I love my little 'ol 100-year-old cottage; the house feels safe and benevolent. However, a few creepy things happen around here:
Over the past six months there have been several spates of “knocking on the front door and no one is there.” It happens at night; one night it happened three times in a half hour. I can get to the door in 2 seconds from the couch and there just isn’t anyone there.
I go through lightbulbs like eggs. I’m certain it’s weird-o wiring, but it’s creepy to constantly be flipping a switch and hearing the bulb go “phling” and then dark.
Not a house thing, but once in a while there are weird animal noises late at night. As a former westerner, to me it kind of sounds like a pack of coyotes baying. However, I’m pretty sure there aren’t many coyote packs in Trenton. I’m wondering if it’s a loon or some other bird with a loud, mournful cry.
We moved into this house when I was 13. There was a patio out back with two or three steps leading down to the lawn. For whatever reason I upturned one of the steps and discovered that it was a marble tombstone from the early 1800s. It bore the name of Madison Hurd, age 10, and the names of his parents. I checked with the Historical Society, and learned that the family was moving out west, and the kid died when they were in this area. So maybe the stone was moved from somewhere else . . . or maybe the kid is buried right here in my backyard.
There’s a large rock on one of the kitchen windowsills. We don’t move it. It was there when we got here, it was there when the previous tenants got here, I assume it will be there forever.
The last house I lived in had some odd moments in the attic, which was my bedroom. I could be home alone, downstairs, and hear foot steps coming from the attic. In the attic itself there’d be strange cold spots, and a crawlspace that had been nailed shut - I always wondered what, if anything, was back there.
One of the basement walls was only half-finished at about chest height, with a full wall about 15 feet back from that. The space in between was full of dirt. When we first moved in I made jokes about people being buried back there. After a while that house made me nervous when I was alone, and I didn’t think it was so funny anymore.
I worked in an old Victorian mansion. Every once in a while we would hear foot steps coming from the second floor, when we knew no one was up there. Occasionally the footsteps would be followed by voices. They sounded like they were coming from right above us. I eventually figured out that the sounds were from people walking up and down the back steps and talking on the porch. The way the acoustics of the house worked, it just sounded like it was coming from above you.
I also lived in a house which had been housing for the elderly, years ago. It still had a medical emergencies alarm by one of the back doors. The alarm could only be turned on and off by flipping a switch. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the switch would flip itself and the alarm would go off. I never figured that one out.
We have a large victorian in a small town in Ohio.
Hidden room in the basement. I had to triangulate its existence and then figure out how to get in. Nothing there NOW…
Attic. Creepy intentionally. We had Lady Chance’s wedding dress in storage. We bought an antique dress form and put the dress on it and put it in the attic window so it’s visible from the street…watching…waiting…
Ooooh, a Miss Havisham tableau! And WHAT was in the hidden room?
Not my house, but my aunt’s. She owned a big Queen Anne ‘camp’ on a lake near a resort town and hosted a luncheon for an author who appeared at a bookstore. The author was a psychic and after the party took a walk through the house. She said there were two happy children playing ball out in the yard. And…on the little back porch that was used for storage, she saw an old man standing there … holding an axe. “Oh, he’s on another plane, hon,” sez she, casually. “He won’t hurt you.” :eek: Grandpa chopping firewood? Or demented axe murderer? You decide.
Oh, and there are coyotes everywhere now, I’m sure they’re in Trenton as well.
When I first moved in to my house, I would occasionally hear the garage door opener opening the garage door. Only I lived alone and, uh, didn’t have a garage door opener.
It took me a few weeks to figure out that the sound of the sump pump is almost exactly the same as a garage door opener (I have a garage door opener now, thanks).
Please, tell us more! How did you figure out that there was a hidden room in the first place? Did someone say it was supposed to be there, or did you notice that the space just didn’t add up? And how did you get in?
I’ve heard that often times that means your house wiring is at 130 volts (it should hover between 110 and 120). Getting bulbs rated for 130V, which you should be able to find at a hardware store, may help with the problem.
