Hear no evil
The first real ghostly experience I had was during my sisters' tenth or eleventh birthday party (not sure which one it was). At the time, my family was living in the town of Woodridge, New Jersey (on Anderson Avenue) and we had a nice bi-level house. I have plenty of good memories in this house, and lots of silly childhood stories by three silly kids.
The house was set us so that you had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the front door. Once inside, you were standing on a foyer with two staircases (one going upstairs and one going downstairs). Walking downstairs, a long hallway greeted you at the foot of the stairs. To your left was the door to the garage. Then at the end of the hall is a laundry room and then a big living room.
My sister's birthday party was a lot of fun, for me, because she invited all of her friends and I (as her little brother) played in every game they played. My brother was older than all of us and wisely stayed away from the silly games we played! As the afternoon wore on, all the parents went upstairs to wash the dishes (or just to get away from the kids!). With the parents gone, my sister, myself, and all of her friends decided to scare each other by telling ghost stories in front of the laundry room.
The doorway to the laundry room was a small recess at the end of the hallway. For many reasons, my sister and I always thought this was a creepy place. When you opened the laundry room door, you were stared down a long dark room with a shaded window at the end. This was always scary to us because we used to make up stories about a masked phantom who would stand outside the window and throw a scary shadow in just to scare us. He he, like I said, we were pretty silly kids.....
The house quieted down as we started talking about scary things. The stories were pretty childish and unbelievable, but to us children, it succeeded in scaring our socks off. Of course our stories were routinely punctuated with gasps and giggles. We were all feeling pretty silly, but eventually, all of us were thoroughly scared.
My sister and I were sitting at the end of the hall looking down its length. From our vantage point, we could see the wall along which the door leading to the garage was. We were midway into someone's ghost story when my sister gasped and said, " The door to the garage just popped open by itself!!" Well, this pretty much scared all of us out of our wits. Somehow, she found the courage to pop up, run over down the hall to close and lock the door to the garage.
"That was really scary!!" said my sister. I really don't think any one of us disagreed. "Hey, everyone. Let's not talk about ghosts anymore!"
"Yeah, lets talk about something else!" we all agreed.
I think everyone was pretty relieved, but not too long afterwards, my sister gasped again and pointed a shaking finger at the door to the garage.
"The door just popped open again!" she said. "I'm sure I locked it, though!"
This time, I came with her and locked and closed the door. Then we ran back as fast as we could to the safety of laundry room door recess (which suddenly became safe despite our earlier demonizing of this "scary" spot!).
By then, all of us were terrified and thoroughly petrified in our little recess. As little kids, not one of us wanted to move out of our spot or make a noise.
Suddenly, we all jumped about 3 feet off the ground and screamed as the doorbell rang! ( It turned out to be one of our neighbor's fathers coming to pick up his daughter) This pretty much cleared our heads and we all started to laugh. This gave us the courage we needed and when we stopped laughing, we couldn't wait to run upstairs to the safety of our parents.......
Our house was new, when we bought it, and nothing strange had ever happened to anyone in my family there. Now that we're older (but not too much wiser!) I still bring up this incident with my sister and we both have a good laugh. She still swears that she locked the door. She says she even double checked to make sure. I don't know, its just a strange thing.... We joke that maybe a ghost happened to be wandering by and saw a bunch of silly kids trying to scare each other. I guess the ghost heard our silly ghost stories and decided to have a little fun with us. No harm done! So don't talk about ghosts if you don't want them to hear you (Hear no evil).
Its the same way every time my sister and I talk about this incident. First, we laugh as we retell our silly little story. After this, she will always swear that she locked and closed that door. When we stop laughing, that creepy feeling returns. That same unsettling feeling we had when were sitting downstairs in that little recess years ago.
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