As I Grew, So Did They 2

As I grew up, I started to notice other things happening that were considerably out of place. Within a few weeks of seeing the small girl on my basement landing, I started to hear very odd noises.

My dog (a 45 pound poodle-type dog) was sitting in our living room with me while I read. No one was in the house, and I was enjoying the rare silence (at the time, I was around 13, my brother 9, and my sister 6,my mother and father also lived with use, along with my uncle who was rooming in out basement, silence moments were few and far between).

As I'm reading, and the dog is on my lap, I heard the back door open, and someone walk up the steps. They footfalls were incredibly heavy, obviously a man, and I assumed my uncle, who is a big guy who works for the city and wears boots, had come home early. Even the dog looked up, very excited, because he loved my uncle. So, I looked up from my book, and shouted, "Hey Uncle Frank!", and got no response. So, I then said, "Fine, don't talk to me."

It didn't take me more than a second to realize something was wrong. The steps continued across the kitchen. They stopped at the sink, and suddenly there was a tremendously loud crash in the kitchen. The dog took off to look and see what happened, and I followed him.

When I got into the kitchen, no one was there (which, if they had left, with those heavy boots, I would have heard them) and the dish strainers was flipped onto the floor, and any dishes were strewn about form the force of being thrown. Needless to say, I cleaned it up, and quietly went back to my book with the dog.

Just for the sake of fluidity in stories, I will remain with the boots for now. Over the years I have heard them, mainly through the hallway on the first floor from the kitchen to the living room. Typically, this is when I was in the bathroom. When I finally started to simply ignore them, I was in high school.

It was about my junior year, and I was having a friend of mine stay over to help finish a project we had. Very late that night, we finished, and she was nosing through my closet, and putting on all the odd things she found. My snow boots, a hat, a skirt, goodness knows what else. I had to use the washroom, so I went downstairs, and after a minute or so, I heard, unmistakably, the sound of boots coming down my stairs, pausing at the bottom, and DARTING through the hallway, past the door. I, of course, thought it was my friend, so I laughed, and said, "Real nice, Emily. If you're going to try to sneak, take OFF my boots."

I waited outside the door waiting for her to come out of wherever she hid. She didn't come out, so I shrugged it off and went upstairs. Emily was sitting on my floor, playing a video game. I stared at her a few minutes and asked, "Uh, how did you get up here without making the stairs squeak?" She just looked at me, incredibly confused, and said, "I have been playing Yoshi story, why would I want to go downstairs, to listen to you pee?" I then explained the situation to her, and she just laughed and said, "Hah! You have a ghost who has a crush on you!", and we kind of brushed it off and went back to playing games.

I can't wait to share my next batch of tales with you!