For a while I owned a 100-year-old former farmhouse (the surrounding land had long since been sold off and developed, so while it was still a house, there was no farm). Shortly after I moved in, I started hearing the tune to “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here” at random intervals. It sounded electronically generated, and I knew that the previous owners had small children, so at first I assumed that a toy had been left behind in the house. I looked everywhere (pretty easy, since I hadn’t unpacked most of my stuff yet) but couldn’t find anything to account for the noise. Creepy.
Eventually I determined that it was the wireless doorbell being triggered by something (never figured out what) outside the house.
That house had a really creepy basement, too. It appeared to have been expanded in stages, creating three rooms of varying degrees of smallness, darkness, and dankness. There was also a dirt-floored crawlspace all the way in the back of on of the rooms, behind the boiler.
My in-laws had an issue with one of my daughters toys randomly firing up and playing music (I think it was one of those books that plays music or makes animal sounds). He finally figured out that it would start playing every time the furnace started. I’m assuming the EMF from the motor must have been the culprit.
I live in a condo building catering to seniors. This is a 30+ yo building, so several (many) of the former owners have died in their condo units.
I’ve spoken to several (well, okay four) neighbors about “seeing things” and we all agree. Without going into details, we all know the building is haunted and we’re okay with that.
While I’m sorry these souls can’t find their final resting place, I wish they would stop screwing with me. My current argument with “Margie” (my ghostie) is that when she figures I’m too drunk and staying up too late watching TV, she turns it off. It usually takes about 15 min or so of arguing with the remote to make my point or she gets tired about it.
That being said, I’m not really afraid of ghosts. As long as they’re not painful hurty ones.
In my previous flat we used to hear the creepiest tapping noise. Our bed was up against a big wall that separated our place from the next flat along. At night I’d frequently get woken up by a rhythmic tapping coming from the other side of the wall, right over the headboard of our bed. It sounded identical to a someone’s hand, it had that drumming quality you get when each fingernail hits the wall at slightly different times. Extremely un-nerving.
I often wanted to ask the guy next door why he was (presumably) tapping on the wall in the middle of the night. But he was a very taciturn, unfriendly person who’s entire body language was ‘don’t bother me’ whenever I passed him. So I never asked.
My husband does that in his sleep, Busy Scissors. I’ll wake up to hear his fingernails scratching on the headboard sometimes. It’s just his hand twitching, and it hits the headboard because he likes to sleep with his arm under the pillow.
I once lived on 23 acres in a huge mud brick house, built on an old farmhouse site that 100 years before had burned to the ground, taking two children and their nanny with it. The closest neighbour was 2 miles away, and we had no phone.
It had a fuel stove, and saucepan lids would regularly and simultaneously fly off about a foot in the air. Kitchen items particularly, would sometimes go missing and be found in really strange places outside - like in a tree stump, or by the dairy. The walk in pantry had extremely cold spots, and the feeling was creepy enough to have you always reluctantly go in there, and feel very brave when you did.
The two dogs would often bark madly; bailing up a phantom in a corner somewhere.
From the loungeroom, we once heard a crash and ran to one of the the bedrooms to find a 4’x4’ window smashed. From the inside.
It had a mezzanine with timber flooring, and 3-foot high ‘fence’. At night, or in the early morning it was not unusual to hear what sounded like workboots and a wheelbarrow. One of my housemates swore he saw an old man leaning on the fence by the stairs. He moved out after that.
One evening, four friends visited in separate cars, and none of them would start when they wanted to leave.
The house was stunning. Living there was startling. But fuck we had some unforgettable parties there.
My mother told this story about the house we lived in while I was growing up. It was early afternoon, too early for my sister or me to be coming home from school yet. Mom heard the sound of a child crying and running up the stairs. Assuming one of us had had a problem, she hurried up to see what it was, and of course there was no one there. Our cat followed her. The cat got a puffy tail and refused to go into that room the rest of the day. My sister and I came home as usual later on, having had no particular difficulties during the day.
I have for most of my life. I think it has been handy, with living out in the sticks the way we do, and mrAru having such a long drive from work. Even the cat and dog will react like they hear someone coming in the door and walking around like mrAru. Dog will bark at strangers, but not at either of us, so she isn’t just alerting for the hell of it.