Old Mine Ghost
When I
was six, my family moved into a new house, only a block from our
old one. Within days of the move, things began happening. Obvious
things. My parents, being very religious and skeptical were quick to
dismiss every flicker of the lights and every bump in the night. The
only one of my three sisters who ever reported anything to me was my
little sister, Morgan. To this day she still remembers odd happenings
in that house.
When we had moved in, the first thing
that started (that I remember
clearly) was the lights constantly flickering. In any normal house,
this is usually the cause of the wind or some external source. In our
house, there was never a wind. When the lights flickered, they never
flickered in unison, but each bulb would flicker independently of the
other. One lamp or fixture would flicker while the others in the room
gave a steady light. We would come home in the early afternoon to find
the lights on on more than one occasion, knowing full well they hadn't
been on when we left. We often heard whispers in the basement, often
accompanied by strong feelings of another presence in the room.
However, here is the story of the most
bizarre incident by far....
On afternoons after school, Morgan and
I were often alone in the house.
Our older sisters had extra curricular activities to attend to and we
would amuse ourselves by watching TV in the basement. One afternoon,
I'd say it was probably about 4:00, we were watching TV as usual when
we started hearing very clear, pronounced footsteps on the floor above,
in the living room. We looked at each other; we hadn't heard anyone
come home. When anyone comes in, the door must be slammed behind them
or it wont close. So we would have heard someone come in.
Anyway, we went up the stairs to
investigate. We stuck our heads in the
living room and there was no one there. We knew we hadn't imagined it;
we had both heard it.
We shrugged it off and returned to the
basement. It wasn't one minute
later before we heard the footsteps again, this time louder than
before. Again we bolted up the stairs and saw no one.
Now we were getting freaked out.
So we went back the basement. About 30
seconds later, the footsteps
came again, this time louder than before, almost like someone was
bouncing a basketball on the floor. We ran up the stairs only to find
the room empty yet again. This time I decided I was going to
investigate further. Morgan was to scared to accompany me, so I left
her at the top of the stairs and walked in the living room. I looked
all over and didn't find anything.
I turned to leave and I noticed on the
carpet a large, fresh, defined
boot print. This was odd since my parents had a strict "no shoes in the
house rule", and no one in the family wore boots. We freaked out and
hid in the basement until someone came home. The footsteps did not
continue. We had our dad look around in the house, but there was no one
there.
After some research a few months
later, I found out that there is a
collapsed mine directly under several of the houses in that
neighborhood. Could the boot print be from a miner who was lost in the
collapse? The whole town was a mining settlement in the early 1900s,
and most of the land is undermined.
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