Before They Moved On
In the mid-1970s, my parents bought a 100-year-old Victorian house in NJ. The original owner, Hiram, was a captain in the Union Army and an engineer. After the Civil War, he developed parts of my hometown under the assumption the railroad would come through, and he would hit it rich.
He didn’t. The railroad went one town over. However, that didn’t deter him from developing a public park and building several houses, including mine and one for his daughter and son-in-law just 100 yards away.
At the time my parents bought the house, the only living descendant was Hiram’s granddaughter, Irma, who by then was in her 80s and living in the house he had built for her parents/his daughter.
Irma was born in Hiram’s house but raised in the second house by her parents. Irma took a liking to my parents because of their interest in the history of the houses.
Irma passed not long after my parents moved in. My parents bought several pieces of furniture at Irma’s estate sale, including a complete antique dining set that initially belonged to Hiram.
They set up the furniture in the dining room—which could be accessed by two doors—one of which was partially off the hinges and hence needed to be picked up for anyone to open and go through it. Doing so made a distinct and loud creaking sound, followed by a slam to shut the door and get it to latch.
Both doors could be locked by a skeleton key. As a precaution, they usually locked the broken door. Around the time my parents bought Irma’s furniture, they attended her wake.
My mom placed a skeleton key from our/Hiram’s house into Irma’s casket. The night after the wake, my parents were lying awake in bed when they heard the broken dining-room door open, creak, and slam.
They went downstairs to inspect, but no one was there. It looks like Irma and perhaps Hiram got one last look at everything before moving on. Story credit: Reddit / mia_san_max