Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

My first year of college, I moved into the dorms and shared two tiny rooms and a tiny bathroom with three other girls I had never met before, Janine, Cindy, and Tanya. We all got along exceptionally well and kept requesting that we stay together as suitemates throughout our freshman and sophomore years. Then over the summer before junior year, the four of us decided to rent a house near campus to get out of the cramped, noisy, roach-infested dorms.

We searched for something close enough to walk to campus from and big enough so we could at least share two decent-sized bedrooms for a change. Everything we saw was far beyond our means. Then we answered an ad on the bulletin board of a coffee shop where I was working and lucked into a four bedroom house in a nice neighborhood. Electrify, water, trash, and gardening service included. It was also ridiculously close to campus and unbelievably cheap!

It was an older house but was in great condition with gorgeous hardwood floors throughout and high ceilings. Besides the four big bedrooms all on the second floor, it had two nice bathrooms complete with claw footed tubs. On the first floor was a newly redone kitchen with lots of counter space, a cozy sitting room, a larger living room, and a dining room. There was also an attic room we could walk upright in except for where the roof sloped, a two car garage we really didn’t need, and an absolutely beautiful landscaped garden with a little fountain that worked.  We were asked for first and last months rent. We didn’t have to sign a lease or put up an additional security deposit. We all thought we had caught a ride on the sweet life express.

Soon after we moved in, one of our new neighbors mentioned that our landlord, the owner who had fixed up the property as an investment, seemed to have trouble keeping tenants. Nobody knew why. At first we were sort of worried that our landlord, who was a single guy and in his forties, was some kind of a pervert or a psycho killer or something. We were expecting to be hassled by him constantly at the very least. It turned out that we hardly ever saw the man.

We were all home, all downstairs studying one evening when we heard this knocking noise from the vicinity of the staircase. The staircase from the first floor to the second originated on the west side of the house in the living room. On the other side of that wall was the garage, which we kept locked and used for storage since none of us had a car at the time. I opened the door and walked into the garage. No one was in there. The knocking was coming from inside the wall between the garage and the living room.

It was an old house, as I mentioned. We figured it was just old plumbing inside the wall that was making the awful noise. Then the knocking just kept getting louder and louder until the banging sound was hard to bear hearing. The sound was traveling too, up the staircase. Cindy and I walked up stairs, sort of following the sound. We were right at the landing about to make the turn to the second floor when this gray blob, for lack of a better description, a little bigger than a softball shot out of the wall to our left crossed right in front of us and soared upstairs at the same time that the knocking in the wall stopped.

Needless to say both of us were pretty shaken up. We went back down and told our friends what had just happened. Eventually all four of us went back up stairs and looked around as a group. Nothing seemed out of place. I don’t think either Tanya or Janine believed us really at that point, because neither of them had seen it. They did give us the benefit of the doubt that we’d seen something- like a bat maybe.

About a week or so later, Janine got home early from classes to find all four burners of the electric stove red hot, all turned up on high. She went to classes earlier than the rest of us, so she accused us all of being really careless. Cindy who was the last to leave didn’t cook that morning but did grab some cold leftover breakfast pizza out of the fridge and swore up and down that the burners weren’t on when she left the house.

After that, the knocking was back. I wasn’t home at the time. They said it lasted about four hours straight and ended shortly before I came in from my coffee gig a little after midnight. The next morning, around five, the knocking started up again. I’m pretty sure I could have slept through it, but the others woke me.

I just charged over to the staircase and screamed “Stop that!” I’ve never been much of a morning person to begin with and certainly not at 5 am before caffeine. Weirdly enough, it did stop immediately and didn’t start up again. We laughed about it over some coffee and decided that we really did have a ghost in the house.

That evening the knocking was back, but was much less loud this time- more polite, if you will. We drew up some guidelines and presented them to our ghost, telling it that it could stay but it would have to respect house rules. It would not turn stove burners on. It would not bang inside walls. It would do nothing to harm us or scare us intentionally. It would not destroy property, ours or our landlords. We read out our demands, waved some incense around to ‘purify’ the house, did a ‘so say we all’ toast and called it a night.

That seemed like the end of it for a while. I don’t think any of us forgot about the ghost exactly, but we stopped talking about it all the time.

I guess we had been in the house about three months when we first noticed the liquid emulsion in the attic. It pooled on the hard wood floor. Since the ceiling above was pristine, we knew it wasn’t the roof leaking. Plus it didn’t appear all the time when it rained. I wiped it up usually. Everyone else hated to touch it even with latex gloves on.

