What unexplained things have happened in your house/apartment?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t believe in ghosts but am fascinated when strange, seemingly unexplainable things happen.

Here’s one of mine:

There’s a ten foot hallway that leads to my bedroom from the family room. One night my wife and I had just turned out the bedroom lights, no one else was awake or downstairs, and we heard what sounded like ice falling into a drinking glass right in that hallway just a few feet from us. There are windows in that hallway but there was no wind that night. It was summer so no ice outside. I haven’t heard that noise since.

My sister’s story:

My sister lived in an apartment with another girl about 20 years ago and everything was fine, no weird activities. They bought a coat rake at an antique store and brought it home. After that they had numerous episodes where the water would turn on their bathroom, the toilet would flush on its own, at different times during the day and night. All the unexplained things occurred in the bathroom only for some reason and I’m not sure how close the coat rack was to this bathroom. They soon got rid of the coat rack and the odd things stopped occurring.

2

My mom and dad got married in 1949 and in 1950 bought one of the family houses from my Great Aunt and moved in. Several months later my Dad went off to his duty station, leaving my mom in the house with one of my uncles and his wife in the house across the street, and my grandparents in another adjoining house. This house is one of 3 built by my great grandfather [uncle and aunt in one, grandparents in the third] to house the family [all 3 are roughly the same size, 2 master suites, servants quarters, the usual stuff you find in 1885]

Culturally, in 1950 and thereabouts it was not uncommon for some military to be married and be geographic bachelors with their wives living back home, and them in barracks. usually this was to be near family and friends for support while pregnant and raising kid, though at that time none of us had arrived yet.

Being built in 1885 it had some old fashioned features - a regular and a servants stairs. The attics were designed by my g’grandfather as his private suite, it had a full bath, a huge dressing room with a walk in cedar closet, and an office that took up the width of the house and was half the house deep. When it was electrified, it got the funky pushbutton switches. All the rooms had a single switch by the door, but by the door to the servant area [kitchen, butlers pantry, pantry, servant sitting room, stairs up to servants bedrooms and down to the cellars] upstairs between the servants area and house, and downstairs between the servants area and the house had a gang plate of them, switch plate that turned on downstairs and upstairs house hallway, the entry waiting vestibule, the equivalent area upstairs, the downstairs small hall [coat closet, toilet for guests] and the front porch lights.

With my mother and the live in maid in residence, they left the attic door locked, the second master suite and 2 bedrooms closed off, the formal living room, formal dining room and the front parlor closed off and they basically lived in the kitchen using the servant sitting room as a dining nook, the library as a living room, the master suite and the servants suite for sleeping in. Mom always gave the maid [maids when there were a bunch of us] Saturday and Sunday off and in general went to dinner Saturday evening and lunch Sunday noon with my Grandparents and Uncle and Aunt.

One winder Saturday, my Uncle John was dropping my mother off at the house after dinner. When they arrived at the locked house, every single light from attics to cellars were on. Every single room. They went next door to my Uncle’s house and called the police, who showed up fairly quickly and entered the still locked house. They went through and made sure there was nobody inside, then my uncle and mom went in and walked through it, and nothing was touched, the police had to unlock the attic to get in to check it out. Absolutely no answer for why the place was lit up. It happened a few more times over the years, and there was never any explanation as to why it was happening.

When we sold it, the people who bought it were both professors at SUNY Geneseo. They decided to rent out the attic to fellow professors and grad students. For some reason people tended to manage to stick around for a month or two. Longest was a neat nun named Mary Agatha who managed 4 months. If you sit downstairs every now and again you would hear the bathroom door open, footsteps going into the dressing room, then into the office and the door shutting. Then after a while you hear them reverse.

Did I ever mention that my imaginary childhood friend in Germany was some old guy who would tell me stories? Spitting image of my deceased for over 70 years great grandfather. Who had a single picture taken of himself in his lifetime, which was at my Grandparent’s Florida house, where I didn’t visit until I was 6 years old. Unfortunately the visits stopped when we moved into the family house when I was 5:( But the noises in the house started when we moved out.

