To begin, allow me, as background for my story, to give you a general layout of my home. It is a large, two story, white board farmhouse, with a large porch that spans the entire front of the house.

As you enter the front door, the living room proper is to your left, a large, knotty pine paneled room, enveloping what was once a bedroom and hallway into the rear portion of the house. To your right, is the dining room. Directly ahead, the stairs leading to the second floor. Through the door at the rear of the living room, you enter the family, or “T.V” room, which also has a doorway leading into the kitchen. The kitchen has a doorway to the left, which leads to a built in back porch, and half bath, and a doorway to the backyard.

To the right, you may leave the kitchen and enter a tiny foyer, where the entrance to the basement is found, along with another entrance into the dining room. This foyer was a storage closet until the time the basement of the house was dug. It was then remodeled. Basically, it is possible to enter the living room and make a complete circle through the main floor rooms without entering the same room twice. On the second floor, there are four large bedrooms, located around a central hallway/landing, and a bath.

When central plumbing was added to the house, the doorway to the bedroom located to the right of the stairs was closed off, a bathroom enclosed on that end of the hall, and a doorway placed immediately at the right of the head of the stairs, leading into the bedroom. On the bedroom side of the wall, a closet was built where the doorway had previously been. Perhaps these renovations may be the answer to some of the strange feelings people sometimes get while upstairs.

The closet in this particular room has always been one that gave me (as well as others), a very uneasy feeling. As a child, I was sure that someone was in that particular closet, and fully expected, while in that room, to see the door creak open, and someone or something emerge. Likewise,on the opposite side of the wall, in the bathroom, there are feelings of being watched .

The shower and tub are located along this particular section of wall. While bathing, I would sometimes be overpowered with the erie feeling of being watched. The odd thing was, it emanated from the shower wall, not outside the tub. I would even find myself examining the wall for hidden, tiny peepholes, so strong was this paranoia. Years later, after doing some reading concerning hauntings and the paranormal, I feel I may have stumbled upon the answer. Since the original hallway led through the bathroom area, and entered the bedroom through where the closet is now located, it seems logical to assume that this would be the path the ghost would travel.

It stands to reason that he would follow the path known to him while living, thus the sensation of a presence where none would normally be. Poor fellow, he probably wondered why a wet, naked child was sitting in his hallway!

But I have another story to tell. This was MY experience, so I can tell it firsthand.

One day, I returned home early from work. When I entered the house, expecting to see my parents, neither were there. The television in the family room was on, so I expected my mom to be close by. My father had a small wood working shop built into th basement, where he made handcrafted shelves, rocking horses, etc. that he sold at craft shows and to local furniture stores.

As I walked through the living room, toward the family room, I could plainly hear the saw running downstairs, and the whine of the blade as wood was being pushed through it. The saw is located in the basement directly under the living room, so the sound could be heard quite clearly. Obviously, Dad was working downstairs. I walked into the family room, expecting Mom to be sitting there.

The room, though the television was playing, was empty. I glanced through the doorway into the kitchen and back porch, and though the back door was open, no one was vi sable. I turned, and reentered the living room to stand at the base of the stairs, and called up to Mom. No answer. The saw continued to run, and the sounds of cutting wood could still be heard. I called to her again, thinking that she might not have heard me with all the noise going on downstairs. I got a reply, but not from upstairs.

A voice, which I assumed to be my father's, answered me from the basement. The voice was muffled by the sound of the saw, so I couldn't make out what was said. I then went through the family room, making my way to the basement, to speak to my father. But just as I stepped through the doorway from the family room, into the kitchen, all sound simply stopped. The house was quiet. I looked toward the basement. The door was open, but the basement was in total darkness. All electricity to the basement was controlled by a switch at the top of the stairs. Nothing–not the lights, the saws, or any thing else could be running without that switch being on.

The darkness staring at me from the basement doorway, accompanied by the sudden silence of the house, sent a shock wave of fear through my body. Without thinking, I stepped to the basement doorway and quickly closed and locked the door. Then I quickly made my way to the front porch, and looked out over the rail toward the lower side of the house. The only other entrance to the basement was located here. It would be the only way of escape, if a prowler were present.

I sat there, watching the doorway, for about a half an hour. No one could have left through that door without my seeing them. No one did. I sat there watching, until my parents, who had made a quick run to town, returned home. When I told them what had happened, my father went to investigate, thinking one of the neighbor's children (known for this type thing) may have been prowling around in his shop. The switch , when he opened the door, was in the OFF position, so he turned it on, and went downstairs.

Everything was in its place. There was no sign of any kind of disturbance, anywhere in the basement, and the outside door, which could only be opened and latched from the inside, was still firmly bolted. There was no way anyone could have been there and left, and rebolted the door on the inside. This only confirmed what I really already knew. I had just conversed with a ghost!!

© Paulette Boyd

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