It was always the same brownish gray- the consistency of thick tomato soup. It always puddled in exactly the same spot and never seemed to leak through to the ceiling below. It may have bubbled up out of the floorboards for all I knew, but I never found any evidence of how it appeared. We joked that it was ghostly baby poo, but had no odor. I thought about trying to get the stuff tested but figured I’d have to lie to somebody or get a reputation as a nut. I was far more worried about what other people would think back then.

We did tell our ghost to stop doing this, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. It was hard to mind all that much, since it didn’t break any of the rules we had set down. All the wood floors had some kind of laminant sealant coating and never seemed worse for wear. Mostly I was happy it was limited to that one small area in a room we didn’t use. It could have been a whole lot worse.

There were lots of little incidents that hardly seem worth mentioning. Occasionally we caught sight of the blob hanging out in dark corners or zooming around in the hall ‘playing’ or floating past doorways like it was unsure if it wanted our company or not. It never seemed to come into our bedrooms or bathrooms or at least not while we were using them. Our things, especially our text books, would be inexplicably missing then turn up again. We joked that it didn’t want us to stress ourselves by studying. Things would move- but not while anyone was there watching. Things would just relocate to different parts of the house, often ending up in the attic. This was just incredibly frustrating at times. Something you’d just put down right there in front of you- and pfft, gone to the attic!

Sometimes there were noises from the attic that sounded like big heavy wooden furniture being pushed or dragged. We never kept anything like that up there. Mostly at first we left the room bare. We did go up at least once a day to see if we had a puddle to clean up. Eventually either Janine or Cindy tacked up a coat hanger mobile in the attic with feathers, beads, and sparkly bits hanging off of it, which one or both of them had made hoping it would give the ghost something quiet and interesting to distract it. It seemed to help.

After that we left lots of soft and colorful things- old magazines, stuffed animals, doodles, posters, a world map and a bean bag chair to name a few. When we picked flowers out the garden we’d put some up there in oasis in a ‘ghost-proof’ plastic container. Sometimes Tanya would sit on the bean bag and play her flute or just read to it aloud. We all talked to it constantly. I know I started thinking of it as my fourth housemate.

At the time we didn’t tell too many people about the ghost, just some close friends and family who already knew how crazy we all were anyway and pretty much believed us despite that fact. Occasionally we had people over, friends who wanted to meet our ghost and such.

It was usually infuriatingly shy when strangers were around. Sometimes there were sounds from the attic while others were there in the house. Apart from Janine’s little sister, a senior in high school at the time who spent her spring break with us, I’m pretty sure no one but the four of us were ever treated to the full show. We all but found its presence (the gray blob hovering around) mundane by that time and found it odd that it frightened Janine’s sister half out of her wits when she finally saw it. I guess hearing it and being told about it don’t come close to seeing for whatever part of your brain deals with unusual phenomenon.

In the end, we stayed there with our ghost the whole of our junior year. We would have continued living there that summer and probably our senior year too, but our landlord announced that he was selling the property.

I did go back there during my senior year. I knocked there a few times eager to meet the knew inhabitants, but though the house looked lived in, no one ever seemed to be at home. I did talk to one of our former next door neighbors. He knew the house had been purchased by someone. He said he saw the moving guys, but had yet to meet the new neighbors. Maybe the house was bought by someone out of state as a vacation home or something, or maybe whoever bought it found the ghost too difficult to stay- I just don’t know.

I can’t say my time living with a ghost was all fun and games, but apart from the initial strain, and the frequent annoyance, it wasn’t so bad. I’ve dealt with more difficult living situations since, between neighbors, room-mates, and boyfriends. So, I suppose as ghosts go, ours wasn’t a bad one. My best advice to anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation:

1) Go with your gut instinct on whether or not you can make it work.
2) Try to enjoy the experience as best you can- because let’s face it- it’s a once in a lifetime one for most of us (if that.)
3) Try to keep your sense of humor intact because a ghost can try your patience worse than the brattiest kid brother from snot-hell.

The more I think about ours the more sure I am that the ghost displayed juvenile humor and an IQ equivalent to a young child or a very clever Labrador Retriever. I’m not speculating on what the ghost was. We weren’t lucky enough to get haunted by Oscar Wilde or Albert Einstein is all I’m saying.

If you are currently living with a somewhat responsive, pesky, but not ill-meaning ghost, an open mind, familiarity, and willingness to compromise can make an awful situation look much brighter. You might even come to regard your ghostly housemate quite fondly one day and make some memories together that will last a lifetime.

Written by C. P. Lawrence, Copyright 2009

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