You know, something inside me wishes all this rather thrilling paranormal stuff was real. In fact, the only horror movies that I genuinely enjoy are, without exception, about ghostly/demonic entities, no monsters, vampires, zombies (save for Blood's) or serial killers for me, these things bore me dead.
Unfortunately there's no hard evidence that suggests such things may actually interact with mortals in any way, if they at all exist, and nevermind my rather fruitless research on the subject, I still have a story or two to tell.
My parents bought a nice house in suburban Wisconsin (more like middle-of-nowhere-Wisconsin) that we went to on holidays and stuff. Originally this was going to be our new everyday house, but it turned out to be so ridiculously cheap (because of the age and location) they were able to keep both of them with a bit of extra effort, but that's beyond the story. This house was very well preserved but not at all modern. I'm talking early 1900's-looking house back in early 80's, that is, totally anachronic and for the most part, nonfunctional by standard of the day, like frozen in time. All wooden and noisy, like most houses from the time, specially on cold winter when all that wood starts cracking and knocking mad in the silence of the night.
No problem there, though, we all knew what it was. But starting from the 8 day on, we began hearing footsteps up and down the wooden stairs, which were located outside the house (I could actually see part of the staircase through the window in my bedroom) and that's how we reached the attic. The sound was very distinctive, it sounded exactly like it did when we used the stairs, it was like 20 consecutive steps, so it was 20 consecutive sounds and sometimes 20 more as the "ghost" climbed back down...
This would happen once or twice a night and it was frightening as hell. Footsteps could also heard somewhere in the front yard, but always during daytime. Again, very distinctive "footstepy" sounds, nothing I could attribute to wild animals or whatever else you could find in the perimeter.
But more than the footsteps, what really made me not want to go there was the creeping "feeling" that something evil lived with us, watching us, following us around, creating a very "oppressive" atmosphere, if you will.
And that was it. Nothing else ever occurred. No shadows, no furniture moving, no voices, no smells, no proper ghostly "materializations" or whatever you call it
Now, like 30 years after, the scientific method (not the raging, stubborn, pseudo-intellectual, jref commie atheist douchebaggery) seems to know something about it, which doesn't necessarily mean that such is the correct explanation, and it's very unlikely that I'll ever find out since they sold this house back in 1991 to some guy who demolished it very quickly to build his own, effectively ending any possibility of proper investigation.
The footsteps outside the front yard *could* be related to mere echo. The house was built near an unpaved road which some people used to walk to get to neighboring houses, and the way everything was placed made it possible for your footsteps to be replicated by the environment with like 1 second of delay, so if that happened there, couldn't it possibly explain the footsteps in our front yard, only that we didn't hear the people walking nearby but there echoed footsteps from afar instead?
The "oppressive atmosphere", that's been explained by infrasounds, which mess with your brains and even vision. We had a brook and an ancient gasoline-powered water pump making these very low-frequency noises which have been linked to scary places that creep the hell out of people for no apparent reason.
What is left to explain, as far as I'm concerned, is the staircase footsteps, that was certainly beyond anything an old wooden house or even echoed footsteps should have been able to produce in the worst case scenario.
That's pretty much it. Don't let the bed ghouls bite
