Interesting Things Found In Our Walls (and updates to our missing household items and more recent paranormal events)

 

Does this look too long? Don’t want to read it?

Summary: my great-great-grandfather built this house.150 years later, we found some interesting items inside the walls. Some other stuff also happened.

Summary too summarized? You better read on.

   As you faithful blog readers know by now, our family homestead was built in 1871. Although I don’t publicly advertise where exactly our house is  located in Nova Scotia, my great-great-grandfather, Simeon, left the community of Northfield (Upper or Lower—I just forget now) with his wife, Kate, their children and their belongings to move to our present community.

Simeon acquired a piece of land on the river, started a sawmill business, built a temporary house right beside it, and in his spare time cut the lumber to build the permanent house I am sitting in right now as I type this.

This was no small feat obviously; those of you who personally know me are aware of the size of the house. The foundation was/is a hand-dug rock lined dirt cellar. When I am in the cellar, I am still astounded it was created with no machinery. Some of those supporting boulders are absolutely gigantic. You think your back hurts…imagine how Simeon felt.

Even though Simeon could not read or write very well, he persevered and with the aid of a local carpenter (as reported by my mother) they built the house and a very large barn on the property. I am exhausted just thinking about all that he accomplished.

Simeon’s wife, Kate, needed a place to bake bread so he built a brick oven into the wall of the kitchen. A few times a week she would come up to the main house and bake her loaves in that oven. We still have that original bake oven but a closet has been built around it since it was first installed. Due to the need for a wood stove in the kitchen now, the wall that prevents you from openly seeing the brick oven cannot be removed without some major rearranging and renovating and rethinking the entire kitchen plan. I recall being a little girl and seeing the brick oven and large brick fireplace beside it and wondering why that was in a closet.

From the time we moved into the house with my elderly grandmother in 1974-1975, I loved poking around in the large walk-in attic upstairs as it was full of old stuff a five year old girl might be interested in: my mother’s porcelain-face dolls from the 1930’s, doll carriages from that era, antique furniture, old clothes (my mother’s wedding dress and my grandmother’s “wedding hat”), ancient books, my ancestors’ creepy belongings and household items. Everything was musty, having sat for at least 30-100 years. No one ever threw anything anyway, for a multitude of reasons: sentimental and financial value or just to preserve as heirlooms. Cobwebs and dust were abundant; spiders had a heyday in that old dark attic.

One of the items Simeon and Kate brought with them was their favorite rocking chair, making it one of the oldest antiques in our house. And since they had it before they even moved here, that makes the chair over 154 years old. It’s still in remarkable condition. It was not used all that much—it was more of a decorative item throughout the years. The ghosts have always seemed to like it. It’s been known to rock all on its own. This has been written about on my blog in older posts.

The first object I remember coming across that was just downright freaky to a five year old (and some adults I know) was an old shoe. My mother told the story of how it belonged to a girl who lived here—a relative from back in the 1800s—who died at a young age from tuberculosis. And now here was her shoe. Her very creepy lace up Little House on the Prairie type of shoe, the leather all wrinkled, the tiny tacks starting to jut out from where it was originally cobbled together, the sole trying to detach. It smelled exactly how you think an antique shoe of this calibre would smell after spending one hundred years in an attic. This was one thing I did not play with, I can assure you. I think MY soul partially detached thinking about this girl who died in our house so long ago.

If I remember correctly, around 1982 or so, my mother decided she needed her kitchen door replaced. My father had died the year before. Luckily, our neighbor was a carpenter so he agreed to do the replacement. It was in the midst of this endeavor that he came across an old coin down inside a wall. It was an 1871 penny. Being knowledgeable about such things, he informed my mother coins were often dropped inside walls of newly constructed houses “back in the day” to date the construction of the house.

There were not a lot of circumstances after that where sections of wall or baseboards had to be removed for repairs. So it was not until within this past year and a half during our in-depth renovation of various rooms that we began to find more-- and much more interesting--things in the walls.

We turned the only downstairs bedroom into a laundry room. During this endeavor, when baseboards were removed, two more shoes were found behind it, just as old and creepy as the first one.

Also found behind that particular baseboard was a small (empty) bottle which I am guessing was an old perfume bottle.

Actual photo of both shoes and the bottle: 

 About a month ago, another (also empty) bottle was also found behind the baseboard in our living room. It appears to be a medicine bottle from many years ago.

Not long ago, I learned the significance of these items and why they were purposely placed behind baseboards over a hundred years ago.

As long ago as the fourteenth century and mostly likely originating in Europe, being superstitious was very common, as well as a belief in evil spirits and the devil. To protect oneself from these supernatural forces, many people would place an old worn shoe in their house, usually under a hearth, near a window, or inside a wall. These shoes are known as ‘concealed’ or ‘concealment” shoes. Bottles (also known as ‘witches bottles’) were also placed in the same areas.

