Old Town Spirits Awakened
Joseph, IL, USA
September 2010
In 1996 I moved to an old "salt box" house in Glen Carbon, Illinois. The house I lived in was built in 1892, and was built for housing coal miners in the area.When we first moved there I recall a time when I went outside of my house andsat down on the curb. While sitting there, I could see a woman approaching mein period clothing to my left. As she came up behind me, I turned to my rightto look at her as she passed but there was no one there. That wasn't the only occurrence that happened in that house.
About a year later while we were in the attic, we discovered old newspaper clippings from 1927 and most interesting we found two coal miner pay stubs from 1893 from a former resident. After these were discovered, strange things began to happen. Doors would open on their own, I would hear my name whispered in my ear at odd hours of the night. But the scariest experience I had occurred one night around 3 AM.
In the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom we had another crawlspace. The door to this crawlspace wasn't attached, and was just a cut out portion of the wall that we had to lean against the opening. I was using the bathroom that night, I didn't even turn on the light. I looked in the mirror to my left and in the mirror I could see the door behind me. Suddenly the door just fell open by itself, crashing onto the bathtub behind it.
I screamed the most terrifying scream and my sister's friend ran to my aid. There was no air flow coming into that bathroom, in fact the air was stale and humid. I could find no explanation for that door to fall open like it did. Over the next few years until we moved out in 2005, I would frequently hear the door falling in the middle of the night when it hadn't been disturbed for days before.