Knock Knock. Who's there?

It is very cliché when talking about ghosts to hear tales of doors opening and closing by unseen hands. However, in the house that this blog is about, this very thing has happened countless times over the years. In a house known to be haunted with plenty of unexplained activity in it, I would be surprised if it didn’t have doors opening and closing with no scientific explanation.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would a ghost bother opening a door when they can apparently walk right through walls?”

This is a great question and probably one of the first I will ask, should I ever get the opportunity to have a good old-fashioned gab session with a disembodied spirit. (Believe me, I have questions.) I would assume the opening and closing of doors is because they want us to know they are there. Like all the times they spin coffee mugs through the air. Or walk around on creaky floorboards overhead. Or bang on the  walls of the unoccupied bedroom upstairs. Or rock in empty rocking chairs. Or call us on the phone. The list goes on and on. 

Who knows why they do anything? They have their own agenda to which we are not privy. It’s like they think it is none of our business or something. They live in our houses but apparently think they don’t have to answer to us if they don’t want to. 

The very first incident I heard of doors mysteriously opening and closing in our house was when I was a young girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old. Hearing adults talking about weirdness and unexplained goings-on was just second nature during my childhood. It concerned me and freaked me out of course, like it would any kid, as it was obviously going on in my own house and I spent a lot of time playing by myself upstairs. I was usually scared to some degree to go to bed at night but I got used to it after a while and came to accept it as the way my life was. 

 As you have probably read elsewhere on this blog, I did hear a lot of noise coming from the empty spare bedroom that shared a wall with my bedroom. It was always a “spare” room so no one was ever in there. No living people, anyway.

So as I said, the first time I remember hearing about doors opening and closing on their own was very interesting and startling to me. The incident happened to a family member. He was in the largest upstairs bedroom one afternoon. He would have been a young adult at this time. My mother always said he told her he was reading on his bed. There is a door leading into the bedroom from the large walk-in attic and another door that leads out into the front hallway where the other bedrooms are. Suddenly, he looked up from his book as the door leading into the attic was opening. No one was there but it opened all the way. In a few seconds the other door opened, as if someone had come into the room through one door and exited through the other.

Currently, my son sleeps in that bedroom. There is now a sliding lock on the door that goes into the attic. He often locks it, goes to work, and comes home to find it unlocked. His elderly grandmother is the only other person in the house and she is not able to climb the stairs.

In the walk-in attic, there is also a set of rickety dark stairs leading down to another door that opens up into the kitchen. This door doesn’t close one hundred percent tight, thanks to many layers of paint around the door and casing over the last hundred years. But it does close enough that you can consider it “shut”. I agree it can become slightly ajar because of this but there is a handful of people (myself included) who have been in the kitchen and happened to look towards it at just the right moment when it has opened way further than you would expect due to natural movement in the kitchen or because the house is ‘settling”. It opens a LOT on its own.

 When my mother was a little girl, an older family member used that back staircase regularly when it was time to go to bed. He would take his lantern, traipse up those back stairs, through the two bedroom doors mentioned above and settle in for the night in what is now the “spare” bedroom. Does he still take that route at the end of the day? Possibly. 

Just off the kitchen is a wonderful pantry. And in the pantry there is a door that leads into a typical dirt-floor cellar. While there has been a lot of “activity” in the pantry, nothing unusual goes on in the cellar that anyone is aware of. However, over the span of many years there have been very loud, unexplained banging noises on that cellar door (from the cellar side) to which no explanation can be found. Not like knocking, but like loud “I’ll-bust-this-door-right-down” banging. It never usually lasts long. If you open the door and look, there is never anything visible. Lots of people have heard it. It is totally random. No one has an answer.

One particular occurrence of this was the day my mother’s friend passed away. My son and mother were the only ones in the house. Before they were notified of the death, that cellar door slammed shut (so it must have also been opened first by whoever or whatever) with an alarming noise. My son went to investigate and tried to open it but this time could not budge it even a little. It normally opens no problem, with absolutely no resistance. Finally, he hit the door as hard as he could and it finally gave. Nothing visible was responsible. Was this a forerunner to the death they would soon learn about? Did the deceased come by to let them know her time had come? Again, the answer is “possibly”. 

In a previous blog post entitled More Recent Haunted Events at the Homestead from 2011, I mentioned how my mother had experienced the dining room door slamming shut very forcefully while she was in the adjoining kitchen. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is no wind blowing through the house. Cats can’t slam doors. There is no reasonable explanation for such things to be happening. Yesterday, my mother told me of another incident. She was sitting at the kitchen table last week and suddenly the dining room door just simply closed. Then immediately after, it opened right back up (she keeps it open all the time). She is used to all of this by now, so doesn’t get alarmed too much.

