“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
—CARL SAGAN
My house was built in 1890. It has served several functions since then. Among other things there are rumors about it once having been a funeral home. The historical society can’t confirm that, but there is a historian in town that says it is true according to records that he has access to. Apparently, the house was originally built for workers who were employed at the piano factory down the road.
There were two tragic deaths at the house. A man was crushed by a piano when he was delivering it to the house in the early 1900s. The other occurred in the 1970s when a young man was working on his car in the driveway and it fell, crushing him. He wasn’t killed immediately, but suffered there for several hours before someone found him. By then, it was too late.
I like antiques. I had found an ornamental boat in the house, which was clearly very old. It was a ship made out of shell or horn, a foot long and 15 inches tall. I cleaned it up and put it on the windowsill in the landing at the top of the stairs (short landing). Almost immediately I started having some issues in the house. Mainly, things would come off the wall that were so fragile they should have broken when they hit the floor, but instead of breaking, they would roll toward me and land at my feet. For example, the ship would repeatedly fly off the windowsill over the landing and land at the bottom of the stairs on a wooden floor. It was a full story below where it had been, but it would not break. It was actually close to falling apart in my hands when I put it on the landing the first time, so I cannot see how it wouldn’t have broken after such a fall. That went on for years. I kept putting it back, partially just to see what would happen. I probably shouldn’t have, but what was I going to do with it? I liked it there.
We had a get-together for Donna’s birthday. I had a big piano with old pictures of the family arranged on it. One of them was a picture of my mom and my great grandmother in a tiny picture frame. It sat back behind the other pictures. While we were eating that day, that picture literally jumped up over the other pictures and smashed onto the floor. We all saw it happen. We were just enjoying the birthday cake and passing the time of day. There had been no talking about ghosts or anything to do with our relatives. When I first heard the noise, I thought it was the boat. It was, instead, the little picture frame smashed to bits on the floor. How do you explain that? We had all been seated; there had been no one walking around. I don’t have a cat or other pet. We were at the table, and there were no kids running around.
It always starts in the dining room in September, the fall. In September a new phenomenon began. There came a banging inside the wall downstairs, like someone was trying to get out. It was very loud, similar to a furnace exploding. Clearly, that would wake us up. There was, however, some variation in how it presented itself. Sometimes there would be a pattern of knocks—three followed by two. When we would go down to investigate it would stop. Once back upstairs, it started again, often so powerful it vibrated the interior dining room wall. At other times it would sound like someone with a ruler was smacking the counter. Still at other times it more resembled cracking, or banging, or even footsteps on occasion. Although it happened both during the day and night, most typically we would hear it right after we got into bed in the evening. It wasn’t an every night occurrence but it happened at least six to eight times a month. It was most prevalent in October and November. It continued all the way through the fall until warm weather set in. Then it stopped. Donna’s father was constantly calling the furnace people, but they could find nothing wrong and could offer no explanation for it. We have been hearing it so long that we know the patterns it follows. I just pull the corners of my pillow over my ears to sleep. [Donna mentioned that she did that too and sometimes, although rarely, still does.]
When I lived there we would ghost hunt since we had more time. At one point, Donna began using the tape recorder downstairs in the dining room at night. Everyone would be upstairs and we would close the doors off while it was recording. Months went by and we heard nothing but the regular noises. One day when we were all home together on the weekend, Donna came to the rest of us and said: “I need you to listen to this. I am not sure what it is.” It had scared her (Donna) so I really didn’t want to listen, but I did. If you have seen Lord of the Rings you will remember how Gollum talks—the evil part of him. That came to mind as I listened. The tape began with some of the normal noises we were more used to. At one place it sounded like someone was unrolling a roll of fabric—a series of soft thumps followed by the sounds of scissors cutting, intermixed was the sound of running water; very weird. It resembled a faucet being turned on and off. Then we heard a voice that said, “Lie down,” as clear as day and scary as hell. It is difficult to describe—like a slimy, evil, spit-filled, angry voice. I could not believe what I was hearing. It scared me so bad that from that moment on I have not listened to any more of the tapes. Who is that voice addressing? What is its source? Although I only heard it once, it continues to haunt me.
Back when I was in grammar school, I found a huge St. Bernard stuffed animal for a dollar. It was a good four feet long with a rubber face and tongue. My room was on the far end of the hall upstairs. I dragged my new treasure up the stairs and put it in my room. The next day after I had gone to school, Donna found the St. Bernard lying in the hall with its head bent. She put it back in my room and shut the door. The next day, the same thing happened. It was in the hall when I came home from school. It was most certainly not I that took it out there. When I was at home it was always in my room on my bed. After about a week and a half of such antics, my mother became upset. She said if I didn’t keep that dog in my room, someone was going to trip and fall down the stairs. We always found it right there in front of the stairs. I told her that I was not taking it out of my room. It still seemed somewhat humorous to me and I was joking with her and laughing about it. To her it had become no laughing matter. Her mood was all quite serious.
