Searching High and Low
My husband and I owned a martial arts school. The building that it was in—which we also owned—was about 130 years old and was located next to a church. I never believed in the paranormal, but the things that happened in it didn’t just happen to me.
The building was decrepit, and we did all the work ourselves. It was old, creaky, and drafty. When we worked on it with drills and electric saws, I heard the tinkling of a music box.
I would stop everyone to ask if they heard it too. No one else did, so I assumed it must have been some music from the church coming through. But there was more in store for us. Then, my husband often heard a woman’s voice calling his name from the bottom of the stairs.
He would think that it was me back from work, but it wasn’t. The building would be empty. It happened four or five times. There was a small apartment on the second floor that was connected to a large hall.
One night, we woke up hearing what sounded like a broom sweeping across the wooden floors in that hall. My husband got up to check. Once he walked in, the sweeping sound stopped. It happened three more times that night.
In another instance, we had a barbecue in the backyard, and I needed to go get more utensils.
There was a metal stairwell from the backyard up to the second floor; the main entrance staircase was opposite that. I came up the main entrance and heard footsteps pacing back and forth across the far end of the hall.
I thought my husband came up from the metal stairwell to get utensils with me. It was dark, and I couldn’t see anything. I called out for him, and the pacing stopped. There was no response, and then the pacing footsteps continued. Annoyed, I thought he was messing with me. So, I flipped on the lights.
I immediately regretted my actions. All of the utensils from the shelf where I heard the pacing crashed down to the floor. There wasn’t anything around, not even a rat like I thought there might be. One Saturday morning, my husband was on his computer in another room.
I was in the apartment playing on my iPad when I heard the stereo in front of me click on, and a girl’s voice started talking from it. I thought my husband was controlling the stereo from his computer, so I ignored it.
I wasn’t paying much attention to the voice on the stereo until it suddenly went, “Something’s hurting me”. When I caught that, I looked up and squinted at the stereo, confused. Then the terror continued. The voice just kept repeating, “Something’s hurting me. Something hurt me”.
At that point, the hair was standing on the back of my neck. I got up to take a closer look. It said, “Please, someone tell my parents, tell the teachers, tell the corrections officer”.
At the word “corrections officer”, I bolted into the other room and started yelling at my husband because I was certain he was playing a trick on me. I told him, “We don’t play jokes about ghosts”. He looked at me, completely baffled.
When he finally calmed me down long enough to get what I had heard out of me and what I was accusing him of, he told me it was impossible and led me to the stereo. It wasn’t plugged in. I thought maybe the stereo picked up the signals from an eBook or something.
After that fiasco, I went to ask our live-in student—who lived with his girlfriend in the basement apartment—if anything weird’s been happening. They gave each other an alarmed look and confessed the dark truth.
He told me his girlfriend was sleeping one night recently when he was working overnights and not around the house. She heard footsteps come down the stairs, and their door open and then close.
Suddenly, a bright flashlight shined on her face, and she could just make out the silhouette of who she thought was her boyfriend. She was annoyed, thinking he was messing with her, so she swatted at him and told him to stop. Finally, she got so mad that she turned on their lamp.
There was no one there. They also mentioned that they sometimes would hear footsteps on the first floor when no one was in the building. They had a pet mouse at the time, and whenever that happened, it would start doing backflips in its tank.
However, when class was going on, and people were in the building, the mouse didn’t care and just went about its mousy business. They were play-wrestling one day when suddenly, their parrot ruffled its feathers and, in a really alarming voice, asked, “Who’s there? Who’s there”?
They thought it was funny at first, so our student looked at the bird, pointed to the door, and said, “You mean over here”? and ran towards the door to open it. Just as a kind of joke.
As he did that, though all the books lining the shelf on the way to the door fell over in front of him, and the lights started flickering. The bird and the mouse both got spooked and were throwing themselves against their cages.
Once the couple got married and moved out, our second live-in student said that there were several times that he could not find his phone when he woke up in the morning. Yet, he had placed it next to his bed the night before.
He would search his room high and low and then find it perfectly placed right outside his locked bedroom door on the floor. There was no way anyone could have done it.
I thought he might have been sleepwalking, but his girlfriend said it wasn’t likely because she would have realized if he did. Story credit: Reddit / lunchesandbentos