9.
“My wife and I bought our first house in 2016, just after getting married. The house was close to 100 years old, and records/neighbor accounts stated it was previously the farmhouse for the surrounding area. As first-time homeowners do, we started dreaming big about renovations since this was OUR space. While we were doing some small DIY work, we found a fair amount of old items: school notebooks, fruit crates, ’40s pin-up model pages, old records. Not odd really, but we were the third occupants of this house, so it was perplexing to us that the family we bought it from hadn’t removed these items.”
“Now, I’m wise enough to know if you find something like that, LEAVE IT ALONE. It wasn’t impeding the work and was in areas like the crawlspaces, so Out of sight, out of mind, I thought.
Shortly after, one of my daughter’s toys that was in storage in the basement started giggling and saying, ‘Thank you!’ I’m strict about batteries being removed before something goes in storage, but hey, no one’s perfect, so I went down to check it out. When I went to check, I stopped dead in my tracks, because the toy was out of the locked bin and sitting in the middle of the room. It couldn’t have been anyone else in the house who moved it, since my daughter was only 2 and my wife never went to that side of the basement.
Creeped out but ultimately okay with how the house spirits were presenting themselves, we had plenty of run-of-the-mill ghostly happenings: moved items, faucets turning on/off, TV turning on/off (once while unplugged….) but, hey, it was their house before it was ours, and if they’re not going to hurt or overtly scare us, we can cohabitate.
We made the tough decision to move out of that house while we were expecting our second kid because we needed space for the extra human and wanted to be closer to family. On moving day, I was the last one at the house, cleaning it and locking everything up while making sure we didn’t forget anything. All the windows in the house were closed/locked, and I had closed the bedroom doors as well (hardwired firefighter programming). As I stood at the door, I said out loud to the house, ‘Thank you for letting us start our family here. We enjoyed every moment of the last few years. I hope the next owners are kind and respectful.’
Before I finished my sentence, three doors on the opposite side of the house slammed shut (or, I suppose it could have been one door slammed three times, but it sounded like three). But……I had already shut them before I came down… I promptly noped the hell out and on to the new house. I’m sorry the ghost(s) were pissed we were leaving!”
—Bill, Massachusetts, USA
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