This Is What Goes On Inside a 150 Year Old Closet

 

I had not intended to write another blog post just on the heels of last week’s, but there have been developments in relation to that topic so here we are.

Today we are going to talk about doors. Not the Jim Morrison kind; the kind that allow you to go from one room to another.

I had previously done a blog post about doors some years ago as there has been plenty of ongoing activity involving doors in our haunted house over the years.

Some of these incidents include:

• Doors opening by themselves
• Doors closing by themselves
• Door slamming by themselves
• Bangs on doors (loud bangs, not normal sounding knocks)
• Doors that could not be opened no matter how much force was exerted (as if someone was preventing it from opening)

These are just off the top of my head. Here is the previous blog post if you want to check it out:

 Knock Knock, Whos There?

As per the usual order of operations, I report on a ghostly encounter but also include a scientific possibility for what happened to the best of my ability. I do this because I want to ensure I have no other explanation for what has happened besides “ghost”, and also because the skeptics and cynics will think or say things like: ‘A door can’t move on its own. It was probably the wind or air pressure’.

I am not against skeptical thinking. But I’ve lived here long enough to know without a doubt that ghosts exist. And unless you have seen, heard or experienced one, I know how hard it must be to believe in the concept. Therefore, I will consider the skeptical viewpoints and  provide counter-reasons why “ghost” is probably the answer and “wind or air pressure” is not.

Which brings me to the doors. This house was built in 1871. Every door, with the exception of the main front door and the back door, are original. You can imagine how many layers of paint are on them. SO many that a lot of the doors do not close tight like a door in a house that has been recently built. I love these old doors with their old glass and ceramic knobs. They add a lot of character to a heritage home.

One of the doors in question is the one that goes from the kitchen to the dining room. It stays open most of the time as there is generally no need to close it. During recent renovations, Shaun shaved off some of the paint layers and it now closes properly should the need arise. However, for many many years this was not the case and if you attempted to actually close the door 100%, it would not. You’d be left with a 4 inch gap due to paint layers.

Why am I mentioning this? Because when my mother was still living here, there was the odd day here and there when she would be in the kitchen and watched that door close.

One day, it forcefully slammed shut. Remember how I said it could never really close all the way? It did on that day. A few minutes later, it re-opened on its own.

There was no other person in the house at the time of these incidents.

Which brings us to other plausible explanations we have to consider:

-Wind

-Air pressure

 Let’s look at the wind: It’s outside. On the days of the dining room door closing and slamming shut, no windows were open. I checked with my mother on that one. Let’s add to this the fact that only the window in the kitchen door was open-able by her but as I just said, it was not open during these events. Other windows in the house, at that time, were still pretty much “painted shut”, a favorite thing to do throughout the years for some reason. So with all windows closed, the outside wind could not be inside the house and blow a door shut. Or slam it. Or re-open it.

Other plausible cause: Air pressure. I won’t pretend to know all the scientific ins and outs of how air pressure flows through a house but I know the general properties of it. Heat and cold moving through air currents can potentially fluctuate through rooms in your house but I can hardly imagine it would do so at the rate required to close (and then re-open) or slam a door.

And as written about before, we have known beyond any doubt that we have ghosts. So put all that together and the opening, closing, re-opening and slamming of doors is most likely paranormal.

This brings me to the event that happened on this past Monday, March 10. The Saturday before (March 8) I had posted the latest blog post and mentioned at the end of that about the bang on the inside of an upstairs closet door.

Refresh your memory here: LINK

I shrugged it off as another ghostly encounter, which is a pretty normal thing for me to do.

So that Monday night, I decided I was going to sleep in that spare bedroom (the one with the aforementioned closet) because Shaun had some cold virus thing going on that I wanted to avoid by whichever means necessary. I considered the closet door noise but decided not getting sick outweighs any paranormal activity. Plus, what are the chances of additional noises coming from the closet? Pretty much nil, I decided, so I got in bed and closed my eyes around midnight.

The house was quiet. About 5 minutes had gone by when the exact same bang noise hit the inside of that closet door. Again.

I looked towards it. The door had not opened. The old fashioned latch had not popped up. It was just one fairly loud bang on the inside of that door.

So I did what any reasonable person would do in this situation: I picked up my favorite pillow and went back to my own bed. Hey-- a girl has to get some shut eye so she can work the next day.

In the morning, I glanced in that bedroom at the closet door. The latch was now popped open and the door was ajar a few inches. This had to have happened after I left the room.

Fortunately, our bedroom has had no paranormal events happening in it since we moved in 1.5 years ago, which is strange because when I was growing up here and even years later when we would visit, it was one of the most haunted rooms in the house. When I moved in, my little speech (“Hey ghosts! This is MY house now. I don’t want to see you at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night so if you could not do that, that’d be great.” ) probably made an impact on the spirits and they drifted to other favorite areas of the house.

Shaun and I had a good look at the closet and its door since these two events transpired. We’ve tried to replicate noises inside the closet that could possibly explain what happened, but nothing else explains what happened because both times it was CLEARLY someone or something making a bang on the inside of the door. It doesn’t take a genius to know what that sounds like, especially when you are just several feet away from the door in question.

The bedroom this door is in is supposed to become our bedroom after some minor renovations are complete. I don’t know why I agreed to this….besides the bangs on the closet door, this room also has a door that leads out into the hallway and another that leads into the large walk-in creepy attic. These doors have also been seen opening and closing on their own.

Should be some interesting days and nights ahead.

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