We Lived in a Haunted House

Not our ghost! We adults never saw him or her.

This photo is the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

taken by Hubert C. Provand in 1936

When we were first married, my husband and I lived in South Chicago, but as my daughters got ready to start school, we realized that this was not the place we wanted to raise our family. He grew up in Philadelphia and me under the flight patterns of Kennedy Airport in New York. We were looking for something different.

We moved to Albion, a small town in south central Michigan. Houses were surprisingly affordable, and after renting for a year, we bought a comfortable three story, four-bedroom house.

We loved our first house. At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. We started to do some minor renovations—stripping white paint from a magnificent oak staircase, refinishing a built-in china cabinet.

A few things seemed strange. We are not careful people, and we have a tendency to misplace things. The tendency continues to this day. We are currently looking for a waterproof fishing hat, which my husband wore to walk the dog because he couldn’t find his waterproof baseball cap. We are also missing an emergency flashlight, my husband’s pajamas and a toothbrush, among other items. (Don’t ask me how someone can lose pajamas or a toothbrush. But we have.)

But in this house, more things disappeared than usual. And then reappeared, in places we could have sworn we’d already looked. Often within minutes of expressing frustration at not finding them. “How am I going to get to the doctor appointment if I can’t find the car keys?” They’d show up on the kitchen table. “I really wanted to wear those earrings tonight. What do you suppose I could have done with them?” Suddenly on the side of the bathroom sink.

My younger daughter Laura began talking about the “angels” who visited her nightly after she’d been put to bed. She said they talked to her and sang her lullabies. When they were young, several of my siblings had imaginary friends. I put the “angel” phenomenon down to that, and made a redoubled effort to make sure she had plenty of opportunities to interact with other kids.

She also talked about slipping on that magnificent staircase, and that someone would catch her or scoop her up and carry her downstairs.

We discounted that as a vivid imagination until a babysitter told us that Laura was running toward the stairs one night and her feet flew out from under her. Instead of her falling down the stairs, however, the back of her shirt jerked back as if someone grabbed it and she was lifted up until she got her feet back under her.

The house had a dark basement with a low ceiling. It seemed to me to be an altogether dismal place, but both girls liked to play down there, especially in one corner. We didn’t quite understand it, but we put in some overhead lights and a blackboard, and let them set up their “school” for their dolls and stuffed animals. They said it worked well since the toys would answer questions out loud down there.

When asked why they liked that corner so well, they said it was comfortable and friendly, and that their dolls and animals liked it there. How did they know? “Because they told us.”

My husband began to have vivid nightmares about murdering someone. He’d awake with a start, and see figures shadows moving around the room. Was it from car headlights shining through the curtains? He has never before or since had such nightmares.

I worked in a steel fabrication plant within walking distance, often second or third shift. If I walked home from work late at night or early morning, the drapes covering one window would open as if someone were peering out. At first I put it down to the dog, but often when I got inside the house, he would be sound asleep in another room.

Both he and the cat would sometimes sit and stare at the space by the staircase. Sometimes the dog would go through his brief repertoire of tricks (sit, down, roll over, play dead, speak) seemingly without anyone telling him to do so.

We only lived in the house for a few years. At that time, the area was very depressed economically. Businesses, including the steel fabrication plant where I worked, shut down. Enrollment in the schools plummeted. We decided we needed a more prosperous area in which to raise our family. We were reluctant to leave our lovely, friendly house, but we sold it.

A few years later, someone with whom we’d kept in touch showed us a book, “Haunted Houses in Michigan.”

The book didn’t give addresses, but one of the descriptions sounded like our former home, except that where we found the house to be amusing and comfortable and a bit frustrating, the people who had contacted the paranormal investigators found the occurrences to be scary. We called the person who wrote the book, and sure enough, it was our old house. And the most haunted places in the house were the staircase and one corner of the basement.

Have you ever had unexplained otherworldly experiences?