My oldest sister, husband, and their three kids used to live in your average, Silicon Valley suburban home. They planned on upgrading to a larger home as the number of children outgrew the number of bedrooms. They soon found the house of their dreams and proceeded to move into it, leaving their old house up for rent.

I was living at home at the time, and my other sister suggested that we rent the house out together, along with her boyfriend. It was a three bedroom, 2 full bath house...and the possibilities of me being out on my own, were very exciting! He and I would primarily be living there full time, while she was away at college. We went for it! We took in a third boarder and proceeded to settle in. My sister would come down on the weekends, and we would have a great time BBQ'ing and bonding...you know the types of things that you do when you're young and on your own.

One Saturday evening, we decided to all go to sleep at the same time. We had shared a nice big meal, watched a movie, and then proceeded to our bedrooms. That night, it was just me, my sister, and her boyfriend. The boarder was out of town that weekend. My bedroom was directly across the hall from my sister and her boyfriends room. Down at the end of the hallway, was a bathroom. The hallway was a beautiful polished wooden floor. We said our goodnights, and both shut the doors at the same time.

No sooner had I shut off the lights and settled into bed, I heard footsteps coming up the hallway from the bathroom. Creak....creak...stepping slowly...but in the silence of the night, it was very clear that somebody was walking from the bathroom up the hallway. I listened until the footsteps stopped at my doorway. I lay in bed wondering to myself...rationalizing...maybe it's my sister? Perhaps she went out of her bedroom and down the hallway when I wasn't paying attention? Why would she use that bathroom when she had her own in her bedroom? I waited for a moment thinking...what is she doing just standing there and not moving? At the very moment I piped up to say her name...she called out my name from inside her bedroom. We both jumped up out of our beds and opened the door at the same time. We stared at each other in disbelief, as we both had heard the same thing. We were shocked. She was listening to the same footsteps and wondering why I would just be hovering outside of her door without saying anything. This just clearly proves that these were very audible, clear footsteps. Not a settling house...but footsteps. We both kind of nervously laughed that off and went back to our beds.

The next morning, we all awoke to the sound of the hallway bathtub being filled with water. I figured that the boarder was home and running herself a bath. 7:00 am on a Sunday morning was rather odd I thought...but who knows. Since I was awake, I decided to get up. I immediately noticed the door was wide open to the bathroom, and moments later that the boarders car was still not home. She wasn't there! My sister got up too, to see what was going on. Neither of us had turned on the faucet. CREEPY.

Here's where it gets really interesting. We decided to tell our older sister and her husband what happened. They both had these really sympathetic looks on their faces and proceeded to tell us of what happened while they were living there:

Their youngest daughter, who slept in the same room that I took, used to wake up in the middle of the night screaming "lady, lady, lady, lady!" This went on night after night. She was very young at the time and couldn't elaborate what was actually frightening her other than "the lady." When she got a little older, she finally was able to tell my sister "lady say's, my house...I say no, daddy's house." Well, you can imagine...my sisters blood ran cold.

They would periodically wake up in the middle of the night to the sounds of a muffled radio. When her husband would check around, he would find that the radio in the garage had been turned on. On and on...strange things would happen, like they would wake up in the middle of the night and their bedroom light would be on. This completely freaked my sister out. She finally asked a neighbor if anything unusual happened in that house before they lived there. Well...as you guessed it, both the husband and the wife died in there (at different times.) The lady of the house was apparently a very eccentric woman. Very short...had very long hair that she piled high on her head, wore long dresses only and had unusually long nails. Sounds scary already... can you imagine her ghost?! Well, as you may have already guessed, when my sister asked her daughter what the lady looked like, she described her to a T!

I couldn't believe she had never told me all of this before we moved in! Things got bad for my sister and her husband and they realized that they had to give up their new home and move back into the one that we were renting (by that time I had already moved out). Anyway, things started happening again. My sisters husband was a skeptic...but by this time, he was starting to wonder what was happening. I think he finally decided that there was an unexplainable aspect to it. My sister, on the otherhand, felt the whole time that it was a "classic" haunting.

I spoke to a psychic friend of mine and told her what was going on in their home. She said that there was "something" in or on the house that still tied it to the previous owners. Unless they removed this "thing" the hauntings may never stop. So....clean up day arrived. They went through the attic, the underground space, the garage, the side yards...the entire house top to bottom. Nothing. It did, however, prompt a major spring cleaning to the point where they had rented a large industrial garbage dumpster out front. Then, as my sister and her husband were walking up to the front door, they noticed a hanging plant that they had for years, had died. Disturbed to lose it, my sister hesitantly reached up and took it down off of its hook. What she saw, made her go pale. Behind the plant...for God knows how many years...was the previous owners name, in black iron letters, nailed to the house. Her husband quickly took it down...broke it up in to many pieces and threw it away. The hauntings stopped almost immediately. They have since moved from this house, but we will never forget the hauntings that went on there.

Submitted from: Christina Oldershaw , California, USA