3

My neighbors had appliances that would turn themselves on from time to time. I always explained that away as some kind of electrical problem. They eventually had an exorcism at the house and then moved because the husband was transferred. I was not close enough with them to find out more about the exorcism and why they thought they needed that. The new people living in the house have never complained.

So you actually saw and talked to this imaginary friend?

4

Another story.

In the 1990’s I lived in an old house in NJ that had been built in 1923, nothing strange ever happened until this incident. Eventually we had my oldest daughter and she had her own bedroom next to ours. One morning when she was about 2 years old or so she calmly told me about this little boy that floated up to her room and talked to her… Freaky stuff but I just figured this was some little kid talk, although she had never watched or been exposed to anything related to “floating kids” at that point in her life. She never mentioned it again so it was a one time event apparently.

5

A few years ago I lived in a terrace house that was built in the 1880’s. Footsteps up and down the stairs, doors opening and closing and lights on and off happened quite often. I could also smell cigarette smoke and every so often pipe smoke. The cigarettes could be explained with it being a terraced house but I cannot remember the last time I saw someone smoking a pipe.

One evening my girlfriend at the time was over and whilst we were engaged in some frantic sofa wrestling the unmistakable odour of cigs suddenly permeated the room. She freaked out thinking it was her deceased husband watching us. The vision of his ghostly apparition standing over us having a fag struck a humorous chord with me which, of course, did not go over well.

6

In my childhood home I heard footstep coming down the hall. I thought it was weird but didn’t pay much attention until my dad heard it too.

Later my mother decided to carpet the hallway and I yelled “Mom! You’re going to kill the ghost!”

7

Yes, my mom actually had a child psychologist check me out because I was frequently seen sitting and chatting with the otherwise empty bedroom that had been turned into a playroom for my sister, brother and I. It apparently started when my mother flew back to the US for my sister to go into Sloane-Kettering leaving my brother and I with the governess though my brother didn’t seem to see or hear him. The kiddy shrink said that it seemed harmless and to let me keep on chatting with him and only if he started telling me to do things to get me back into counseling.

I had a description of him, and was able to describe what he looked like well enough that my dad recognized him from having grown up with a portrait of him. As I had not yet been back to the US, I had never seen the portrait. At 3 years old, I had no understanding that he wasn’t there, it did not seem odd that I was the only one he was talking with.

8

I grew up in a new house. Not old and creaky. No deaths there and I don’t believe in ghosts.
But - when I was 12 years old I was home alone and in my bedroom with the door open. I heard a voice in the hall call my first name. Not all drawn out and horror movie, just a statement. I was a bit scared but thought that maybe when you hear a sound you try to make it into something familiar such as your name. A few weeks later the same event happened. I spoke up and said " Yes, I’m here. What is it?" No reply. Now I think maybe I am nuts.
So mentioned it to my sister. She told me she had heard the voice as well. So I asked if she had answered it. No she said because “It called YOUR name.”
She meant it, no kidding.

9

My first home was a trailor. Single wide, hitch still attached and axles under the skirting. It had been dropped on a bare piece of land, no Indian graveyards or anything involved.

It was cheap and I was poor, what can I say?

One of the owners had had a heart attack in the living room and died in the hospital. I cleaned the blood splatter off the wall, repainted and thought everything was good.

None of my cats would go into the 2nd bedroom unless I forced them. My rescues would cry in their cages all the time.

Once I moved the cages to the little tiny 3rd room, all was good.

I never did figure that out, I was just fine in the 2nd bedroom. My friends were fine there. I even borrowed dogs and they were just fine there. Any cats I tried to take into that room just freaked out.

10

There was blood splatter from a heart attack? Did it burst out if their chest?

11

Sorry, no. It wasn’t anything as dramatic as that.

It was from the blood splatter when the EMT’s were stabbing him with needles and trying to get his heart going again. It was just small drops of blood on the wall by where their couch was. I wasn’t there, I didn’t see what happened, but I’m pretty sure that if his heart had burst out of his chest, it would have left a bigger mess.

I just thought that it was strange that the cats refused to go into the second bedroom but didn’t have any problem with the living room.

Didn’t the OP ask for unexplained things that happened in a home? That’s what I was sharing.

(If you want to talk about the mess that EMT’s make, that might be a different thread.)

