Rolling Weights
Hi Folks,
I've lurked, I've discussed, now it's time to share a ghost storywith you.
The situation took place in my parent's home, in mid-January 1984.Like a typical mid-January evening in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada,it was bitterly cold outside. I was helping my brother shovelsnow off of the backyard patio and walkway. We put the shovels inthe garage, and we were just about to open the back door, when Inoticed a strange odour. It smelled like something dead somewherearound the porch. The odour was especially strong near the backdoor. I asked my brother if he could smell something weird. Hesaid that it smelled like an animal (mouse or rat) probablycrawled behind something around the porch and died. We checkedeverywhere, under and around the porch. It was not cluttered, soit was easy to do a thorough check. We found nothing, and we wentinside, thinking nothing about it further.
Later that evening, my sister and I were sitting in the kitchen.I was on the phone with a friend, and my sister was sitting inthe rocking chair with her cat on her lap. During my phoneconversation, I heard the 'beep' of the Call Waiting service, soI put my friend on hold and answered the incoming call. It was afriend of my brother's, wondering if he was home. I was positivemy brother was home, because I could hear his weight set clankingoccasionally (he was into body building). I put the phone downand called my brother's name. My sister then said he wasn't home.I said, "Sure he is..he's in the basement..", and Istarted walking toward the basement door. My sister repeated,"Val, he's not home...he left a couple hours ago. He's atMark's." We both went completely silent and still for a fewseconds, then we heard one of his weights rolling across thefloor! We both became extremely creeped out. I returned to thephone, took a message for my brother, got back to my friend andtold him I'd call him back later. My sister and I just sat therelistening closely to the noises coming from the basement. Weconfirmed that nobody else was home, we had no other animals inthe house (the cat was with us), and whoever was downstairs couldmove a minimum 5 lbs (the lightest unit weight in the set). Wethen heard what sounded like a very heavy weight roll across theconcrete floor of the basement, and we screamed and ran out ofthe kitchen, and into our parent's bedroom. We sat by the coldair return vent, listening to the clanking and commotion in thebasement. Finally, my brother came home, and we told him abouteverything we'd been hearing. He went down to the basement, andhe accused us of messing with his weights. They were scatteredall around the basement. He checked the basement for anything oranyone that might be down there, and didn't find anything. No onecould figure out what caused this. Actually, my brother thoughtwe were playing a joke on him, so he didn't take us seriously.That really bothered us.
This activity continued for about a week (between dusk and dawn),and would stop if someone entered the basement. It focussed onthe weights and barbells. They were the steel cast Real McCoyweights, so they made a thundering sound when they rolled acrossthe concrete floor. We heard footsteps creeking up the basementsteps, and they would stop at the basement door, which opens toour kitchen.
One evening, we didn't hear any strange noises in the basement.The next day, as I opened the back door and stepped onto theporch, I noticed that the rotting meat smell was gone. The odourhad remained on the porch and at the back door for the entireduration of the basement activity. I mentioned this to mybrother, and then he looked at me with a confused look on hisface. He said, "You know, it's f***ing cold out here andeverything is frozen......even if something died out hear or wasdead, it wouldn't be rotting and smelling like that."Another thing I noticed about the odour, was that it didn't fadeat all over the week. It was not overpowering, but it wasdistinctly pungent, and then suddenly, it was completely gone,within the same time that the activity stopped.
No one else has lived in our house before us (my parents had itcustom built). We've thought about it many times, and we've triedto come up with a logical explanation for it, but we can't. Weall think it was a ghost, who might have been into working outwith weights in his life, and we had the impression it was a guyin his 20's or 30's. It might have been 'passing by' and decidedto hang around our basement for a week. Go figure!