So, I continued to make sure it was in my room and made certain that I shut the door before I went to school. She continued to find it in the hallway at all hours of the day. Not long after that it started to “come out” when we were home, even when we were in bed in the middle of the night. We put a nail through the hasp latch in the door to my bedroom to keep the door shut. It still found its way out into the hallway. On one occasion we found it propped up way down against the wall at the end of the opposite hall. After we discovered it, it fell over on its own. It had always been found lying down before that. I made a point of keeping track of it so I knew for sure that no one touched it. Perhaps that was its regular routine—standing first and then falling over. I wondered if we had caught it in the first part of its routine before it lay down. We would go to the store and come back and it would be laying there in the hall. It got to the point that we would regularly check to make sure it was locked in that room before we left the house. It was heavy. It couldn’t roll around. At one point we considered that Skippy, our little dog, might be to blame, but he was so small he would not have been able to budge it. Besides, he couldn’t even get into the room because we had a nail through the latch. It caused so much turmoil that we finally bagged it up and got rid of it. It had begun moving everywhere throughout the house, not just upstairs and in the hall. At the end it seemed that every time we found it, it was further from my door. I didn’t want to get rid of it. I loved that thing, but it became creepy.
(Michelle explains this occurrence in Donna’s diary entry #152.)
Tim and I were in the kitchen. He was picking the skin off the turkey. At one point his voice became low—as if confidential. He told me to turn around slowly and to look at the spot he was pointing to. He said a man had just appeared there and was going around the corner. He was missing one leg, but stood fairly tall. He was dressed in contemporary clothing—a blue shirt with pleats, grey dress pants, and well-trimmed hair. The whole thing lasted only a few seconds, but I got a good look at him. To some extent he appeared transparent and yet had been clear enough that I could see details on him.
There she is in the mirror. I can see her very clearly. And that mirror is always clean. Those are not wiping marks.
“Oh my God—I see her hair with the type of braids she had, looks like grandma gray! I just got goose bumps.”
(See the color insert for a picture of the sighting in the mirror.)
One Thanksgiving, Tim was watching TV alone in the living room, reclining on the chase lounge. From the kitchen I heard him gasp. It had been loud enough to hear clearly that far away. It had not been a scream or yell. He immediately came into the kitchen as white as a sheet. He said something had just lifted him off the chair. Tim is not one to talk like that; he had indicated his reluctance to believe in things like that and was not interested enough in it to even talk about it. By the look on his face I believed what he said about what had happened. He was clearly frightened. He couldn’t explain it, which was at the base of his fear. Clearly, he had been wide awake through the experience. After that day he would not go into the living room alone and refused to talk about the incident.
One evening, Tim and I were sitting together in the living room watching TV. I heard sounds behind us and thought it was my brother. He seemed to delight in coming down the stairs and trying to sneak up and scare me. I turned around, ready to say “Stop it—we’re watching this program.” Nobody was behind us so I glanced up the stairs. There was the figure of a young man standing there. I yelled at him, “Bob, c’mon down. We’re watching TV.” Underneath the kind words I was really mad at him. He didn’t respond so I turned to get a better, full-on view. To my surprise, it wasn’t him. It was someone close to his build wearing a polo shirt and dress pants. He had a crew cut, like my brother. Other than that his clothes were different from anything Bob would wear. The part of the stairway on which he appeared was well lit. Suddenly, he was just gone. Tim had looked when I did. He had also called out, saying, “Bob, what are you doing?” I said, “That wasn’t Bob.” Later we determined that my brother was not in the house that evening.
As I thought about it, I understood it was the same figure I had seen sometime earlier in the dining room sitting at the table visiting with my mother. On that occasion I had looked into the room and saw him wearing the same clothes. That time I could see he was missing one leg as he stood and walked across the kitchen. When he was on the stairs I couldn’t tell if he had legs or not. In the kitchen it was really clear. You could see one of his legs moving as he walked across the kitchen and then he was suddenly just gone.
I reported a UFO to MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). We were coming around the corner and we saw these lights and we wondered what they were. It was like a big, flat, black rectangle thing. The lights were like triangles underneath. It was to the left of the road where the Christmas tree farm is. All of a sudden it moved slow. It was summertime.
I went to an estate sale. Dale always has to get something. We bought a matching set of two Scottish terrier stuffed animals. They were clearly old and about a foot long and 8 inches tall. I put them on his bed where I expected them to remain. This past summer, I found one of the dogs on the bed in the guest room. So I told Dale not to put the dogs on that bed and asked him to keep them in his room. Mostly, I just wanted to keep him out of there. He said, “I am not doing it, Mommy.”
Eventually we determined that although the switch would sometimes happen when he was home it also happened when he was not at home. It was always just one of them, never both of them, and it was always the same one that got moved. (I suppose that also means that it was always the same one that didn’t get moved.) As I put it back on the bed where it belonged, I would often have a word or two with the—whatever it was: “I know whoever this is thinks it’s funny, but if you want to play with the toys, please play with them in here.” The same thing continued to be repeated. It was not constant, but after a week or a month it would be back in the guestroom.
Sometimes, when there is no one else in the house, I hear footsteps upstairs in the hallway. They are often accompanied by young girl’s happy voices: “Mommy, Mommy!” and laughter sounding very much like little girls having a good time.
Occasionally, I will hear Dale’s electronic toys turn on and begin doing whatever they are designed to do. I often hear a rustling in his toy room, which is separate from his bedroom. When I check, there that dog will be on the bed. So we have those things going on.
I began seeing two dark figures just last week. They only appear upstairs—never downstairs. From the bathroom you can look down a long hallway. On one occasion I watched the tall black figure of a person wearing a coat come off the stairs and move right across the hall to Dale’s toy room. It moved very slowly. I couldn’t make out a face but there was a head. It was more a form like an old-fashioned silhouette—solid. The bottom of the coat flared out. I had previously seen what I believe is the same type of figure in my dining room downstairs, but it was see through—transparent—and shorter, with no coat. It was just a form. Both of them had the essence of a male I would say. I just don’t understand why I am seeing such things now. I’ve seen the one upstairs twice and the one downstairs once.