12

I’ve probably told these events before, but here they are again:

When I was 5, I sleep walked every night. Due to this my mom always made sure every window and door on our trailer was locked, so that my nocturnal travels would be relatively safe. Both of our doors had deadbolts that could only be unlocked with a key, and she had the only one. One night she woke up hearing me calling out “Mama! Mama! Where are you?” in a frightened voice. She searched the trailer from one end of the other, checking under beds, in cabinets, the dryer (my favorite hiding spot), everywhere a sleep walking 5 year old could get to. Unable to find me, she unlocked the front door to go get our neighbor to help look, and found me standing on the porch, calling for her. All the windows were still shut, and there is no way I could have gone out of one and closed it. You see, windows no trailers back in the day didn’t slide up or down. They cranked in and out, and only from the inside.

In the same trailer, my grandfather came for a visit. He seemed down and withdrawn, and near the end of the visit he asked my mom could he go into my sisters room and take a nap. My mom told him no, he was doing no such thing, that he needed to go home. I found this strange, as on plenty of occasions my grandpa had slept in mine or my sister’s room when he was visiting and gotten tired. After he left, I asked her why she told him no, and she said that she knew if he went to sleep in there, he wouldn’t wake back up. Early in the morning I heard my sister talking to someone. I got up to see who, and no one was in her room with her. When I asked her who she was talking to, she said grandpa had come to say goodbye to her. Not 15 minutes later my murderous, drunkard, child abusing grandmother was at the house, telling my mom that grandpa had died.

A year later, we moved into this charming little house. Every night we would close and lock the doors and windows, only to get up in the morning to find them unlocked and open. This was an older house with a large back porch, with steps made of poured concrete, which was odd, as aside from the foundation, nothing else in the house was stone of any sort. You could hear someone walking through the house at various hours of the day, and the steps would always stop at the stone steps. We only lived here for a few months before moving. After we moved out, the landlord broke the steps up as part of the renovation, and found a body inside of them.

A few years after that (around 93 or so) we moved into a house that had been built around 1905. Strange things started happening in this house the day we moved in. The entire family was in the master bedroom, getting everything arranged. The bed had 5 large boards as part of the frame to hold the box springs and mattress. When we went in, all 5 boards were there. No one left the room in that time, and the windows were shut. When we were ready to put the bed together, one of the boards was missing. We searched the entire house just in case we were mistaken, but could never locate it. Over the next 3 years, objects small and large would continue to vanish. Every day at 1pm on the dot, throughout the house, it would smell like a lit match. The livng room had a mantle, and anything put in the center of the mantle would fall off shortly after the lit match smell showed up. The mantle was perfectly level, and there was no activity going on that could cause this. Every night at midnight, 1, 2, and 3 in the morning it would sound like someone coming up the front steps and knocking on the door, but no one was ever there. If you sat outside you wouldn’t hear the noise, but those inside would. One night at exactly midnight, my mom and I were awoken by what sound like every window, every dish, every glass shattering at once. We searched the entire house, and couldn’t find the cause of the noise. The next morning we went to visit our neighbors, and before we mentioned any of the previous night’s events, our neighbors asked what had went on the night before. When we inquired into what they meant, they said said that at midnight the night before, they noticed our house appeared to be glowing, almost like something was shining a bright light down on it.

13

I had a friend tell me a story of when he lived in a particular house that had a garden path that had seven steps up to the front door, from his room he’d hear when guests were approaching by them walking up the steps.

But on some nights he’d hear someone walking up the steps and yet nobody would subsequently knock on the door. He’d even go outside and look around to see if someone was just pulling a prank, but couldn’t find any evidence for that either. It wasn’t just mysterious, it happened so frequently it started to get creepy.

He considered staking out the steps or setting up a video camera, but that didn’t turn out to be practical, so it remained a mystery for many months, until he accidentally stumbled on the explanation.

What sounded like someone climbing up the seven steps was in fact their cat scraping at the front door. For some reason the cat’s rhythm was always seven taps, no more, no less, at exactly the regularity and tone of feet on steps. Mystery solved.

14

I wonder if there was something they smelled that upset them?

15

I lived in an old house that had been converted into apartments. Still had the big heavy windows on sash cords and high ceilings.

