The Phantom Flusher

Throughout my life, I have always been fascinated with the paranormal. The reason for this is twofold: I lost many people when I was relatively young and I like to believe that they are still around me. The second reason is a less altruistic; contrary, its slightly more ominous - I grew up in a haunted house.

From as long as I can remember, there was always something "off" about my childhood home. Toilets would flush by themselves; beds would shake violently; phantom footsteps would run around in an upstairs bathroom; huge crashing noises would ring through the house, but nothing was broken; my dog would continuously bark at something behind me that was not there. These occurrences were never accompanied with any malicious feelings. I always had a feeling that it was little boy and he was just trying to play. As a result of the constant flushing of the toilets, we nicknamed him the "Phantom Flusher".

However, there were times when the events got scary. One time in particular made me feel very uneasy about living in my house. It was a night of a summer storm - it was rainy and cold; which is very rare for where I grew up. I was 15 and I was babysitting two girls (13 & 11) at my house, as both our parents had gone out together. At this point I have to give a quick explanation of my house. It has three floors: the bottom floor has the family room, computer room and bathroom. The second floor has the kitchen, living room and dining room. The trick about the second floor is that there is two door that lead outside that are almost side by side. The first door leads into the kitchen. The second door leads into the living room, but it is divided by the rest of the second floor by a wall. We only use this door on Halloween. The top floor has three bedrooms and a bathroom.

The three of us were watching TV downstairs in the family room. We had been down there the entire night. It was getting really cold down there, so I began to go upstairs to the third floor to turn off the air conditioning. However, when I reached the second floor, I had to stop. It was freezing! I looked at the kitchen door - it was closed tightly. On a whim, I went around the wall to check the second door - it was wide open and still locked. This unnerved me quite a bit. I thought someone got into the house. So i took the biggest knife I could find and searched all the upstairs rooms thoroughly. I found nothing. I figured the wind must have somehow opened the locked and never-used door.

I was still unnerved though and told the girls that if they needed anything from upstairs to let me know and I would go get it for them. About an hour later, the youngest girl was thirsty. I began to climb the stairs and once again, I was stopped in my tracks. I could hear running water. I looked into the kitchen - the taps were off. So I slowly went up to the bathroom. I walked inside and found that the sink had been plugged, the tap was on and there was water everywhere. I turned it off, threw some towels on the ground, grabbed the girls and went to a friend's house until our parents arrived home. To this day, this event remains unexplainable to me - I was the only one who was upstairs that night - so who turned on the tap?