History of the Homestead

The house I grew up in was built around 1871 and has always been in my family. It is in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, but for obvious reasons, I cannot reveal the exact location.

Many people have been born there, and many have also died there, although I can attest to the fact that some of the deceased have continued to call this house their home. They have never been threatening, but they like their presence to be known, either through tricks they play, noises they make, or simply by materializing. On ocassion, they have been downright destructive. I have been witness to all of these events, as have other family members.

I have spent most of my childhood here. I moved away as a young adult, and then back again about 10 years ago. Upon returning, the ghostly activity increased, or was perhaps more noticeable than it was when my mother lived there alone. Either way, there was no mistaking that we had regular visits from the beyond.

Several days after moving back in, the first incident occurred. My five year old son was sleeping in the bedroom that was mine when I was young. To comfort him at bedtime, I had put a nightlight into a wall outlet. Being old, the outlet did not readily accept plugs so I had to forcefully jam it in and also pull hard to remove it every morning. One night as my son slept in that room, I stepped out into the hallway that separated our bedrooms to find his room in total darkness.

Assuming the bulb in the nightlight had blown, I went in to investigate. I was shocked to find the nightlight laying on top of his dresser on the other side of the room. He remained fast asleep in his bed. Immediately, I felt a spine tingling chill, plugged the nightlight back in and retreated to my bedroom for the night. There is no way my son could have removed the nightlight himself. He was clearly asleep and never wakes in the night. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't remove it from the wall, as it jams in so tightly.


The nightlight came out of the wall and sat upon his dresser every night for two weeks. Finally, in the daylight, I requested to no one in particular, that it would be helpful to leave it plugged in to provide some light at night. After that, it did not come out of the wall again.

Not only do spirits enjoy playing with nightlights, they also like to play with regular light switches. Shortly after my father died, the kitchen light would snap on by itself in the middle of the night. Sometimes it went back off by itself too. After the third time this happened, my mother had the switch replaced but the light continued to turn on by itself.

The ghosts also enjoy the Christmas tree. One year they turned solidly- lit sets of tree lights into blinking ones. I turned them back into non-blinkers, but the next day, they were blinking again. We decided to leave that alone after that. If the ghost wants blinking lights, then blinking lights it is.

There are noises of all kinds regularly. Music of unknown origin suddenly begins and stops, footsteps, and creaking floorboards can be heard where no one is walking. Thumps, bangs, knocks, and voices are quite common. On more than one occasion I have clearly heard someone call my name when I have been alone in the house. It was a woman's voice, most likely my grandmother, who has been seen in the house since she passed away.
I had heard unmistakable pacing outside my closed bedroom door late at night. I have heard pacing IN my bedroom late at night. Recently, there have also been incidents of various people hearing car doors slamming outside when there are no cars there and people talking, where there are no people. A rocking chair has been heard rocking at night in the kitchen where there is no rocking chair now, although there had been at one time, many years ago.


Shelves of ornaments and vases have crashed to the floor on two separate occasions. The hardware for the shelves stayed firmly intact on the wall and it appeared as if someone had picked one edge of the shelf up and forced it to the floor. This happened to two different shelves, so it is not the instability of one certain shelf.

There is a spare bedroom reserved for guests that the ghosts seem to enjoy very much. My mother keeps the bed made up, completely wrinkle free at all times and has a lock on the outside of the door to prevent the cat from wandering in. At any given moment, one can enter this bedroom and find the bed totally messed up, the blankets strewn about, or an indentation in the bed as if someone has been, or still is, sitting on it. Within the past year, the indentation in the bed appears to be slightly dirty.

Guests are always forewarned...sometimes things happen to them, sometimes they don't.

My aunt and uncle from another province spent every summer for 25 years there, and that spare bedroom was where they slept. My uncle NEVER heard or saw anything ( or never told us), but my aunt clearly saw my dead grandmother standing beside the bed looking down at her one time. My aunt also insisted one corner of the room felt cold. I have felt that corner and never interpreted it as cold though.

My brother and sister-in-law slept in that room a few times during visits. She is so scared of the house that she will NOT stay alone in it for one minute. She had no choice but to sleep there though, and thought my brother would protect her if anything happened.

Well the very last time they slept in that room, my brother slept the whole night through, but she heard something scratching at the foot of the bed during the night and rattling the doorknob. She swears on a stack of bibles she will never ever sleep in there again.

I have slept in there several times during visits but never saw or heard anything unusual. However, it shares a wall with the bedroom I had as a child and when I was about 10 or 11, there were many nights I would run downstairs, scared to death because of all the bumps and knocks on the wall that connected the 2 bedrooms.

Much to my surprise, I have actually laid eyes on two ghosts. The first incident happened when I was wallpapering a bedroom. I was cleaning up and turned towards the door and there stood a man watching me. He was wearing a long sleeved white shirt, had his arms crossed and was watching me intently. He was gone in seconds but I had definitely seen him.He was no one I recognized.

The second incident happened a few months later. I awoke one night to find my bedroom door being opened and there stood a child in the dim light of the hallway...and it wasn't my child-- he was sound asleep in his bed.

I got up, very startled, and the child giggled and turned and ran into the hallway. On instinct I called out and said not to run out there in the dark because of the danger of falling down the stairs. Two seconds later, I was at the top of the stairs in the hallway, dimly lit by my son's nightlight and the child apparition was gone. I could see my son asleep in his bed from where I stood in the hallway.

Occasionally, strange smells can be detected throughout the house. A very perfumey smell is the most common one, much like a lady's perfume. It lingers for a while, then fades away.It is most common when my mother spring cleans, and washes all of her deceased mother's antique dishes. Other times, we have smelled something burning, but have never found a cause after much investigating.

A very common occurrence is the disappearance and reappearance of things. The items are mostly household objects, but there have been times that clothes have disappeared. Most of the time, the missing articles reappear in very obvious places as if suddenly placed there. They may disappear for minutes, days or weeks. One very interesting item that moved about by itself was a broom that had been stored in an upstairs attic, packed away amongst boxes. It would have taken a lot of work and effort to get to the broom, yet one day in the dead of winter it appeared outside on the front doorstep. With only my mother, my son and me living there, we knew neither of us had touched it.

A very unusual incident occurred in the bedroom I slept in there, about eight or nine years ago. I awoke one day to find a burn mark in the carpet near the bedroom door. It was in the exact shape of a hoof-print. About six other people witnessed it and no one could explain what it was or how it got there. The carpet fibers were actually melted into this very obvious shape. The next day it began to fade until a couple of days later when it was completely gone.

Eventually, I moved 100 kms away but my mother says things still happen there. She now lives there alone.The most recent ghostly activity is the mewing and purring of my mom's deceased cat. It has been witnessed by four people, including myself. This would explain the slightly dirty indentation that keeps appearing on the bed in the spare bedroom.

                      

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