A Ghost In An Old House
Texas, USA
February 2000
My wife and I bought a house in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, about 18 months after we married.
The house was a 2-story front to back duplex, and had a basement (as most houses in Canada have). The house was one of the older in the city. The back half of the duplex was moved into the city in 1907 or thereabouts. The front half was built in the 1920's.
Shortly after we moved in, I was up late. I went into the hall to head upstairs and saw a lady coming down the stairs wearing curlers and a robe of some sort. I thought it was my wife at first and was puzzled as to why she had curlers in her hair since I have never seen her with curlers. She looked older than my wife, and she came to the bottom of the stairs. She looked real enough, but as she got to me, she walked right through me. There was no sense of fear, and I do not remember it feeling unusually cold. When she walked through me I turned to look and she was not there.
My wife told me she saw her when she woke up a few nights later. She was looking down at us as we lay on the bed.
That apparition never appeared to us again. We felt she just wanted to see who was moving into her home.
However, eerie things happened in the other side of the duplex. Things would move as we watched, drawers open and close, and we would get sudden chills, and vague senses of uneasiness.
Nobody who visited would stay in the basement for long periods of time by themselves. Other rooms in the house could give us the creeps, but it was centered in the basement.
One morning I heard something through the wall in the other side of the duplex, and so I went into the basement to go through to the other side. We had a door with no knob on it, but a deadbolt that needed a key to open from either side. I unlocked this door, and moved a building brick to shut the door instead of locking it. I did not want the cats coming to the other side of the duplex as we planned to use it for a rental property. I went through the basement hurrying because I felt something was there. I got up the stairs, did not see anything, but suddenly got a feeling of panic, and I turned to head back to the other side. As I got to the door to the basement I heard the brick that I had set up to block the door shut being moved. The brick weighed about 40 lbs, so I knew a cat could not move it. I got to the door and it was locked. I knew I did not lock it because I had set the brick there. I unlocked the door and saw the brick was moved about 6 feet from where I put it. I quickly locked the door, went back upstairs and asked my wife (who was just coming into the kitchen from having a bath) why she had moved the brick downstairs. She said she had just come downstairs and didn't know what I was talking about. I was very shaken by this.
People who rented from us asked about feelings they got in the basement. There was a crawl space that was filled in at one place, and that is where everybody stopped and stared when they felt the chills.
One woman who claimed to be psychic said she saw a woman being tortured in the basement. She never went back in. I personally do not know what that was.
I know that it was not the old woman who never bothered us. I wonder if maybe there was a body in the crawl space. I heard that come up in conversation more than once by renters and people who came over to visit.
We sold the house and moved, so I guess we will never know. It is something I wonder about...