I live with my mother and grandmother in a 3 storey Heritage House in Sydney, Australia so, I assume it's pretty old. Before my family moved in it was recently renovated, they extended it and added two extra rooms, one of which I am currently in. The house, to me at least, has always had an uneasy feeling about it. Even during the day time. When I was a child I'd find myself only sticking to the main lounge room whilst playing and holding my bladder until someone was upstairs with me to go to the bathroom. I was afraid of walking by the staircase which leads up to the master bedroom and original spare room. I don't know why, I had never had a bad experience there, it was just a feeling. Now there are a lot of stories in my family surrounding this stairwell... Things I wasn't aware of until my late teens, but I won't get into that right now.
So anyway, when I was about 14-15 I moved upstairs into the room across from the master bedroom (my mother's room at the time). This was around the time that my older cousin had also come to stay with us so, I was quite used to people walking up and down the stairs at odd hours of the day, because I had the only computer in the house. It only became strange when I'd start hearing the footsteps when I knew no one else was home, but I just wrote it off as noisy people next door. That is until it began to happen in the dead of night. The heavy footsteps would start in the middle of the stairs and get louder as they got closer to the top and then it'd stop at the landing. I thought it was my cousin playing a prank on me so, every time I heard it I'd creep out of bed and quietly tip toe to my door in hopes of flinging it open and catching him in the act, but more often than not, when I'd get there, there'd be no one. I think my family started to think I was some paranoid freak! Always opening the door before they'd get a chance to knock or when my mother was just walking to her room.
Even I thought I was beginning to lose it, so I just started to ignore it. But then I realised the steps were no longer stopping at the landing. They were coming right to my door. That's when I really got scared. I told my mum and she convinced me it was just my imagination, but I pleaded with her to sleep with her door open and the hall light on. All was fine and quiet for a couple of weeks, but I began waking up in the middle of the night in complete darkness and all the things I'd hung on my door were on the ground. At first I didn't let myself think anything of it, I'd just pick them up and put them back, but every night I woke up all my things would be on the floor again! Bags, jewellery, towels, clothes etc. I blamed my family for it and they just laughed it off as some teenage tantrum.
Still grumpy at my family, I went upstairs to sulk and put my headphones on. While I was laying on the ground with my laptop, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was walking back and forth behind me. Assuming it was my cousin I told him to piss off and then I felt something heavy pounce on me from behind, I laughed, I thought it was my cousin coming to apologise so I pushed him off and turned around to sit up, but there was nothing. I was alone in my room. Looking around, I took my headphones off, I was baffled...
A couple months later during school holidays I was up all night on MSN (lol, remember MSN?) when I heard this loud bang that trembled through my entire house and made my dog bark like crazy. I turned everything off to listen. I didn't dare go downstairs by myself, because everyone was out. As I sat there in silence I heard the footsteps again - for the first time in weeks. They started at the bottom this time, heavy and rushed. They bounded up the stairs, I was so frightened I couldn't move, my cat crouched perched on the end of my bed waiting to see who was coming and then... And then they just stopped. Nothing happened. Everything - it seemed - had returned to normal. I turned my music back on and continued to chat to my friends when a couple of minutes later my towels and bag fell off the door again. My cat leaped off my bed and ran out of my room... And so did I. I spent the rest of the night in the lounge room with all the lights on until my family got home and I begged someone to switch rooms with me! No one believed me. They all thought I was overreacting, that I'd imagined the whole thing. So it wasn't hard to persuade my cousin to swap rooms with me.
It wasn't until the next day when my mother decided to get a start on moving my stuff, and she had just gotten most of my furniture out when a bunch of art supplies I had stacked on top of the wardrobe next to my door fell on her that she started to believe me. She told me she got a stepladder to check if I had piled them wrong or if I had something heavy leaning against them, she even said the window was closed so there was no wind either.
I was glad it wasn't just me, but mostly I was just happy to be out of there.
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