I grew up in the North East of England in a house built sometime during the 70s, which is where this story takes place. There was no bad feeling connected with anything that happened there, in fact I look back on it with a kind of fondness and interest.
The only thing that scared me took place when I was about 10 years old. My dad worked away a lot, and my mother, brother (2 years older than me), and I were sitting in the living room absorbed in watching the TV (we were watching the Hornblower series, if I remember rightly!) when all of a sudden we heard somebody knocking on the door. My mother rose and answered the door, but nobody was there. We lived in a quiet neighbourhood in a small village and it was raining heavily, but it's possible that some children were messing about. Shortly afterwards, again whilst watching TV, we heard (and felt!) a succession of loud bangs on the wall. They sounded as if they were coming from upstairs, but you could feel them through the sofa downstairs. I remember my mother searching the house with a broom as a weapon! We all slept in the same room that night!
A couple of years later, I remember sitting in my room against my bed listening to Green Day pretty loud. My brother and parents were downstairs. My music kept being turned down, and the little display on the CD player reflected this (15, 14, 13, 12, etc). Intrigued, I kept turning it back up until it stopped. A few moments later I heard and felt a tremendous bang on my floor, just next to me. It sounded just like when I jumped off my bed onto the floor, so my Dad came running to the bottom of the stairs to shout at me for it. Only this time it hadn't been me! I told my parents - Dad was more skeptical, but my mother had experiences both as a child and in that house so she took me seriously.
One experience of my mother's was when she got up during the night to use the toilet when I was around 12 or 13. Whilst she was in the bathroom, she heard my Dad's voice outside the door say, "Don't flush the chain!" but when she returned to the bedroom moments later my Dad was flat out asleep. This experience is made stranger by the fact that my parents did used to say this to each other when my brother and I were young and our bedroom was near the bathroom, as they didn't want to wake us during the night with the noise of the flush. We had lived in a different house during this time, though. Knowing this, I couldn't help but smile when my mother told me the story the next morning.
Another story that was told me was that, one day when my parents were giving each other a kiss and a cuddle at the door before my dad left to go to work they heard a child blowing a huge raspberry in the corridor. They were the only people home at the time, and it gave them such a shock!
There was also a time when everybody was in bed except my dad and me. I was in my room and my dad working at the computer in the living room, from where you can see whoever is coming down the stairs. Suddenly my dad came into my room and asked if I'd just been in the kitchen (which I hadn't). He said he'd seen somebody come downstairs and go into the kitchen, and he'd followed me in only to find that the light was off and nobody was there.
Things would also move around the house. For example, one time the whole family was in the living room talking. I was around 17 then and my boyfriend was there too. We heard a loud noise coming from the kitchen which was just next door, so we piled in there. We couldn't find what had made the noise until my mother opened the rolltop on the bin to find a full bottle of orange squash in there. The orange squash had previously been in a wine rack on top of the fridge, which was roughly next to the bin. We failed to see how it could have made its way out of the wine rack (which is designed specifically to stop wine bottles from following out!) and into the bin which had its lid closed anyway. It's not exactly scary but perplexing nonetheless.
A screwdriver also flew off the bench and across the room in the utility room one time - nobody was in the room at the time but next door in the kitchen, so we heard it.
Like I said, these stories don't really amount to much in terms of being spooky, but I'd like your feedback. It always seemed to me whatever resided in our house was more mischievous than malicious, and my family still talk about it a lot now we don't live there anymore.
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