Coastal Maine Haunting

My parents have been married for 45 years, and for the last 16 of those years, they’ve shared their house with a ghost. It started when they bought a house in coastal Maine. The place had been built sometime in the 1940s and occupied by a single resident the whole time. When he died, the house was put up for sale and my folks jumped on it—but there’s evidence that the previous resident hasn’t given up his occupancy.

Every night, my mom says she hears someone walking through the house. I told her it’s an old house and that sort of thing is to be expected. The older a house gets, the more it settles and the louder the plumbing gets. But she insists it’s more than just that and says there’s a definite presence, and that the movements she hears “seem to have purpose” as she puts it.

Even my dad, who’s always been the most skeptical and hardheaded person I’ve ever known, is totally convinced there’s something paranormal going on. He tells me there isn’t a week that goes by without something strange happening. Weirdly, he doesn’t hear the footsteps on a daily basis like my mom does. What he experiences seems even worse (from the perspective of someone who wouldn’t be interested in experiencing stuff like this). My dad says he sees things regularly.

When I asked him for more details he just sort of clammed up like it was something he didn’t want to get too deep into, and said it was usually just movement out of the corner of his eye. But when I talked to my mom alone, she told me he’d admitted to her that he frequently sees a very short woman with “wild hair and a scary smile” peeking around corners at him.

Being the doubter that I am, and also wanting to make sure my parents weren’t losing it upstairs, I invited myself to spend a weekend at their house. My “weekend” visit turned into a single night after I myself experienced something I still have trouble understanding.

We’d just had dinner and were sitting in the living room talking when all of a sudden it sounded like someone came pounding down the stairs and ran right through the room. That time, my father heard it too. It startled me so bad that I literally threw my hands up defensively, expecting there to be an intruder or something, but there was nothing there. The whole time the noise was happening, you could feel the floor vibrating, and when the footsteps ran through the room I could definitely sense another presence in there with us.

Nothing else happened that night, and I left early the next day. I lied and said I got called in to work so I wouldn’t have to spend another night. I’m pretty sure they saw through my story, but they didn’t give me any crap. They tell me nothing like that has happened since, although they both still regularly have their personal individual experiences. I believe the sounds my mom hears are probably the footsteps of the original owner. I have no idea what it is my father is seeing, but after my own experience there, I don’t doubt he’s telling the truth. At least now I know my folks aren’t nuts.