Just A Little Diy Advice

We've been living in our current home for about a year. I fell in love with the house at first sight; it felt like it was meant to be ours. But something really surprising happened here about a week ago.

First I should say that this is not the first peculiar experience I've had here, although it is the first thing that I've been unable to explain away. The first event happened when we were still thinking about buying it, and I brought my father over to see it. We were looking around the cavernous basement when he suddenly asked, "who was that?" When I asked who he was talking about, he said that he thought someone had poked their head around the door frame right behind me, looked at us and then ducked out of sight. I knew there was nobody there but us, but I went through and looked around to be sure. The next room - the one that the unknown figure would have peeped out from - was the original owner's workshop. This man had clearly cared for his home, and had done a lot of woodworking over the years. His beautiful old hand-built and much-used wooden workbench still stands against one wall; other than that, the room was empty.

I returned to my dad and asked him to describe what he saw, but he dismissed it quickly, refusing to say anything more about it. The whole thing was a bit eerie, but I sensed nothing "off". A few days later when I visited the place again I went back to that basement room by myself and stood there awhile just to be sure, but all I felt was contentment. Meanwhile, my dad had been feeling unwell and was diagnosed with pneumonia a day or two later, so I decided that he must have had a fever and hallucinated it, and I put the incident out of my mind (my dad made a full recovery, by the way).

We moved in without incident, and nothing unusual happened at all for about six months. Then one evening in late winter I arrived home early and, relishing the thought of a quiet hour to myself, I lit the dining room fireplace and settled down at the table to do some work. The house is a mid-century modern split style, and the room that we use as a dining room is a large open space occupying almost that entire level, with a soaring fifteen foot ceiling and wood paneling on the fireplace wall. So as I sat there at the table, I looked up and noticed a single, dusty-looking boot print, clearly from a lug-soled work boot, about ten feet up the wall on the wood paneling. I decided that it must have been there all along, left by a builder who had put up that panel fifty years prior - but I couldn't understand why I hadn't noticed it before, or why it had been left there for so many decades. It stayed there for about a week, an idle curiosity that I pointed out to my husband and the few visitors who stopped by. Then the following weekend I finally hauled out the step ladder, planning to try to wash it off. But when I looked for the print, it was gone. I asked my husband if he'd cleaned it off, but he said he had not. I scanned the entire wall, thinking I was looking in the wrong spot, but it had just simply vanished.

After that, nothing unusual happened again for another six months - until last Saturday. I'd purchased some hooks for the bathroom door which my husband had offered to install. I was looking them over, and commented that they had come with drywall anchors, which might not be suitable for hanging on a door. "Nah", husband says, "they'll do". I was doubtful, but I left the package on the bathroom counter and went about my business.

Two hours later I wandered into the bathroom again, to find the hooks still uninstalled and sitting on the counter - but beside them was a package of door anchors. I picked up the package, which was faded and appeared to be quite old; it was also open, with only four of six anchors still in the package. "Where did you find these?" I ask. "I didn't find them, you did", husband replies. "What do you mean?" I ask, and he says, "I've never seen them before. They were just in the middle of the floor in the upstairs hallway." And because my husband completely refuses to acknowledge or accept anything supernatural ever, he added, "you put them there." Of course I'd never seen them before either and I had no idea how they ended up in our upstairs hallway - but he needs to think whatever he needs to think to get his beauty rest, and that's ok. But personally, I kind of like the thought that maybe they were a gift from the man who built, lived in and clearly loved our home, who somehow conjured them up from the depths of his beloved workbench to make sure we didn't make a mess of his beautiful old house.