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This happened during a four-month span in 1980. My parent's house is in a rural area of a small town in Missouri. I was about 17 at the time. Construction of a nursing home was going in very near us, and my brother and I would knock around there. One day in the brush near where the construction was occuring, we found a big tombstone, dated around 1880. We even found the footstone. Stupidly (and this does embarass me) we started to do ignorant kid things like dancing around it, taunting it, etc.
Not immediately thereafter, but maybe a few weeks later, my mom began hearing voices on our deck. Her bedroom is on the back of the house, over the deck. She's a light sleeper, and even then, I stayed up very late. I got up a few times to listen, but I couldn't hear or see anything, and she couldn't make out what the voices were saying.
Soon thereafter, strange things began happening with regularity. We'd wake up to find the house wide open--doors unlocked and thrown open, the garage door open, etc. At first we thought it was my brother--who sleep walked when he was young, but I checked several times when I heard things, and he was sound asleep.
Two things happened to me directly. First, I had a phone in my room. This was in the days when the phone co. billed you by the number of phones, and they could tell by the resistance on your line when the phone rang. So, I had disconnected the ringer--physically opening the phone, removing the wire and throwing it away. Once when I and some friends were joking about the "ghost" the phone rang. No one was on it. It never rang again.
Then, the noises started. All the bedrooms were on the second floor of the house. At night, when everyone went upstairs to bed--I usually went up to read or write--we'd hear the kitchen cabinets open and close, repeatedly and for hours. I'm sure everyone's cabinets make a distinct sound when they close, and this is a sound you'd recognize. This went on for months--the entire duration of the haunting. On the several occasions w
Then I'd screw up my courage to go downstairs and look, the minute my feet touched the stairs, it would stop, only to start again when I'd return to my room.
My mother experienced two events diretly. One evening, she was home alone, having a drink and watching TV. She got up to use the restroom. When she returned, her drink--which had been sitting on a coaster on the center of a side table--was upside down on the floor in the center of the room--sitting on the coaster with all the liquid still in the drink! Now, this isn't a hard trick to accomplish, but she was alone.
Another night, my mom, brother and sister where watching TV. My dad has a rolltop desk in the room, where he keeps his business stuff. While they were sitting there, a minrecorder inside the closed desk suddenly came on, at top volume and fast forward, scaring the you-know-what out of them!
The finale in this haunting was spectacular. My father, who's a cop, didn't believe any of this, of course. He'd not been around to see anything, and he's a skeptic by nature anyway.
On Christmas Eve, I had stayed out til about 2 p.m., having gone to a Midnight Mass with a girlfriend. Upon arriving home, I switched off the lights they'd left on for me--two lamps on end tables on either side of a couch in the family room--and went to bed.
Sometime after this, my father was awakened by a loud noise. He got up because he thought it might have been my grandmother who was staying with us for the holiday. Now, the amazing thing here is that my dad could sleep through a nuclear war. My mom, on the other hand, awakens if easily. But she got up, not my dad.
Well, he checked and everything was alright. But he saw lights on downstairs. Cursing me, he went down and found the two lights I'd switched off not only still on, but on the ground, as if someone had knocked them off. Picking them up and turning them off, he went back to sleep.
A half hour later, he awoke again to a crash. He got up and saw the lights on again. Thinking it was the cats now--yeah, right, dad!--he went back downstairs, picked up the lamps, switched them off again and went back to bed.
He'd hardly put his head on the pillow, when he says a big THUMP shook through the house. Again, he was the only one to hear it. He jumped up, ran downstairs.
Again, the lights were on and on the floor. But over the couch, we'd had an old framed Budweiser print of Custer's Last Stand. Not valuable or anything, just pretty big and cheaply framed.
Well the frame was still hanging on the wall. The backing, print and glass had somehow come unattached and had fallen, shattering the glass.
Now, the funny thing here is that this back of the frame was held in places by about a hundred staples--I'm sure you've seen the type. Every one of those staples were gone--never to be found. My parent's have since replaced the carpet in that room with a hardwood floor, expecting to find the staples, but we never have.
The incidents pretty much dried up after that, fading to the cabinet banging, then ending altogether by the end of the year. A few kind of strange things have happened since--my parents still live in the same house--but nothing really interesting.
I've always been interested in ghosts but never REALLY BELIEVED. I don't know if this was a ghost, but I do BELIEVE that something happened.