The September Paranormal Activity and How I Got Scared Half to Death

 

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know we are rarely lacking for paranormal activity. We usually do not have long stretches of time where nothing ghostly is happening. Prior to this past June, I spent almost every day in the house as I worked from home. As a result, I was witness to whatever shenanigans the resident ghosts were up to. This made for many blog posts and updates due to their ongoing activity.

Over the summer, my days spent at home were less frequent as I returned to the office part time. As my husband was also gone to work on certain days, this only left Winston, (the cat) to keep an eye on the place in our absence. If he saw or heard anything unusual during the days he was home alone, he has not told us about it. In his defense, he pretty much only talks about food anyway.

Therefore, I don’t have the usual volume of encounters to relay to you as I was only present on the haunted premises part of the time.

But I can tell you about the following occurrences.

September 10 was a day I was home alone working. It was early in the afternoon when I heard a very loud bang. This was not a knock or rapping sound. It was quite literally one BANG and not only did I hear it (as did Winston), I felt it. This entire house shook for about 2 seconds. Of course, as usual, I got up to go investigate. If an aircraft fell out of the sky onto my house, I’m gonna need to see that. I looked out all directions of the house. Nothing was found.

You’re probably thinking ‘earthquake’. Nova Scotia does not really have earthquakes. I say “not really” because we did actually have a little tiny one on September 16 (an unusual event for our province) but I believe it was in the very early morning hours (maybe 1 or 2 a.m.) and was not felt by us as we slept. Some residents in nearby communities reported feeling it, however. And as you can see, I heard/felt the bang on September 10 and the mini earthquake was on September 16.

You’re probably still thinking ‘earthquake’—like a preceding one leading up to the positively-identified one on September 16. Here are the reasons I do not believe the bang on September 10 was an earthquake:

-I’ve seen enough movies to know earthquakes generally create a rumbling sound of varying degrees and do not make a banging sound. There was no rumbling.

.-Buildings move slightly (or completely), dishes rattle in the cabinets, overhead lights sway, that sort of thing. None of this happened when the bang was heard. It was just a loud bang on the premises and the vibration of that bang caused the house to shake for 2 seconds. There is no other way to describe it. Earthquakes don’t do that.

-There is nothing under my house except a dirt cellar and pipes and nothing on the surrounding property that could cause a sudden bang. Nothing exploded or fell over.

Conversely, here are the reasons I think it was probably something paranormal:

This is not the first time this has happened here. My mother had told me about two incidents over the years where this exact same loud bang happened and the entire house shook. Both turned out to be forerunners---which is a paranormal prediction that a death in the family would soon happen (usually within 3 days). On one of these occasions, several people heard the bang in question and they all looked around as they were sure something either exploded or a car drove off the road into the house. The source was never found. But the deaths did occur. It has been 30 days since I heard the mysterious bang and no one in the family has died, thank goodness, so while I do not believe the bang was a forerunner, I do consider it paranormal.

What do I base that assumption on?

I base it on this: Unexplained noises in our house and on our property are always ongoing. If you’ve read the blog, you know we experience knocks, footsteps, rappings, music, voices, doors slamming, just to name a few. Bangs are also part of that—big and small. Yes, once in a while a noise can be heard that we can positively identify (wind, a mouse trap in the cellar snapping shut, a dumb squirrel who needs extrication from the bay window area—that sort of thing). But the unexplained mysterious noises are part of the mix and when investigated, no logical reason for them can be found. This brings us to paranormal explanations.

This would be a good time to point out that at the exact moment I heard the bang on September 10, I was texting with an acquaintance about his upcoming paranormal investigation of our house. We were discussing the house and the details of our upcoming get together when the bang happened.

So now you’re thinking: “Okay, it wasn’t an earthquake and if you think it was paranormal, then WHY? What in the world of paranormal activity causes such a noise?”

I ask the same exact questions. I really wish I could answer them with some certainty.

Fast forward 8 days. I happened to be at the office but mid-afternoon started to feel unwell and decided to call it a day and left for home. Once at home, I thought I’d lay down on my bed for a bit, due to the aforementioned crappy feeling. Winston was laying on my bedroom floor. The house was completely and peacefully quiet. I had been laying there for about 2 minutes when I heard “something” either in the largest spare bedroom or out in the walk-in attic. It wasn’t footsteps or shuffling around or furniture being moved. It sounded like someone had picked something up and set it down again loudly. I glanced at Winston to see if he was reacting to this noise. He was---his eyes were big and his ears perked up and he was staring intently out into the hall. I decided I probably was not going to get any rest so I headed downstairs, but I did glance in those rooms on my way by in case something was visible. It wasn’t.

We were alone in the house. Well, as alone as you can be in a haunted house.

A few days later another incident occurred. This one happens quite often actually. I was upstairs in my bedroom when I heard footsteps coming down the hallway. These are 154 year old floorboards we are talking about. When someone walks on them, you hear it.  As I heard it, I wondered if it was Shaun, although I had not heard him come up the stairs but as I was pondering this, I could hear him doing something outside with his noisy aluminum ladder. This confirmed it was not him walking down the hall. I was alone. Well, as I mentioned, as alone as you can be here.

And then a few days later, I had one of the biggest frights of all. It was a Saturday and I had been hoping to sleep in but that almost never happens due to that ole pattern of getting up early every work day and your body refuses to sleep past six or seven on the weekends. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.

