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In reply to the discussion: DU is a good place to ask this: how many people here believe they have encountered a ghost? [View all]megapuzzler
(476 posts)Like many others have said here, you really do get used to it. First hint was the night we moved into the house, and that night while all of us were gathered around the dinner table, my dad heard someone walking heavily around upstairs. None of us kids were paying attention as we were too busy talking, but he and my mom exchanged glances (she heard it, too) and he went upstairs to check it out. As soon as he started up the stairs, the walking stopped (my mom told us this story much later). Through the years we lived there, the most common sound was someone walking down the steps from upstairs, but both I and my then four year old sister and our cousin saw someone once. I heard and then saw someone out of the corner of my eye one night coming down the stairs and going to the kitchen. I thought it was my mom until I went into the kitchen to talk to her and no one was there. I raced upstairs and she and my dad were both sound asleep (I had been up late watching a movie). Another time my four year old sister and an equally young cousin were playing on the stair landing when they saw a man dressed in old fashioned clothes step through a closed bedroom door. They shrieked and ran down to tell us and both their stories matched. Years later when we had all married and left and my widowed mom lived there alone, she was in the upstairs bathroom when the phone started ringing. It rang a few times and then stopped. When she opened the bathroom door, the receiver of the phone in her bedroom was laying fully extended (remember those long phone cords before cordless phones?) on the floor in front of the bathroom door. She picked it up, said hello, and my youngest sister said, "Hi Mom! How's it going?"
Evidently the ghost didn't want my mom to miss the call.
Only disturbing story was one we only learned years later after we had moved from that house. To preface, after our grandfather who had lived with us died, my mom used his bedroom as a guest room until she finally moved away. We were at a family reunion at my brother's house, reminiscing about the ghost, when my brother asked if he had ever told us the story of what happened to his friend. No, we hadn't so he shared. He and his friend had come down from Minneapolis to visit my mom, and his friend had slept in the guestroom. He woke up in the middle of the night because something unseen was pushing him out of the bed. He freaked and left in the middle of the night and went to a hotel. As my brother was telling this story, my husband got a funny look on his face and told us the same thing had happened to him when we were visiting early on and I had stayed up late to talk while he had gone to bed. Meanwhile my middle sister was sitting there with her mouth hanging open, as the same thing had happened to her once when she had slept in the guest room to escape our other sister's snoring. None of them had ever shared the story of their experience before as it had seemed too out there, even though we all knew the house was haunted.
The thing is, if you see and/or hear enough ghostly happenings, after a while they really don't faze you.