A Ghost Getting Exercise

Halloween has come and gone, with its tradition of telling ghost tales, both real experiences as on this site, and made up tales, such as the wrapping paper joke I recall from Boy Scouts. (Directions to our camp site included 'turn on to the one lane sand.')

While discussing this site and various experiences my family had, my dad admitted that something he said when we were younger, I was about 10 at the time, he just made up to dissuade us from ghostly explanations, and that he too experienced this thing.

We lived in a Cape Cod style house, a style as distinctive as Victorian architecture. Front door flanked by one window on each side, so if you're a student of architecture you'd know this is almost, but not quite, a full Cape as it usually has two windows on each side of the front door. The steeply pitched roof housed an attic that a previous owner had finished into two bedrooms and apparently added some plumbing for a possible half bath, but did not build it. My brother had one bedroom and I had the other bedroom at the top of the stairs.

After we had our evening prayers, my brother and I headed to the attic and our separate rooms for sleep, and just as we settled in, the ghost would begin its exercise of climbing the stairs. At the time, dad just called it the house settling. The entity began its ascent on the fifth or sixth stair out of 12, climb to the top of the stairs and turn left, walk into that bedroom and around the bed, then head to the other bedroom and do the same: walk around the bed. It then proceeded back to the stairs and dissipated. I can't speak for my brother on this, but I did turn on a light to see if something was there. The walking stopped until I turned the light off, resuming its perambulations. I saw nothing, no shadow in the dark or in the light, nor did I personally feel any positive or negative energy from it.

I recall my brother reported feeling negativity from it, however. The events stopped when my brother finally sat up in bed and stated to the invisible thing, "We are God's children now. Get out." According to my brother's account, the thing shoved his bed hard then passed through the window, making the curtains move.

The stairs continued to creak but only from flesh and blood walking on the staircase, either us or our dog.