Ghost Stories

Have I ever told you the house we just moved out of was haunted?  You have no reason to believe me, but there it is:  We had a ghost.

Throughout the entire 17 years we lived in the house there were inexplicable events.  I know the claim of ghosts in a house is too dubious to be believed, but there were happenings that had no other explanation.

When we moved into the house, consort had a job that required him to wake up at 3 a.m. and leave for work at 4 a.m.  Regardless of my job assignment as a court reporter, I never had to wake up before 6 a.m.  I was always soundly sleeping when consort left for work.

One morning, during the first week we were in the house, I was awakened by a loud pounding and the sound of someone yelling.  I lay listening for a moment, then decided what I was hearing was consort calling to me from the first floor.

Being one who tries never to exert herself, I rolled over, faced the bedroom door, and yelled back, What do you want?  The pounding stopped immediately, but the shouting continued.  I hollered once more, What's wrong?  Did you forget your keys?  The only response was a loud, unintelligible voice making a ruckus on the first floor.

Fully awake and completely annoyed, I got out of bed and headed down the stairs.  Consort was not in the entryway where I expected to find him.  In fact, aside from myself, there was no other living being within the house.

It was not uncommon during the first seven years we lived in the house to hear voices shouting or someone calling.  It was always bizarre, but never frightening.  During those same seven years, consort and I were busy restoring our house to its original 1920s condition.  It was during this reclamation period that the voices were most active.

At some point in the restoration, we completely gutted an upstairs bedroom.  We chiseled plaster from the walls, opened up a closet by removing a wall, and, of course, we pulled up and removed carpet.  Beneath the carpet were remnants of the original linoleum.  As I worked to remove the linoleum, the voices occurred with greater frequency.  I heard them multiple times during the day.  Once the renovation of the house was complete, the voices went away.

We always assumed the main voice we heard was one of the previous owners, an elderly lady who died in the house.  I don't know who the others might have been.  The conversations, if one could call them that, were an indistinguishable mixture of voices.

For about three or four years the house was silent.  There were random disturbances like knickknacks  that were moved to the wrong place on the fireplace mantle.  There were sounds of doors opening and closing or being knocked on, but there was never anymore voices.

We acquired our first dog, D.O.G., in April of 2014.  One afternoon when I returned home from a job, I found D.O.G. sitting on the landing in the stairwell.  He was barking at a wall where two oversized pictures were hanging.  The framed pictures were heavy and necessitated the use of drywall screws to secure them to the wall.  A screw was placed so that both pictures had a screw in each upper corner.

The pictures were still hanging on the wall, but they were cock-eyed.  One picture hung from its upper left corner, the other picture hung from its upper right corner.  And there sat D.O.G. in the middle of the landing, staring at the wall, and barking for all he was worth.  It took me quite awhile to calm him down and coax him away from the wall.

The next two curious events occurred in the last month we occupied the house.

Our house was an old, two-story Sears bungalow.  All of the doors had skeleton key locks.  I collected skeleton keys, had hundreds of them, but only one key ever fit a door lock in the house, the lock to the basement door.

Most of the homes in Oklahoma do not have basements; there's too much ground water seepage.  We did have a basement, but used only the top few stairs for household cleaning items.  There was a sump pump installed in the basement that could be turned on with the flip of a switch at the top of the stairs.

One morning when I came downstairs, I noticed the basement door was ajar.  I assumed consort had opened it and simply forgotten to close it again.  I shut the door without too much thought and went on about my day.

That particular day I was working upstairs getting ready for our big move.  Around lunchtime, I went downstairs and saw that the basement door was, once again, ajar.  I thought it odd but came to the conclusion I had neglected to shut the door tightly.  I closed the door and then pulled on the knob to make sure it was secure.  It was tightly closed.

I made some lunch and took a short break.  (That's code for I grabbed a Pepsi and went to play Candy Crush for half an hour.)  When I walked back through the house, I saw the basement door standing open.  This was beyond strange and I was sure it was our ghost.  I closed the door for the third time and used the skeleton key to lock it.  I double checked to be certain it was secure and would not open, and then walked away leaving the key in the lock.

Again in the vein of never exerting myself, I left the packing up for another day and went out to run errands.  I was gone for a few hours.  When I returned home, the basement door was open and the key nowhere to be found.

The last encounter I had with the ghost is the most unbelievable.

I was in the kitchen unloading cabinets.  In my peripheral vision I saw an elderly woman.  Her hair was knotted in a bun.  She wore a long-sleeved dress covered with an apron.  She walked from our back door, across the laundry room, and disappeared into the bathroom, a total of about eight feet.

That was the last time we had any contact with the ghost.  In the beginning, the voices made us uneasy, but never fearful.  Over the years we got used to the ghostly actions and looked forward to sharing the haunted tales.  As far as we know, the ghost lives there still.