The Invisible Roommate

I was talking to my mom while I was helping her make our Thanksgiving dinner and the conversation got to the house she had just moved out of two weeks ago. We all strongly believe that the house is haunted, though we believe the spirit (s) to be benevolent since s/he never did anything all that threatening, so we didn't really mind them much. In fact we sometimes called him/her the invisible roommate that doesn't pay rent. I did hate going to the bathroom there because there had been witnessed activity in the bathroom, so I always felt like there was a ghost in there watching me pee.

I personally was never there enough to witness anything, but a few nights where I'd sleep over I had things go missing and turn up in places I never would have left them. My cellphone once ended up in the bathtub's built-in soap dish somehow and I found one of my video games on top of the microwave, for example. I also tended to feel like I was being watched when I was alone in my sister's room or when I was in the back area of the basement, and would not go in those places by myself.

The first time anyone ever experienced anything was when her boyfriend (I'll call him "Stacey" after an in-joke) had first bought the house and was fixing it up. He had a friend that lived up the street who would often stop in unannounced to keep him company. He was busy painting a room when he saw someone walking up the stairs towards him. He assumed this was his friend and started talking to him but got no response and quickly realized that he was alone. He called his friend asking him where he went, but he wasn't even in the city at the time.

The second time anyone experienced anything was my sister. Note that Stacey never told anyone about his experience before then, so we had no idea the house was potentially haunted. She was about to go to the bathroom before going out somewhere with my mom when she saw what looked to her like Stacey walking into the bathroom, so she decided to wait. After a bit of a wait, my mom called to her, wondering what was taking her so long, and she told her that she was still waiting for the bathroom because her boyfriend was in there. It turned out he was asleep on the couch the entire time.

My mom also brought a friend to the house who claimed to be psychic. I'm not sure if she was or not, but I do know she had an eerie ability to predict things, such as when she demonstrated an uncanny ability to predict when at least three of her friends were pregnant before even they knew. The second this woman set foot in the house, she turned to my mom and asked, "Who else is here?" Apparently she felt the presence of a third person in the house, even though it was just the two of them. We had never mentioned anything to her about the house being haunted before then, so she had no forewarning.

My sister would often feel her bed shaking for no real reason and only her bed would be shaking, so it wasn't like there was a minor earthquake due to the neighbor's kids storming up the stairs or anything. It might be worth noting that the bed had previously belonged to a family friend who had committed suicide several years prior, though we're not entirely sure that it was related as we think the haunt was there before she moved in with the bed.

She also heard a creepy sound coming from a crawlspace in her room that she described as sounding like a dying music box a few times. She dug through it and found a music box that she owned inside a storage container and removed it from the crawlspace, assuming that was the source of the sound. The sound still continued before stopping altogether a few months later. She's the only one who ever heard it.

There was also a summer where bees kept mysteriously emerging from the wall around the crawlspace. We looked and didn't find any nests or any holes to the outside, so we have no idea how they got in there. This stopped when we put duct tape over the crevices they were emerging from.

After that, Stacey decided to take a tape recorder up to my sister's bedroom while he was home alone and tried to record himself asking a few questions. It's mostly just him talking to a seemingly empty room, but at one point there was a woman's voice on the recording saying what sounded like, "Funny." It wasn't a viable answer to any question he'd asked, so we have no idea what it meant. Our theory is that the spirit found it laughable that we would try to communicate with it.

The reason this came up in our conversation was because I mentioned to my mom that the house always felt like it was haunted and my mom looked at me and said, "It was. Did I tell you what happened the day we were moving out?" Evidently she saw a blur that she thought looked like my sister rush past her up the steps and into the bathroom and heard the towel rack swish and the bathroom door shut. She didn't think anything of it until she heard a noise in the kitchen. She assumed it was her boyfriend getting off of work early and went downstairs to ask him something, only to find my sister in the kitchen. When she went back upstairs, the bathroom door was wide open again.

We don't think it was trying to hurt us, but we're still glad to be out of that house. It was certainly creepy.