Grandma's Perfume
When I was about 14 my cousin Kim & her family moved to the same town that I lived in. They bought a big,old house with the intention of renovating it. Kim & I were very close in age so I spent a lot of time at their house. One day Kim & I were alone in the house. We were in the kitchen cleaning strawberries when we started to hear a rattling noise. At first we didn't pay much attention to it, but then it became much louder. We turned around to see where the noise was coming from & freaked!! On the opposite side of the room from where we were standing cleaning the strawberries was the laundry room. The rattling noise we were hearing was the laundry room door & doorknob shaking like someone was trying to get out of the laundyroom. Now, you have to remember that we were completely alone in the house and no one could have gotten in without us knowing because both of the doors to the house were locked. Kim & I took one look at the rattling door & we both took off screaming and yelling out of the front door of the house. Since the door was locked & we were so scared it took us a few minutes to get out. Since I couldn't get the door open fast enough for Kim she was pushing me & she left a big red hand print on the back of my shirt from the strawberries she was still holding in her hand. When we finally got out we would not go back in and we waited out on the sidewalk for 1 1/2 hours until the rest of her family got home. When we told them what happened my aunt looked at us a little strangly and the rest of them pretty much thought we were nuts.
We were kids & pretty busy like most kids are with all of our activities so we pretty much forgot about the "strawberry incident". A few weeks later I was again staying at Kim's house. Kim & I were once again alone in the house because the rest of her family had gone out of town to do some shopping. We had locked both doors again. We got a little bored so we decided to surprise my aunt by cleaning up the house for her. We straightened up the downstairs of the house by doing dishes, dusting, vaccuming,etc., and then we made our way upstairs to start cleaning. We had only been upstairs about 5 minutes when we suddenly heard a very loud noise coming from downstairs. We were scared but decided to go see what was going on. By the time we got partway down the stairs we realized that the loud noise we were hearing was the t.v.--which had NOT been on when we went upstairs. We ran into the living room to turn off the t.v. (which was turned on with the volume just about all the way up). We couldn't figure what was going on, but thought that maybe everyone had gotten home early & somehow gotten into the house without us knowing about it and were trying to scare us because of the "strawberry incident". We checked both doors & they were both still locked from the inside. We thought that maybe somehow the t.v. had malfunctioned & turned itself on (don't ask me how this could have happened--we were scared & were looking for any explanation)!! Then we noticed that there were other things that were not right. We had just completely cleaned the downstairs, but you couldn't tell it the way things looked! Two of the pictures that were supposed to be on the fireplace mantle were now laying on the floor in the middle of the room. All of the pillows from the couch & loveseat were also on the floor. The weirdest thing we found was a spoon that was next to the couch--it was covered with some sticky red substance. When we checked the other rooms we found Kleenex thrown all over the bathroom & the garbage dumped on the floor of the kitchen. You cannot imagine how scared we were!! Once again we ran outside & waited until my aunt and the rest of the family got home. After they got home & saw what had happened they started accusing us of setting it all up--everyone except my aunt that is. She looked as scared as we were!! When everyone else went to do whatever they had to do my aunt called Kim & I into her bedroom and told us to close the door. She said that she had something to tell us but that we couldn't tell my uncle or my other 2 cousins because she didn't want to worry them. She thought she could tell us because we had already had strange thing happen to us. She told us that from the first day they had moved into the house she had had weird things happen to her. She would be in a room somewhere in the house when all of a sudden the air around her would get really cold & damp feeling and then she would smell White Shoulders (a perfume) really strong around her. She said that no one in the house wore White Shoulders, but she knew what it smelled like because her grandmother had always wore it all of her life. Her grandmother was now dead! My aunt said that other strange things had happened also. Every Thursday night at about 11 p.m. she would hear footsteps going up the stairs to the second floor. She said they seemed to stop at each bedroom doorway for a few seconds and then they would go back downstairs again. She had tried walking up the stairs & stopping in front of every door too just to see what it would sound like and that all of the squeaks on the steps and the hallway upstairs matched with the ones she made when she tried it herself. Another thing that had happened to her was that she was cleaning the kitchen one day & when she finished in there she went into the bathroom to clean up. While she was in the bathroom she heard a crash in the kitchen and when she ran to see what it was she saw a hand mirror that she had just put away in the bathroom broken on the kitchen floor below the sink!! She said that she had had a lot of other weird things happen too, but that she wasn't really afraid of them anymore because she thought it was her grandma letting her know that she was alright and that she was watching over them. She thought this was so because of the strong smell of White Shoulders that she had always worn.
Eventually everyone that lived in that house experienced something unexplained, but they just got used to it. They even talked to the ghost and they never felt threatened once the shock wore off. They lived in the house for a number of years & every Thursday night they would hear the footsteps going up the stairs. My aunt said she thought that it was grandma checking to make sure they were all fine & snug in their beds. After they moved out of that house I ofter wondered if the new owners experienced anything strange, but if it really was grandma like my aunt thought, once they moved out of the house grandma probably moved on too!!