There have been other door-related incidents over the years, such as the door knob on the spare room door rattling in the middle of the night while people slept in there, to more recently the ghost of a deceased cat clawing and scratching at the front door to be let in. It stands to reason that since ghosts/spirits/etc can exert enough energy to move objects, make noise and sometimes even materialize, they can just easily open and close a door when they want to.

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Paranormal Pets (The Cat Came Back)

There have always been pets in our family: dogs, cats, rabbits, and once for a short time, a little lamb and a couple of wild raccoons. My father was known for taking any animal that was up for grabs so I don’t really ever remember a time when there wasn’t at least one pet.

Cats seemed to dominate the scene over the years, probably based on the facts that they were so easy to get free of charge, easy to look after and of course cuddly.

But as with any furry friend, there comes a time when their short lives come to an end.

Around the year 2000, my mother had one cat named Roy. My son was around five at the time and of course, loved cats. I don’t recall what happened to Roy but he did die around this time. Shortly afterwards, my brother, my son and I were in the kitchen at my mother’s house. Suddenly, we heard a cat clearly meowing outside the front door. We all sort of looked at each other because as a rule, deceased cats who have been interred generally do not show up on the doorstep crying to be let in the house. My son became pretty frightened and asked,” What is that??”

My brother opened up the door and I was wishing terribly hard for Roy NOT to be sitting there (so as not to scare the crap out of my kid) while at the same time wishing he WAS sitting there, because let’s face it: a ghost cat would be pretty awesome to see.

Well, wouldn’t you know it….no cat was visible. I made up some lie about the wind blowing around the side of the house making a weird noise that sounds sort of like a cat so my son would stop asking questions about a pet very obviously returning from the “other side”.

He bought it that time but we did hear it a time or two after that so I point blank told him what I thought it was. He spent a lot of time in that house and was well acquainted with the supernatural, which we downplayed as much as we could. But like I did (growing up there), I am sure he spent many hours, especially at bedtime, wondering what he would hear or see before dawn broke the next day.

My mother has also reported that Roy made a few visits to her bedside shortly after he died, as she could feel him on the bed beside her, just like the way he used to cuddle up next to her every night of his life. She says she could hear his happy little purrs.

Eventually, ghost Roy seemed to fall to the wayside.

And then my mother got a dark little furry guy named Casey. Casey lived to be about 13 or 14, I believe, and died December 2017, due to complications from his advanced age.

My mother claimed he was her best friend; always eating breakfast with her, keeping her company during the day and listening to her every word, and going to bed with her at night. He was definitely a smart little fellow in his younger days. I remember once when he was just a few years old, my mother was lying down and not feeling well with declining blood sugar. Casey knew something was wrong and cried and cried until she got up and he led her to the shelf she keeps her medications on, at which point she remembered she hadn’t taken it.


He loved roaming around outside, sometimes staying away for a couple of days at a time, causing her to worry and think he’d never come back. But he always did. He would sit on the doorstep and make scratching noises near the doorknob so someone would let him in. In his later years, he just sort of sat on the doorstep and softly meowed and didn’t manipulate the doorknob anymore.

I spoke to her today and as always, I asked my usual question: “Any ghosts around?” To which she replied, “No, I don’t think so, except Casey was here a few times.”

(She said this as casually as if she is telling me it’s going to snow tomorrow)

“What do you mean Casey was there? Like, you’ve seen him?” I asked.

My interest was definitely piqued for several reasons: One, we can add this to the pile of unexplained things in her house. Two, this is even more proof of some sort of life after death/spirit thing. And three, the “Ghost Animals” blog post can be created.

(She hadn’t given me anything to work with lately as she had not noticed anything unusual going on—I spent several days there over Christmas and nothing happened then, either. Sigh..if only they performed on command)

Then she told me she heard the gentle jiggling of the doorknob, just like Casey used to do when he wanted to come in. In recent days, it has occurred three times. Once, she went to the door to look, but could not see anything.

If I had to guess, I’d say he will probably show up next on her bed. Maybe once it’s dark and she has settled down for the night.

This is not the only incident of a pet coming home again after its death that I am personally aware of.

Our fourteen year old dog had to be euthanized several years ago. She was quite a character, well behaved and smart. We buried her beside the lake by our house where she loved to play. We returned to the house afterwards and my son and I were in a downstairs bedroom when we heard her chain collar jingling as she came meandering down the stairs and plopped into her creaky wicker basket.

We looked at each other. “Did you just….?” I was going to ask my son. With wide eyes, he looked at me, I looked at him and we both looked into the hallway where her familiar basket still sat.
"She's come home," he said.

Yup, she most definitely did.

Want to read about other paranormal pets?
Oscar the Grim Reaper

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