 The belief behind this was that if a dark force entered a home, it could be tricked into attacking a shoe, instead of the shoe’s owner, which leads me to believe that maybe the dark forces aren’t all that bright or they have questionable vision if they can’t tell a shoe from a person.

A bottle, which sometimes contained hair, urine, small bones, nails and pins, was supposed to entice and capture the entity, and the demon in question would hopefully impale itself upon the sharp instruments inside, and your paranormal problem would be solved before it even really began. They were believed to also be helpful in warding off witchcraft by trapping attached negative energy.

My ancestors that preceded Simeon Joudrey (my great-great-grandfather) have been traced back many generations to about 1430 in France. I suspect the practice of placing shoes and bottles in walls was a common tradition passed down throughout the generations. Simeon wasn’t taking any chances, implementing the use of at least three shoes that we know of (likely belonging to his children) AND bottles in the walls here. Makes you wonder how many more are hidden in our house.

I am not all that superstitious so the items we found are no longer in our walls but I am hanging onto them for now. They may have kept potential evil forces at bay but they sure haven’t done anything to deter the ghosts.

UPDATE to the incident on February 18, 2025: 

The cup of coffee and my bag containing hairdressing items has still not materialized. I’ve had to repurchase some of the haircutting things and my coffee mug shelf still has one empty spot.

In case you missed that original post, here it is:

https://nsparanormal.blogspot.com/2025/03/if-you-could-just-return-my-things-from.html

 

UPDATE to the blog post entitled “This Is What Goes On Inside a 150 year Old Closet”:

Incidentally I am relating this to what happened in the “closet” post because both have to do with doors.

Recently, on March 19^th, I was about to head to bed. It was around midnight. Shaun had already been in bed asleep for awhile and Winston (the resident fur-face) was camped out on his favorite loveseat upstairs.

I went into the kitchen to turn out some lights when I heard the door that leads up the back staircase unlatch. It has the exact same old latch that is on the upstairs closet door.

This door and staircase are no longer in use and have not been used for many years. Originally, the reason was mainly because it was pretty dark on those stairs and it led into an equally dark attic so why even go up there? Since then, we have new lights installed everywhere (in the stair area and attic---you could land a plane in there now, although I do not condone or recommend this) but we still don’t use those stairs. The placement of the fridge blocks stair access now anyway.

So because I heard the door unlatch, I naturally turned to look at it in my dimly lit kitchen. If someone or some thing is trying to open that door at midnight while I am standing there all alone, part of me wants to know who it is. The other part of me doesn’t want to know who it is but I can usually shut her up with a couple of true ghost stories.

I can see that the door has opened about an inch or so. It is clear this is what has happened and especially noticeable because the door is always tightly closed and latched. I am wondering who is possibly on the other side of that door looking back at me but because it is pretty dark in the kitchen and pitch black in the open space of the now-opened door, I can’t see anything in there.

I went into the bathroom (which is just off the kitchen) for about 3-4 minutes. When I came back out, I was fully expecting to see something resembling a ghost in my kitchen.

Reminder: the house is, without a doubt, haunted and I just witnessed a door unlatching and opening all by itself. See previous blog posts about why this is not caused by the wind, air pressure, the house settling or my imagination, if that’s the rabbit hole you are about to go down.

So what did I see in my kitchen? Nothing. But I did look towards the door that a few moments ago had opened by itself and it was now closed. Whoever was on the back staircase and opened the door to have a peek, must have closed it again and went upstairs to tuck themselves in bed for the night, as I did shortly thereafter.

Once again, wind, air pressure, the house settling or my imagination cannot do that.

This would be the end of this blog post if it hadn’t been for last night’s (March 23, 2025) incident.

It was around 11:30 p.m. I was continuing the writing of this blog post when overhead I clearly heard the sound of unmistakable footsteps. Shaun was upstairs asleep. Winston the cat was on his favorite loveseat upstairs asleep. Neither of them sound anywhere even close to these particular footsteps. There were 4 steps, right overhead of where I was sitting, so probably either in the smaller spare bedroom or just out into the hall at the top of the stairs. Within 15 minutes, I went upstairs to go to bed and did not hear or see anything further.

It is interesting that footsteps have become a more common event within the last two years in our house. Growing up here, there was lots of other paranormal activity but I don’t recall footsteps being encountered by anyone. When my mother lived here alone, she never reported hearing any either, but her hearing had started to fail so it’s hard to say if she just wasn’t hearing it, or if they weren’t happening then.

The other interesting thing about the footsteps when I hear them is that they are always very clearly footsteps, either overhead (upstairs) or on the stairs. It never sounds like someone in sock feet, which would be quite faint. It is always the sound of actual shoes on the floor.

When Scott was about five years old and we lived here for awhile, that year on Christmas Eve, he heard Santa Claus walking around in the living room. He excitedly told us the next morning that he woke up in the middle of the night and could hear Santa walking around downstairs in his big boots. When most children report something like this, you can chalk it up to their imagination.

In this house? Not so much.

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