This week we hear from Amy in MD.
I've lived in several haunted houses. The house I lived in growing up had a child ghost. You could never hear it when many people were in the house, but if you were alone in the house and stood in my bedroom, you could hear the sound of a ball bouncing on the front steps. I had this verified by another friend who happened to be in there when we were all elsewhere and asked me why it sounded like somebody was bouncing a ball when there was nobody out there. I found that house incredibly creepy in other ways and hated to be alone there, but most of it was probably my overactive imagination.
The house I rented prior to buying my current house had a long history. Originally a tobacco barn, it was renovated so that the farmer's daughters could live there. It had served as the office for the town newspaper, as a post office, and as a jail. I couldn't keep lights off there. Every day when I came home from work one or more lights would have been turned on.
My current house has had the most active hauntings. It was built in 1871, so lots of time for ghosts to accrue. I've seen several scary apparitions. The first was the worst. I jolted awake, screaming, terrified for no obvious reason. I couldn't remember dreaming. I opened my eyes and there was something between me and the ceiling. Just a dark...something. In the darkened room I should have been able to see the ceiling easily in the light from the street lamp.I was shaking so hard to that it took me a while to turn on the light, but when I did there was nothing. I did the sage blessing thing and blessed the heck out of that bedroom, and never saw anything in it again. But I didn't do the rest of the house.
A while later I moved into the guest room so I could paint my bedroom, and had a couple of scary events there. I woke up because someone was wiggling my toe, the way my parents used to do to wake me up if they were standing at the foot of the bed. Nobody was there, of course. I sleepily mumbled "Stop it" and went back to sleep. Why that didn't terrify me more than a visual ghost, I have no idea. The next night, I woke up to find a man (dressed like he was in a barbershop quartet) leaning over me. He was standing through the bed -- the mattress cut him off at mid-thigh. He was pretty memorable, with his old fashioned mustache and striped shirt. After that I slept with the light on until I moved back into my own room. If there were ghosts in the room I didn't want to know.
The child living across the street whose bedroom window faces mine asked why my light was on all night, and I made the mistake of telling her. After that I noticed she started sleeping with her light on, too. Oops.
Most of the activity in my house has happened when I've been doing construction. It's like the house wakes up a little bit. After a few months everything settles back down again. We haven't had any ghostly visitations in years now and I'm pretty happy about that.
