Our 1947 bungalow in Columbia, Missouri, where we lived 12 years ago, had a lot of ghosts for being such a tiny house. There was the man who paced in heavy boots in the living room, just a few yards away from our bedroom. Occasionally, we would hear him at night, stomping back and forth in the living room on the old wooden floor. However, the living room had wall-to-wall carpeting at the time. There was a little dog ghost that would wander around the house. He was not scary.
I was watching television with my husband in our small living room one evening, and saw a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. I glanced to my right, just in time to see the hazy, white dog trot out of the bedroom in a happy sort of way. He disappeared after taking two steps. My husband looked at me in a knowing way and waited for me to say, "Did you just see that?!" He said he had seen the little dog several times, but hadn't said anything because he did not want to frighten me. We found out a year later that the previous owner had buried his dog outside of our bedroom window.
The noise that scared the living daylights out of me was the banging between our ground floor and the partially finished attic. It sounded like someone had a sledge hammer and was smacking the crap out of the insides of our ceiling. It happened once when my husband was on a business trip and a couple of times during the day when we were both home. We thought it was something in the heat ducts - you know how people always try to rationalize these things! [wink] We later found out the floor was solid, hard-as-a-rock wood with no "ducts" between the floors, and there was no reason for that spooky banging.
All these things pretty much stopped when we brought our two foundling cats indoors. The cats were being abused by our creepy next-door neighbors, and we rescued them. I guess the sweet energies of our two furry buddies helped to get rid of these noises. Whatever "it" was stayed in the background. I still felt like a man was watching me when I was in the bathroom at night with the door open. (Our tiny bathroom faced the living room.)
When we went to move, our house started falling apart: our air conditioner died and we found we had mice or bats in the attic crawl space. Those two incidents happened three days before the realtor was scheduled to show our house. On the day of our move, our washing machine pipes exploded and flooded the little laundry room off of the kitchen and our car's gas pump died unexpectedly, stranding my husband at the hardware store parking lot where he was trying to get a cap for the pipes. Only one friend was home at the time - this was before the days of cell phones - and she rescued my husband. I had to stay at home and keep putting plastic buckets under the pipes and then quickly emptying them into the kitchen sink, so our entire house wouldn't flood and ruin the expensive carpeting we had just bought two weeks earlier.
That evening, which was our last night in the house, I was in the bathroom with the door open. Suddenly, I saw a two- or three-foot long shadow glide by. A HUGE bat came out of no where and was flying all around the house. I was scared to death it would hurt our two cats, so I scooped them up in my arms and ran into the bedroom, shutting them inside. My husband got a flashlight and stood on the front lawn, directing the bat out of the house like an air traffic controller, while I sprinted to the back door and opened it, in case the bat flew into the kitchen. We got it out of the house, but really had no idea where it had come from. Our windows were closed, the air conditioner was on, our ceiling was solid with no air vents, as I indicated. It literally just seemed to materialize out of thin air!
My husband had to rent a car, drive me to our new home in Kentucky, and then drive back to Columbia to pick up our broken car after it was repaired. The night he finally left our old home, my husband went around the house, literally talking to it and saying everything would be okay. He walked all around the place and up into the attic, blessing the house. He seemed to have done the right thing, because our house ended up selling within THREE HOURS after we moved to our current home in Kentucky. I have read Russian folk tales about homes having their own "spirit" and if you anger it, such as by moving, they will put road blocks in your way and cause all kinds of mischief. It would appear that was what we had in this tiny 1947 Missouri bungalow!
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