In 2009, I bought my first house in the Waldo area of Kansas City, MO. It was a modest house, a three bedroom, one bath ranch built in 1953... About 1100 square feet. I bought the house from the original owner who was moving out to live with her daughter. I never met her, but from all accounts she was a nice old lady. The house was dated, but otherwise in good condition. The day I took possession of the house me and my significant other, along with our dog decided to go over to the house and start cleaning. When we went into the basement, our dog who is a fearless terrier, just stood facing one of the corners, the area just to the left of the basement stairs and just growled. From that day forward, the dog that is usually my shadow, refused to go into the basement. Something down in the basement scared him, and for a dog that usually jumps head first into every situation without thinking, this was odd behaviour.
A few months after living in the house, after finding out that some treats don't agree with the dog, we decided to pull up all the carpet in the house. The hardwood floors were in remarkably good condition, except for the second largest bedroom. In that room, the finish was worn down to bare wood in a path that went from the door to the room to the window on the opposite wall... Like someone had paced back and forth in the room. One night, after we had a bit of a fight, I decided to sleep in the bed we had in that room. In the middle of the night, I woke up and there was this dark shape standing next to the bed... Like a shadow of a person. I closed my eyes, reopened them and it was gone. After a few minutes I worked up the courage and left the room and never slept in that room again.
About two years into living there, we went down into the basement to do some laundry and standing up on the floor, right in the path of our way to the washing machine was an antique pill bottle. This is a completely unfinished basement, a floor we had swept numerous time and in a path we had walked nearly every day in two year and there is was. The label was gone, but the bottle was of the style of something you would have seen in the 1960's or 70's. We were never able to explain where it had come from.
Another time, when I was home alone and I was coming up from the basement after sticking some laundry in the machine, I was halfway up the stairs and heard someone clearly say to me, "what are you doing"? I was in the house alone, no TV or radio was on and it was just too clear to have come from outside.
In 2012, I was offered a job in another city and needed to sell the house. It is amazing how much you can accumulate in just a few years. We had filled every closet, the garage and most of the basement... Except for the corner that my dog had growled at our first day in the house. A whole section of the basement, the part most convenient to the stairs and arguably the driest bit of that basement had been completely overlooked during three years of living there. We never went there unless we had to in order to deal with maintenance issues, otherwise, I don't remember ever even looking over there.
The thing about our time in that house was that it felt like someplace that was never going to be ours. Always felt like we were in someone else's house, we were unwelcome house guests. I did look into it a bit, but was never able to pin point anything bad ever happening in the house.
We are now in a new house in a new city. Bought a similar house, but I know that at least one of the owners passed away of natural causes in the house. Plus, the previous owners loved dogs and had a small pet cemetery in the back yard, but even with that I have never felt that the house didn't want us. Plus, the dog loves the basement in our current house.
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