One day, just as I was walking by one of the windows that my cat was sitting sunning himself in, the sash cord broke! I didnt even know it had happened, but I reached out my hand for some unexplained reason and caught the heavy window in one hand before it could coming crashing down on his head. I dont know who was more surprised!

Lots of unexplained strange things happened in that house.

16

I live in an old house built on a civil war battlefield. The house itself is on a sniper killing ground. There were odd things about the house when I bought it; like the door that was missing to the basement (the door itself was stored in the basement). Two people had died in the house, one had been stabbed in a bar, the other of some disease. Stuff happens.
Anyway, the doors to the closets in the upstairs would not keep closed. And when I had the basement door installed, it would not keep closed either. Remember the scene in the Sixth Sense where all the kitchen doors open in a split second while the mother’s back is turned? I shut the basement door as I walked past, heard the latch catch, and when I turned around it was completely open. Yeah, that was spooky.
So, the old owner lived a couple of blocks way and when I passed some of her mail to her, I asked “Did anything…odd…ever happen in the house?”
Let me say I now know what hysterical laughter sounds like, and I don’t mean hysterically funny, I mean hysterically panicked. So she repeated to me all the things I had seen. Plus she told me that after they had some work done on the house, the ‘problems’ would go away for a while then come back.

Anyway, I had the basement door rehung and balanced, and it still opened on its own. Then I bought a new interior door in a frame and had it installed as a basement door. As for the the upstairs closet doors, I had the attic behind them vented. New roof, second bathroom, new upstairs windows, carpets, converted a tiny bedroom into a closet and added bannisters. So far, two years down the road, the doors stay shut.

The sounds of artillery in the fall nights, that everyone in the town can hear, and no one can explain? Yeah, they’re still there—but this was about things in the house.

17

Nothing supernatural here, but a weird story, nonetheless. I went up on the roof to fix a turbine vent, and discovered, well, poop. Not bird poop or cat poop, but a big pile near the peak of the roof. Trying not to TMI here, but it seemed to be all one big, umm, grouping. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t something that collected over time, and it was at or above human-sized.

For the life of me, I can’t figure what would be that large and on my roof.

18

A harpy? :stuck_out_tongue:

Haven’t thought about this in years - back in 1984 I was spending what was supposed to be a nice weekend with a new boyfriend and it started snowing fairly hard - it would have been the weekend before Christmas. We were in his house, which was on the shore of Lake Ontario in more or less Hilton NY, so we were getting wind from Canada pushed across the lake. It was sometime in the middle of the night when we heard a huge house shaking thud, then shuffling noises on the roof of the house that sounded like a giant version of the little side to side shuffling sort of movement-noises that something like a parrot does on its perch. It went on off and on for about 2 hours, and ended sometime around dawn. When Dan went outside, there was nothing slammed into the house, no roof damage of any sort, and no sign that anything had been on the roof shuffling around, or caught and being blown around before blowing away. We joked that it must have been a harpy landing to get out of the storm.:stuck_out_tongue:

19

A goose, maybe? They leave impressive piles of mammal-like shit.

20

Right after I got married, my wife and I moved into a small two bedroom apartment. One was our bed room the other bedroom was used as an office. There were two things in that room; a drawing table and a small couch. Nothing else.

One day I got the idea I wanted to learn to juggle. So I got three tennis balls and started. Soon enough I realized how much of a hassle it was to pick up the dropped balls. I decided to juggle over the couch in the office so I wouldn’t have so far to bend over to pick up the dropped balls. I go into the room, shut the door and start.

All was going well until one of the dropped ball hit the couch arm, ricocheted over to the wall and bounced back behind the couch. I reached behind but felt nothing. Looking behind I saw nothing. I tried one of the other balls and they wouldn’t fit under the couch. Remember, other than a tall table there was nothing else in the room and the door was closed. The tennis ball was nowhere to be found.

I took all of the cushions off (not that it could have gotten behind them anyway) - nothing. Finally I ask my wife to help me search, she also couldn’t find it. I turned the couch over and tried everything. The ball had vanished. It never showed up.

A couple of years later we moved into a house. We didn’t need the old couch anymore so decided to toss it. I tore that couch apart piece by piece and there was nothing in it.