Ghost Hunters (2022) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

"Did you hear that?" gasps Bill, peering around himself in the darkness! Startled, Ernie drops his torch as a cold shiver runs through his body!
Ghosts are real. I once lived, housesitting in a haunted farmhouse in Blaine, Washington, near the Canadian border. We were only there for three months while the residents were in Mexico, in the 1970s. The house had no electricity, we cooked on a woodstove and used kerosene lamps.
One night I was awakened by the sound of footsteps on the wooden floors, downstairs.
The house was dark and that made me suspicious that this wasn't an ordinary intruder. I sat up listening as doors were opened and shut. Chairs were dragged across the floor. Drawers were opened and dishes rattled. And between those distinct sounds, I heard heavy boots walking back and forth from the front room to the kitchen as though someone was looking for something but couldn't decide which room to look in. I could see the darkness at the top of the stairs and no light ever disturbed it.
I didn't believe in supernatural things at this point in my life. I pinched myself, I slapped my face, I looked out the window to see if a wind was blowing, (it wasn't) I listened for the difference in the footsteps of farm animals from humans, to test myself I worked through simple mathematics in my head. Convinced that I was not still asleep, dreaming I was awake, I felt for and found my girlfriend, still asleep beside me. I decided not to awaken her to deal with her being frightened by what I was hearing.
I grabbed a hunting knife and a book of matches from my pants and crept to the top of the stairs in my bare feet. The sounds I was hearing continued, occasionally passing just ten feet below me past the foot of the stairs. I sat down on the top step and listened as the noises continued.
I believe I sat there for about a half of an hour, tracking the sounds by ear as they went back and forth between the two rooms, opening cupboards and moving furniture, in the pitch blackness inside the house.
I lit a match and tossed it down the stairs. No change happened. I lit and tossed two more. No change.
I made a 'throat-clearing' sound. No change. The footsteps and scraping sounds continued.
I spoke, in what I hoped was a reassuring voice, "If somebody's in this house, I don't want any trouble." No change.
I started down the stairs, very slowly, as quiet as I could be. No change and the footsteps passed right below me, not more than six feet away. They continued until I reached the fourth step down. That step was the first that would make me visible to someone in the front room, (if there had been any light to see by). The noises stopped ... and so did I. I froze, listening.
After a minute or two I sat back down on the stairs and waited as silently as I could, breathing slowly so not even that sound could be heard. I waited and waited, wide awake and hearing nothing. As I sat there, I realized that whatever made the sounds had responded to me. The moment my foot had cleared the ceiling of the front room and begun to enter the downstairs of the house; the sounds had stopped. And though I waited, listening for at least another twenty minutes to a half an hour they never started up again.
Eventually I went downstairs using lit matches to see. I lit lamps and checked both rooms and the pantry off the kitchen. I checked both outer doors and every window. No cupboards were open, no drawers pulled no furniture moved. The strange sounds never returned.
It had seemed like the right thing at the time, but my girlfriend was unhappy that I had not awakened her and probably thought I'd made the whole thing up. I filed the experience away as "unexplained" and it took me years to accept that it was real, that I wasn't in a hallucinatory state and that there was no other explanation for what I'd heard. When the owners returned, I asked them about this, and they confirmed that they had seen ghosts and heard sounds and that the house on Badger Road had a long reputation for being haunted. One candidate had hung himself in the barn, another had hung himself in the house. The only place to tie a rope high enough to do that would be on the upright for the stair railing, from the ceiling of the front room to the fourth step down from the upstairs.
So, I'll repeat, ghosts are real. I'm not sure hunting them is real, though people really do that. Ghosts are real, but you can dismiss my story if you want to, it makes no difference to me.

Related themes

GhostsGhost HuntersTrue StoriesSupernatural