Yet Another Haunted House?

Some time ago my family and I moved to another house again - the third one now within two years. As I told in some other stories of mine, in each of my previous two houses we more or less had some issues with spirits and also now the "spook" doesn't seem to be all over.

The whole moving process started quite funny actually; on the second day already after moving in some of our neighbours told us that this house was allegedly "known to be haunted" - they talked about hearing young children crying inside while the house was vacant and nobody was living there.

Oh gosh - but I didn't take this too serious at all since most neighbours here are very superstitious, so I told them (and myself) "ah come on, stop it already..."

In fact, I consciously and willingly closed my eyes regarding anything paranormal because I just didn't/don't accept it bothering our life and peace in any way.

Having that said, we spent our first few nights in the nice new house.

And my first few nights there were kind of remarkable for me; I had very vivid nightmares about very horrible and partially even gory things!

But they were not really nightmares as in "having a scary nightmare", I mean I have never been waking up in fear or been afraid of something during those dreams.

Furthermore, the plot of the dreams was something that had never come to my mind before, but it repeated every single night in a slight variation;

It was always about a middle-aged dead couple lying in two separate beds in a room of my house (no idea which one) who were "forgotten" in some way and even looked already decomposing (!).

Not sure to explain it right, but in the dreams my questions to them always were "why are you still here?!" and "how can I help you?"...

They did answer me but I really cannot remember what exactly they said.

I only remember that I always felt very great pity for them but no fear whatsoever (even though their image was very ugly) - and after waking up in the morning I've always been very confused!

All this stopped after the first 4-6 days and I thought to myself that it must have been because of the new surrounding plus those "haunted-house" talks of my neighbours that just let my mind play.

I never told my family about it because I knew my wife would be too scared and same like me she was so happy about the new big house - I didn't want to ruin that happiness.

Some weeks passed by before a friend of mine (a local) came to visit me for his first time in my new home. Oddly, the first thing he asked was "ah, so you're living in the haunted house now, how is it going?!" - I laughed because I thought he was joking with me, but then he explained that it really is some kind of "neighbourhood legend" here that this particular house must be haunted or something.

Interesting!

After his visit my "I block everything out"-attitude was way not that strong any more, which means the following days I couldn't help but keep on thinking and researching about what might have happened in this house before.

My initial researches didn't bring up any useful information at all, so I just started "listening" (with my mind) when I was all alone in that big new 3-storey house. And I swear to you, only less than one day after I finally started opening my mind, the first distinct happenings started to occur;

I started to frequently hear tiny footsteps of wet children-feet in the afternoon, running across the tiled kitchen/living room floor.

They sound the same way like my own small children running across the floor after leaving the swimming pool or the shower or something.

At some spots in the house (especially in my office) I sometimes feel like being watched - but not in an inconvenient way at all, it's more like a curious/nosy watching like "hmmm what is he doing there?!" or something.

In this context I'd like to add that what is now my office must once have been a small girl's bedroom, because when moving in I found a couple of Barbie-stickers and children's paintings/writings in pink and blue colour on the walls.

Outside we have a small balcony that has stairs going down (to the garage) and up (to the rooftop) and I have to say this is the least enjoyable place for me when it comes to "sensing" or "listening to" spirits of some kind (if there are any).

Out there, especially on the stairway that leads to the rooftop, I sometimes smell a very very disgusting scent - like a mixture of urine, sour lemon juice or rotten beef or something like that.

Sometimes it's really so intrinsic that I feel like throwing up!

I blamed it on the dog in the first place because sometimes she wee-wees under the stairs if she cannot go out, but even if she's going out regularly the smell will come back from time to time and I'm not the only one to smell it.

Speaking of the rooftop; we have a gigantic beautiful 100 square-meters wide rooftop on the third floor of our house - I love the place for relaxing and sunbathing or for inviting friends to bbq and so on, but:

If it's night time already and if I'm standing at the stairway going up, sometimes (only sometimes) I have no chance to move my body even one step ahead to go up there!

It feels like there is something up there that says "don't you dare to come up here now!" or something similar - it's really weird!

Usually I am not that kind of coward and sometimes I just ignore it and I go up anyway to do my business there (mostly getting or bringing some stuff) - but sometimes even if I turned on all the lights up there and everything I'm having that very deep eerie feeling telling me that I want to go back downstairs immediately - it feels like I'm "disturbing somebody" there and that I "must not participate".

As I said before, all this started only when I eventually "opened" my mind (again).

I don't really feel threatened by all that since this is MY house and I am living here now (I am a very self-conscious person).

I've made up my own mind already, but I'd really like to hear your opinions and advice about what you think this might be and what I should/could do about it.

P.S.: I know about Rook's cleansing ritual of course, but I didn't use it (yet) because I don't really feel threatened until now - just a little uneasy.