Ghost Stories - The Invitation

My parent's house was haunted...according to my mother. I had a few unusual experiences in the house myself while growing up, but the first incident happened before I was born. This story is my mother's.

My parent's finished building a house just after their 4th child was born. He was a baby when they moved in (I was #6). Unfortunately, my dad's mother passed away before the house was finished. She had really wanted to see it, but didn't get the chance. At least not while she was alive.

About two weeks after they moved in, my mother had one very annoying afternoon. As she was trying to get her work done, someone kept knocking on the front door. She answered the door the first time to find no one standing there. It happened a second time. The third time it happened she was getting annoyed. She thought her niece or nephew from next door was playing a game with her. So the third time she answered the door she also opened the storm door and said, "Look, if you want to come in, come in. But stop knocking on this door!!!" The knocking stopped.

A half-hour later she was cleaning the tub in the bathroom. Someone turned out the bathroom light. She looked, but saw no one there. She assumed one of her kids had played a little joke on her. She turned the light back on. After she started cleaning again, the light went off again. Once again annoyed, she went in search of the prankster. But the only child tall enough to reach the light switch was not yet home from school. Weird!

Soon she needed to go into the cellar to start a load of laundry. Each of the four quadrants of the cellar had a single, bare light bulb. One could be turned on by a switch in the kitchen and the other three had pull chains to turn them on and off--including the one over the washing machine. My mother started the washing machine, turned off the light and headed back upstairs. As she approached the top of the stairs, the washer stopped. So back down she went to re-start it. Do I even need to say what happened next? That's right, she got to the top of the stairs and the washer stopped again...except this time the light was back on too!

How frustrated was my mom at that point? Haha! For some reason, she felt it was her deceased mother-in-law, come to explore the house. So she shouted, "You're welcome to visit, but STOP playing with everything. I have too much to do!!!"

The mysterious aggravations all stopped after that. At least for a little while. My mom never had any more experiences, but I had 3 or 4 (or 5) experiences that I cannot explain. Some were scary and some were helpful. If anyone's interested, I'll share those in future postings.