I grew up in Augusta, Michigan. It's a quaint little town about 20 minutes away from Kalamazoo. The house I grew up in on Canal Sreet was the first building built in the town, in the late 1800's/early 1900's.
A few miles out of town was a military base called Fort Custer, aptly named after Civil War cavalry officer General George Armstrong Custer. The house was first built to be Augusta's library. Shortly after he passed it became another family's house, then our house. So you can imagine how many faces the walls of that house has seen.
The house had many trap doors and underground tunnels leading to the basement, and one that seemed to have led out of the basement, but had been securely closed off.
Now, my brother's room, which later became my room after he moved out, is one of the main rooms of interest. It is located at the back of the house, and was not part of the extension the house had seen prior to us moving in.
The extension was done by an Amish family that brought all their supplies via horse-drawn trailer, which is interesting in its own right, but doesn't pertain too much to the activity I have experienced. The only significance was no activity happened in the extension of the house.
One night when I little, I'm guessing 9-10 years of age, I was sleeping in my room. I heard creaking coming from the hallway which sounded like someone walking through it, but then it stopped. After a minute I got up and went to check it out, but no one was there, and my brother was sound asleep in his room down the hall.
A few years later when I moved into the room, that's when things seemed to pick up. I frequently heard creaking in the hallway, sounds from other rooms in the house-some loud, some soft-just the normal things people usually try to explain away by old plumbing or the wind.
One night I remember very specifically, the closet door in which one of the trap doors I mentioned earlier was located in, swung open. It didn't open much, probably an inch or two, but enough to know it wasn't wind or change in air pressure. At that point, for a split second, the room seemed colder. The door wasn't able to completely shut because of wear and tear on the bolt positioning on the doorway. This particular event comes to mind so vividly because I was too young to understand the common signs of a paranormal presence. I could definitely tell the room got colder, but I did not know at the time what that meant.
The rest of the night I couldn't sleep, and from then on I felt uncomfortable in that room. I became so uncomfortable with it in fact I had my parents move me to the room next to theirs.
After that, every time any of us went into the room the door was always open as wide as it could go. We would shut it as far as we could, but then come back the next day and it would be open again. Eventually we just left it open for a long time until my dad decided to just get a new handle for it, and we never found it open again.
Other than that night, and after the door was fixed, the only thing I heard from it was an occasional noise coming from the inside. The kind of noise like when someone taps their fingernail against wood.
I haven't been to the house in a while, it is currently up for sale. My brother and I moved back in after my parents passed, not wanting to let go of the memories. I eventually went my own way due to disagreements with my brother, and he wasn't able to keep up the payments without me. So it is now, as of January 2012, in possession of the bank.
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