Ridge Paranormal Happenings #5: Signs of a haunting

How can you tell if your house is haunted? The signs of a possible haunting have been consistent since stories started to be written down thousands of years ago.

Here is a list of some of the most common signs of a haunting.

• Feelings of being watched or that someone is near you, when there is no other physical presence there.
• Feelings that someone or something has touched you. Cobwebs, a tug on your sleeve, etc. Something that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
• Feeling a cold spot or a temperature drop, or a feeling of dread or discomfort in one certain spot.
• Lights coming on and off or flickering.
• Sounds that when you go to investigate don’t appear to have a cause – footsteps, things being dropped, whispers, crashes and bangs. Odors that you can't find a source for - perfume, cooking, flowers, smoke.
• Seeing unexplained shadows, or something moving out of the corner of your eye, or sometimes lights – these are known as orbs.
• Strange behavior from your pets - dogs barking at things, cats staring at things, that you don’t see.
• Objects moving on their own. Cabinet doors, windows, doors opening and closing.

Most people have experienced one or more of these signs to a degree, and it’s usually easy to dismiss them with rational explanations. And those explanations are probably true in most cases.

For example, you could have sworn you left your keys on the table and here they are on the sofa. How did they get there? They must have slipped out of your pocket…. And that’s most likely what did happen.

Then again, you just saw the lamp turn on and off on its own. There must be a short in the wiring…. And that’s probably true.

But now you just felt a tap on the shoulder, and you’re there alone. It must just be the twinges of aging….

Or maybe it isn’t.

To illustrate some of the signs, these following stories were compiled from experiences reported by people on the Ridge.

“A lot of strange things happened in the house I grew up in. One night when my mother was alone, she saw a woman in an old-fashioned dress kind of glide down the stairs and vanish at the last step. My brother saw the same woman outside his bedroom door on another night. We sometimes felt someone tucking in our covers in bed. One evening we were all watching TV in the living room and heard a terrible crash in the kitchen and the sound of breaking glass. We rushed in there and – nothing. Everything was just as it should be. At first I was scared when these things happened, but then we all just got used to it. Whatever it was never harmed any of us.”

“Shortly after we moved into our house, I was home alone with the dog and we fell asleep on the sofa. Suddenly the dog woke up and started growling and rushed upstairs to the spare bedroom. He went crazy barking at an empty rocking chair that had been left by the previous owner. I couldn’t see or hear anything out of the ordinary, but the dog just would not calm down. I remembered that when we had looked at the house, an old man, the owner who was moving to a nursing home, had been sitting in the rocker. When my husband came home, he took the chair out to the trash. We never had another experience.”

“My aunt stopped staying with us because she felt like she was always being watched. The shadows freaked her out, too. Sometimes there would be a strong smell of roses but there was no garden at our house. Other times we would smell cigarette smoke but none of us smoked. We would hear sounds that we could never pin down – footsteps on the stairs, whispers in the closet, doors opening and closing. Sometimes it sounded like someone was crying. None of us ever saw anything or were physically bothered. There was just a really creepy feeling to the place. My folks had the house blessed and it got better for a while but after they left the house, I heard from a neighbor that the new owners had the same things happen.”

In the next blog: Why are there so many ghost stories connected to the Ridge?