A Mischievous Entity?

I'm a new member to this community, and had a few stories I wished to share. I lived from 2009-2015 in a house that was host to a number of bizarre and unexplained occurrences that could only be described as paranormal. I'll let the reader be the judge, as I myself am still not quite sure what to make of it.

To start with, let me say that while I have always been fascinated with the concept of ghosts and the supernatural, it's not necessarily something I believed in. I'm agnostic, irreligious, and tend to hold the idea that everything that occurs in our natural world must have some sort of valid explanation. Prior to experiencing these things that I am about to share with you, I viewed ghosts and ghost stories as sort of a fun diversion from the mundane, fodder for good-natured tales of terror and horror films. The same way most people would view stories about vampires, werewolves, and zombies... Fun to read about and watch on screen, but nothing that will ever be able to threaten you in reality. Stories of ghosts and hauntings gave me a fun fright as a child, but I wasn't quite willing to accept that they were real. Even if there were such things as ghosts out there, surely I would never be so unfortunate as to experience it for myself, right?

Needless to say, my attitude has changed.

Let me begin: Our story starts in November of 2009. My wife and I were newly married, and we were expecting our first child (a daughter). We moved with our two cats into a non-descript three bedroom, two bathroom house on the corner of a typical residential neighborhood, this house being located right across the street from a public school. My wife was about two months away from her due date, and those two months that we lived in the house by ourselves were very quiet and uneventful. Nothing out of the ordinary began to occur until a while after our daughter was born.

It is worth mentioning that friend of my wife's who considers herself to be sensitive to the "spirit world" got a very uneasy feeling from our new home and was reluctant to set food inside, even before anything out of the ordinary began to happen.

Things started to happen in September of 2010, when my daughter was nine months old (she is seven years of age at present).

One Sunday morning, I was changing my daughter's diaper in her bedroom, with the lights on, when the first event occurred. As I was completing my task, the light in the room went out. It was very early, and the sun was not yet out, so the room became dark. Naturally, I assumed that the power had gone out, until I noticed light from the hallway creeping under the door. Then I took the next logical step and assumed that the light must have simply burned out. It wasn't until I opened the door to the hallway to let some light in that I noticed that the light switch had been switched off. Now, I had been nowhere near the light switch. I didn't turn it off, and my nine month old daughter certainly didn't. And yet, it had physically been moved into the "off" position somehow. I became very uneasy, and took my daughter out of the room quickly. I wasn't frightened, but it was a very strange occurrence, to say the least.

The next day, I was pushing my daughter in her stroller up and down the hallway (it was a trick we used to help her fall asleep) when, after she fell asleep, I went parked her stroller in front of the doorway of the hallway bathroom to use the toilet. I was in there for several minutes with the door closed, and when I opened the door I found that her stroller had been moved about five feet away, towards the end of the hallway. She still lay in it, asleep.

From that point on, many things began to occur in our once peaceful home. Sometimes multiple events would occur each day, sometimes a few would occur within the space of a week or two, and other times there would be long stretches (weeks or even months) where nothing happened at all. You could never predict when something would happen, and you could never hope to prepare for it. Here are a few of the more common occurrences:

1. Many times we would wake up in the morning to find that multiple drawers and cabinets in our kitchen were open. It got to be so frequent that we didn't even mind it all that much after a while. Closing cabinets and drawers became part of the morning routine. Sometimes all of them would be open and objects would even be removed from them. One time an electric can opener had been removed from an upper level cabinet and placed on a counter top several feet away.

This could go on for weeks or months at a time, followed by equally long periods of time where nothing would happen at all.

2. We had an attached laundry room in the house. Sometimes, we would leave clothes in the dryer overnight while we slept, only to wake up in the morning to find the dryer open and clothes scattered about the room, still wet. It was more of a nuisance then anything, as it would set us back on our laundry.

3. Small objects in our home would often go missing. Keys left hanging on a hook by the front door would disappear, only to reappear somewhere else entirely days later. Books would go missing off of the shelf, only to turn up in some odd place like a bedroom drawer. One particular incident that I recall: I am a schoolteacher, and as such was required to wear an identification badge at one point. I always kept my ID badge on a table by the front door. One day, it vanished. I needed it for work, so I searched the house for WEEKS trying to find it. I eventually had a replacement made. One day, MONTHS later, the ID badge was found sitting by the computer in our spare bedroom/office. It had NOT been there before, I surely would have noticed it as I did work in there frequently.

4. My mother took a trip to Europe in the summer of 2011 and brought back some glass beads that were colloquially told to be capable of "warding off spirits." I didn't believe her of course, but I humored her and put a bead in a hiding place in each room of the house. I then promptly forgot about them. Many months later, as I was cleaning out the top shelf of the closet in my daughter's bedroom, I found all of the glass beads had been placed in a neat pile in the very back corner of the highest shelf in the closet. I have to admit, that was kind of scary... There is no way my daughter could have put them there, as she was a toddler at the time.

5. My daughter had a little play table and two folding chairs that she liked to sit in as a toddler. We would put them in the living room when she wanted to play, but normally we kept them folded up in her room in the corner when she wasn't using them. One morning, when my daughter was out of the house, spending the night at her grandmothers', I awoke to find the table and chairs set up in the kitchen, as if somebody were preparing to sit there.

6. The "entity", whatever it was, had a particular fondness for moving our shoes. Whichever room we took our shoes off in, they seldom stayed there. You might take your shoes off in the living room, only to find them in the kitchen or in a bedroom the next day.

7. Once our daughter became old enough to talk, she would regularly speak to/interact with some otherwise unseen presence in our house. But each time we pressed her to describe who or what she was talking to or interacting with, she would never answer.

That's the extent of what I have to share. We didn't have any terrifying experiences, just a series of annoyances and inconveniences. The house was great, and the rent was cheap, so we simply stayed there until an opportunity to move into a nicer location presented itself.

I'm still not QUITE sure that I believe in ghosts, but I am definitely willing to consider the possibility now. I'm not sure what to make of it. Ghost? Residual presence? Poltergeist? What do you think?