Encounters In An Old House

At the time these incidents took place, I was around 45 years old. I had, by then, lived in many different houses in both the US and other countries. My family and I had never experienced anything like the things we experienced in the old green farmhouse in Indiana.

Let me start by saying that I'm an atheist and have been one since I was very young. My husband and I did not expose our children to church, but we did not forbid church for them. We left it up to them to decide for themselves when they were older.

In 2003, my family needed to move from the house where we were living. My boys loved their school and we didn't want to move very far. I had driven past an old, crooked green farmhouse just around the corner for years, and wondered if we could rent it. I contacted the owner and he showed me around. The house was in abysmal shape and needed a complete overhaul to be even liveable. I told him I was willing to do the work to fix it up and he agreed to apply the money we would spend on the house as rent. My husband was working long hours and my boys were in school, so I drove to the house every day and worked on it, tearing out plaster, redoing the kitchen and bathroom plumbing, putting down new floors, taking walls down, etc. I spent almost every weekday alone in the house and every weekend my husband and sons helped out with the heavy lifting and cleanup.

The renovations took about 4 months and nothing strange or unsettling happened during that time.

Then came the day when we could finally move in. It took most of the day but we finally got settled and I left my husband and youngest son, (I'll call him H), at the house while I drove to the school to pick up my 13 year old, (I'll call him J), from an after school activity. By the time we got close to home, it was full dark.

My son and I were chatting about school and his new room as we drove past the house to the driveway and I looked up into his bedroom window (we hadn't had time to put up curtains yet) and said "Uh oh, your brother is in your room." I could see the outline of a person at the window because he'd left his bedroom light on.

I didn't look at my watch, but it didn't take us more than a couple of minutes to park the van and walk in the front door. I was shocked when I saw my husband and H sitting in the living room watching television. I remember I asked H how he got downstairs so quickly and my husband said that they had both been sitting right where they were since I'd left to pick up J. I knew that there was no way for H to have crossed J's room, go down the hallway, down the stairs, through the dining room, across the living room and be sitting on the couch in the time it took us to park the van and walk the 10 feet to the front door. J and I told them what we had seen and my husband suggested that what I thought was a person at the window was more likely a branch of the huge weeping willow tree growing in the front yard.

That didn't seem possible to me so we all walked outside and into the street to the spot where the van had been when we saw the figure. It wasn't the willow tree and the figure was gone. We walked up and down the street over and over again, trying to line up a branch of the tree with the window and just couldn't do it. Finally, we shook our heads and went back into the house. I didn't really think all that much more about it.

A few months later, I wasn't feeling well and decided to go upstairs to my room and take a nap. I closed my bedroom door so my cat and dog wouldn't get in the room and wake me because I've always been a very light sleeper and I didn't want them to jump on the bed. I was just drifting off and felt something press down on the foot of the bed. I opened my eyes and sat up, thinking my cat had already been in the room when I closed the door, but she wasn't on the bed. I got up and searched under the bed and in the closet. She wasn't there. I went downstairs and asked my husband if he'd seen her and he told me that she had been sitting in the windowsill watching birds in the yard for at least half an hour and there was no way she was upstairs. I told myself that I was just dreaming about what I felt on the bed.

My son J had a very good friend who spent several nights at our house but I noticed one day that he hadn't been around in a while and asked J if they'd had a fight or something. J said that his friend wouldn't come to our house anymore. I asked why, and he said that the last time his friend had spent the night; he was alone in J's room watching TV on the bed (J had gone to the restroom). He said that he felt someone sit on the foot of the bed, but there was no one there. It scared him so much he refused to come to our house ever again.

I hadn't told J about what I had experienced in my bedroom. Very shortly after that, my son began begging us to let him go to church with one of his friends. I think what was happening in the house had really frightened him.

More time went by and we all began to hear footsteps on the stairs but there was no one there and footsteps upstairs when we were all downstairs. Nothing really scary, just things that made us say Huh?

Finally, about a month before we moved, I was walking across the kitchen when a bottle of my son's cologne literally flew across the room in front of me. My husband was in the living room and saw it also. That did scare me a little. We decided that it must have been my walking across the bouncy kitchen floors that knocked the bottle off, but it didn't just fall, it was more like it was thrown because it went straight across directly in front of me.

We now live in a different house and none of us have experienced anything similar. Other people are living in the old green farmhouse now and I want to stop by and ask them if they've noticed anything strange, but I don't know them personally and I don't really want to look like an idiot.

As an atheist, it's hard for me to explain what happened at the old farmhouse, but I've basically accepted that we are sort of like fish in a pond. Fish have no ability to perceive or even imagine the world we people inhabit, just outside of the water. Perhaps we humans live in our own little pond?