Further explanation

As I give my previous entry more thought, I realize how silly I must sound. Surely a few odd sounds to which one is not yet accustomed do not constitute a haunting. Of course not, but I had to start somewhere. The truth is that it goes beyond that, but much like the noises, it has taken time for us to realize what was really going on. Before I get ahead of myself, let me start at the beginning again and attempt to follow the progression as we've seen or, more accurately, experienced it.

As I've said, I suspect things began the first night we stayed in the house. The house did seem oddly noisy. By this I mean moreso than you would normally expect. Odd noises in the attic, creaks in the floor, thumps in the walls. It wasn't constant, but it seemed unusually frequent. Still, the place had been build the year I was born. Just an old house doing the things old houses do. It was April. the temperature outside was all over the place - warm during the day, but still cold at night - and the spring humidity was returning to the air. Houses make a lot of noise during the changes in and out of winter in our experience. We only mentioned it in passing,not htinking anything of it at the time.

The next week we didn't think a lot of it. We were busy packing up the apartment and getting ready for the official move the following weekend so we were only in the house occassioanlly during the day dropping things off.

Once everyting was moved in the next Saturday, we started the process of unpacking and didn't notice anyhting odd. In fact, it wasn't until Monday night while we were relaxing for a bit on the couch when Kari mentioned the quiet. I realized she was right. All the house noises we'd hear the week before were completely absent. So much so we hadn't noticed for 3 days. We shrugged it off as odd but that was about it.

As the house started resembling a home, the house began to resume its creaks and growns. I noticed it and laughed then said to Kari, "Hey, I think the house finally woke up." And so it was for a few weeks. The house making it's noises and us settling in and getting used to the sounds of our new home. We never suspected that that would all change.

It's funny the things you don't notice at the time, but on reflection they start to paint a picture. Every house has it's known creaky spots. Our has a couple of spots in the floor and a few of the stairs. I remember now that around mid-May we started hearing the stairs in particular creaking once in a while. At first it was just an isolated creak. But within a week of noticing it, it became more persistent. By the end of the month, you'd swear there was somebody coming up from the basement. Yet every time it happened, niether of us were near the stairs. We were either downstairs watching TV, in the livingroom, anywhere but the stairs. It started to become a nearly nightly occurance. Not knowing what to make if it, Kari jokingly decided we had a "ghost" and his name was Bob. And so began the Bob jokes.

"Oh, Bob's coming up for bed." "Bob, thinks we're boring. He's going downstairs to watch TV." we must have come up with a hundred of these. It kept us amused and we tried not to think too much of it.