitchen doing my usual routine. My stepson's bedroom is right off of the kitchen and since he was at a sleepover, our dog was seriously depressed, so we left the door open for him to lay on Matthew's bed. The dog had been chilling on Matthew's bed until he smelled my eggs cooking and he wandered out, nose in the air. When he realized he wasn't going to get any human food, he turned around to go back into Matthew's room. He stopped just outside the open door, crouched down low and began growling. This is something he never does and it caught me off guard. I walked up behind him and he was staring at my stepson's bed, growling and the fur on his back was standing straight up. Bullwinkle backed up against my legs and I don't know if he was trying to get away or prevent me from going into the room. Applying the standard ghost hunting techniques, I called out for a sign or a noise. Nothin happened. I stepped into the bedroom and Bullwinkle stayed behind growling. Thirty seconds or so passed before he joined me in the room. He stopped growling, hopped up on the bed and obsessively sniffed the corner of the mattress as if something had recently been there.
This whole episode was definitely strange, but I still had to get ready for work and by this point, I'm running a few minutes behind schedule. When I'm in the shower, I hear the door to the garage from the house slam shut. A distinctive sound we are familiar with. I thought my husband had stopped by the house. He hadn't. I called him later, once I got to work, to confirm. I'm not the only one to have experiences today. My husband got home after work and went to use the bathroom. He was alone in the house so he left the door open. While he was sitting on "the throne", he heard the door to the garage slam shut. The dog even ran out from the living room to see who was here, but returned moments later when there was no one to greet. A few minutes after that, the basement door, which is across the hall from the bathroom, clicks open and slowly swings until it is wide open. My husband is watching this as the hairs on his arms rise with fear.
With this sudden onset of activity, I've been thinking about any signs we might have missed and it dawned on me...just last week when I was setting the table, I made a comment about how our forks are disappearing again.
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