Scary Footsteps
I've really enjoyedlurking here for the past few days, and really enjoyed readingthe stories. By way of introduction and a thank you, I'd like toshare one of my own ghostly experiences.
When I was fourteen, my family moved to a new town in upstate NewYork. The house we moved into wasn't your classic "haunted"variety at all, but a fifteen-year-old ranch house. Nothingspooky about it at all.
Some months after we moved in, however, I started hearingfootsteps in the dead of night. I would hear them walk throughthe basement, climb the stairs into the dining room, and enterthe kitchen. There they would always stop.
No amount of arguing with myself would make those footsteps goaway. Night after night I would lie awake in the dark with myheart pounding, praying those steps wouldn't continue out of thekitchen and down the hallway to my bedroom.
I finally told my mother what I was experiencing by way ofexplaining why I so desperately needed the hall light on allnight. Don't ask me why I thought the light was any protection!:) Mom thereafter allowed me to keep the light on, but she wasvery impatient with me. She told me I had a hyperactiveimagination, and that I'd damn well better not mention thesesteps to my brothers and sister, because the last thing sheneeded to deal with was four children who were terrified ofghosts.
So I never mentioned it to another soul. Until...
Two years after I moved out and married, Mom told me she owed mean apology for her reaction. It seems my brother, two years myjunior, had been hearing the steps, too, and on more than onenight he had climbed out of bed with a knife and gone to find outwho had broken into the house.
This brother brought his wife to live in that basement for acouple of years while he finished graduate school. One nightduring that time, my youngest brother was sitting on the patiooutside the dining room in the evening. No one at all was home.But he heard footsteps on the basement stairs and thought myolder brother and his wife had come home. He went inside to check...andfound no one there.
A guest, who slept in the basement, early one morning feltsomeone grab his leg and tug gently, trying to wake him. No onewas there...and no one had told him about our ghostly steps.
Eventually, the steps began to pass beyond the kitchen and downthe hallway to the bedroom area. I was long gone, thank God,living elsewhere, but my poor mother watched all her kids grow upand leave, and then, when my dad was out of town on business,would retire to her bedroom at sunset and keep the door closed,too scared to be out where the ghost roamed.
One afternoon when Mom came home from work, she found the sugarbowl upended in the middle of the kitchen floor, a good four feetfrom the counter. She got so mad when she saw the mess, that sheyelled at the ghost (by this time called George by the entirefamily) "You can live here if you want to, but don't youdare make another mess!" It struck her then that she wasyelling at a ghost, and she said she felt so creepy... :)
Everyone in the family heard the steps at one time or another. Wehave no idea what was going on, only the conviction of presencethat was inescapable, and a haunting that seemed to strengthenwith time.
My folks moved away from there fifteen years ago, but we allstill talk about it from time to time.
And then there was the ghost in my Aunt's house....for next time.