Erie Avenue Walker

We purchased this home about four years ago and while the house itself is new, it sits atop a piece of land where two previous houses once stood.

All information I found out after I decided to dig into the history of the property after some strange goings on.

My youngest child's bedroom is always several degrees cooler than the rest of the house but since it was new we figured that perhaps the ductwork for the heating/cooling system was installed improperly. So, I called a repair person to come over and check everything out and he found nothing that could explain why that one room was so much colder.

About a month after the repair person came over, we noticed a foul odor coming from the room, almost like spoiled meat. It wasn't a constant smell; it just came and went over the period of several days. Again, I called yet another service person to come over and check out under the house to see if an animal had, possibly, crawled under the house and died.

Once again, no explanation.

Not too long after that incident my husband had the night off from work so we were sitting in the living room that night around 9 o'clock, watching a movie on television. He kept looking at the front door and even got up four or five times and opened the door. He kept saying that he was seeing someone on the front porch, looking into the house through the small window on the door. Every time he got up, our mysterious visitor would disappear. I never saw this person, but my husband swears he did. About an hour after he got up to check the door for the last time, four light bulbs through out our house went out at the same time. They all burned out simultaneously. We decided it was then time to go to bed.

Ever since that night, I've heard footsteps starting in the back hallway that end about half way through our kitchen?a path of about 70 feet. We live in a ranch style house with our bedroom being the last room along this rectangular home design?the kitchen is about 10 paces from our bedroom door.

My husband worked the midnight shift so he was never around much to hear what I was hearing. He kept telling me that I was imagining things and that our incident while watching TV probably had a rational explanation, even though he has a famous haunted house in his family (famous in the area where we used to live - I'm trying to get him to submit his story, too) so he is not a skeptic.

Well, about six months ago he started working the day shift so he's been home at night. For the first week, there was no nighttime walker in the house but things soon changed. He can now hear our walker at night.

At first he kept getting out of bed, thinking it was one of our children getting out of bed and goofing off while they were supposed to be sleeping because it sounds like the walking (and sometimes running) starts at one of their bedroom doors and stops in our kitchen. Every time he got up to check (to catch *those sneaky kids raiding the fridge at night*), both kids would be sound asleep in their own beds.

The kids recently spent the night with their grandparents so that my husband and I could go out to dinner and see a movie. When we got home that evening, we had the house to ourselves, or so we thought. We were both in the bathroom taking out our contact lenses when the walking started. So, he decided it would be best if we shut and locked our bedroom door. We had only been in bed for about 5 minutes when the footsteps got louder and increased in speed. It sounded like someone was running through the house. After about 30 minutes it stopped completely, much to our relief. We had just turned off the light and were getting ready to sleep when our bedroom doorknob turned sharply one way then the other. Hard, complete rotations. Since the door was locked the knob can't be turned, just wiggled. Well, it turned - all the way. First one way, then another. But there were no footsteps leading up to the door before the doorknob turned. We had been calling our house ghost "Gus" after the children's book with the character Gus The Ghost. My husband flung open the bedroom door and said, "Gus, we know you're here. We can hear you. Feel free to roam about at night but stay away from my bedroom, please".

We can still hear him walking his rounds at night but he stays away from the bedroom!

We researched our land not too long after this happened and found out that the house that was here before ours was the home of a young man who committed suicide. Local stories say that this was a very nice, outgoing guy in his mid 20s who was the very picture of happiness and of sound mind. His doctor had prescribed him a medication for anxiety but he had, supposedly, underlying bipolar disorder that had never really presented any symptoms and that the medication actually caused psychotic symptoms. In a very manic like episode, he hung himself. This was indeed a tragedy.

The house stood vacant for a long time and eventually vandals destroyed it so the man's family had the house razed and sold the lot.

Before that man had lived here, there was yet another house that stood here. That house burned to the ground killing three people in the fire. All information I dug up through public records and through the neighbors?information I could have used before buying the land and building the house here!

And here's the kicker, and I swear to God this is true, the name of my street: Erie Avenue.