My first experience in this field dates back to 1982 when I was living in New York. I now live in South America.
I was 14 years old attending junior high just a few blocks away from my house. For some reason that I can't recall, a couple of friends and I decided to cut out of school that day and since I lived so close to school and the fact that both my parents worked we decided to go back to my house. We hung out in the basement so as to not leave any traces in the rest of the house that we had been there (my folks hardly ever went down to that part of the basement). The basement was divided in two. You had a smaller room where we had the washer and dryer and heating system and another larger space kind of like a family room.
At approximately noon we were just sitting around talking when we started hearing banging noises coming from the smaller room. I really didn't pay much attention to it and we thought it might be the heating or something like that. It went on for a couple of minutes then stopped. A few minutes later we heard the kitchen door open and then we heard footsteps (I would like to point out that we all heard them not just me) the footsteps were pretty loud you could clearly hear them walking around the kitchen which was right above us and then heard them go up the stairs to the first floor where the bedrooms and bathroom were.
The first thing that came out of my mouth was, "My mother's going to kill me!" So I decided to go upstairs and face her. When I was just a few steps down from the kitchen the first thing I noticed was that my mother's purse was not on the counter nor were her keys, which was the first thing she did when she got home. This really scared me so I went back down and asked one of my friends to come with me and check out the rest of the house, there was no one around. I can assure you that we all heard the footsteps. I was so scared that when my parents came home that night I told them what had happened. My mother told me that she didn't mention anything to me before because she didn't want to frighten me, but she had also experienced strange things in that house, like things disappearing from one room and appearing in another or just disappearing and a couple of times she heard someone call her name. We also had a cat that always seemed to be running around the house like he was running away from something. One minute he was lying on the couch and then all of a sudden he would run up the stairs like a bat out of hell and hide under my bed or in my closet.
In time we found out that the original owner of the house had died there, he fell from a high ladder when he was cutting branches off a tree that was in the yard. A few months later we moved to South America (where my family is from originally) and where I have had a few strange experiences but I'll leave that for another time.