Anyway, I had heard Shaun come up the stairs and go out into the walk-in attic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep so I decided to get up. I walked down the haunted hallway and stopped dead in my tracks when I was almost at the staircase, right in front of the spare bedroom door. There stood a person right in that bedroom doorway, looking at me silently. I could hardly believe my half-opened eyes and gasped. The moment I did, however, I realized that the person standing there was indeed Shaun. He wasn’t intentionally trying to scare the you-know-what out of me. He just happened to be there at that moment and decided to stay quiet so as not to startle me. That plan did not really work. You can’t do stuff like that in a genuinely haunted house.

The funny (and you might find this fact surprising) thing about ghosts and spirits is of all of the ones that have been seen on these premises, not a single one of them was ethereal and transparent. All of them appeared to be solid and life-like (except for the 2 swirly black misty shadow-ghost apparitions). But the ones who are clearly the ghost of whoever, looked just like you and me.

I was about to declare this blog entry as complete until a few days ago when yet another weirdo thing happened. And although it technically happened in October and this was supposed to be a September update, I’ll throw it in anyway. I cannot definitively say this incident is paranormal but I cannot imagine what else it could possibly be. I know every nook and cranny of this entire house and every single sound it is capable of making and what happened on this day is completely unexplainable.

Picture it: once again I was home alone. It was lunch time so I was in the midst of making something to eat when an acquaintance (Bob) stopped by to have a preliminary look in the kitchen area for some upcoming work he has been hired to do. He knows nothing of the paranormal activity that goes on here. I am also not about to tell him. He will be here working for a few days and I don’t need him fleeing the premises due to paranormal encounters.

As soon as he came through the door and he stood in the kitchen, a loud crazy noise came out of the dining room. Winston was in the kitchen with me (where else would he be at meal times?). The only way I can describe the noise is it sounded similar to a squelchy screechy interference noise, like if you held two walkie-talkies together and pressed the buttons and got that irritating feedback sound. Only it was extremely loud. There are no walkie-talkies in my house. There is an Echo Dot speaker hooked up to the stereo in a cabinet in the dining room but the stereo was turned off and the Echo speaker is always on mute, as I confirmed shortly thereafter that it still was muted. No sound could have come from the stereo.

As we were both startled by this sudden burst of noise, Bob looked at me and I looked at him, both of us quite unsure what was happening. I asked him if that was his phone making such a strange sound, even though it was clear it came from the dining room but I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t very well say, ‘Oh don’t mind that racket, it’s just a ghost expressing its displeasure at the work you are about to do’, now could I?

Bob said the noise did not come from him and that he had left his phone outside in his truck. Which, of course, I already knew it did not come from Bob. It definitely came from my house.

I changed the subject pretty quick and we talked about the work he was going to do and he left. I hope he wasn’t too bothered by what happened. I need him back here next week.

I took a few random pictures of my dining room after Bob left, hoping something would materialize but a review of the pics showed nothing unusual.

Again I have to reiterate, this was not really a noise I have actually heard before. It was similar to the walkie-talkie noise I described but doesn’t 100% capture how it sounded. It was definitely abnormal so it’s getting filed under ‘paranormal’ as I can’t logically explain it.

Lastly, I think it should be noted that as we are constantly renovating different areas of the house, the home office/computer area is currently being moved to an upstairs unused bedroom. Why am I telling you this? Because LOTS of times when I am downstairs, I hear noises, footsteps and movement from that bedroom. It was the room that was the source of the “3 thumps forerunner” three days before my mother’s death. It was my bedroom throughout my childhood. It was my son’s bedroom for a few years. We can both testify to the fact that lots of paranormal things happened in there. But then again, they happen in every room of the house.

I am finishing this blog post from that room, fairly late at night, lit only by a dim desk lamp. I do not scare easy.

So am I going to continue to hear things from the bedroom in question while I am sitting in it? Am I going to hear more footsteps on the stairs and out in the hall, as they are right outside the door? Is the door going to creak open all by itself?

Time will tell. You’ll be the first to know. Stay tuned.

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Positively Identifying Our Ghosts

 

You might not be comfortable with this fact but back in the mid to late 1800s, there were no hospitals or funeral homes nearby like there are today. When any of our ancestors who lived in my house became ill, the doctor would make a house call and if need be, perform surgery right here in this house. If the patient didn’t make it—and some did not—the funeral was held in what is now my living room and home office space. This was common practice. Back then, they called it “the good room”, which was fancier than the other rooms in the house and it was only used when someone as dignified as a clergy member would come visit or you needed to have a funeral. When we visited my grandmother here before moving here, we were never allowed in the good room. Heaven forbid we disturb the pristine condition of the room.

But I digress.

So the doctor would knock out the patient with whatever he had: chloroform, ether, laughing gas, opium or alcohol (homemade moonshine comes to mind) and proceed to   lay out the victim..I mean ‘patient’ …on the kitchen table (yes the kitchen table! I guess he needed the most sturdy surface in the house and at a good height to operate from) and slice them open to attempt to cure the patient.

This horrifying set up is enough to imbed the fear and near-death turmoil into the old lathe walls, roof and very foundation of this house. And if you didn’t survive and your funeral is being set up the next day in the parlour room, that would just put the final nail in the coffin, no pun intended. The more traumatic the death, the more likely the site is to be haunted.

So that might be all the reason you need when you ask why are there ghosts in my house?? And maybe why there aren’t any in yours.

Of course, this is not the only reason for ghosts and spirits to lurk around. I would imagine there are many.

Speaking of being haunted, in addition to being asked by people if I have recently seen any ghosts in our house, I also often get asked if I know who exactly these ghosts are.

Of all the reported sightings (by myself and others) only a handful could be positively identified.

Below is a list of the positive identifications we have made over the years. Bear in mind, we can only I.D. the ones we have actually seen and cannot say with 100% certainty who is responsible for the myriad of noises (footsteps, knocks, bangs, voices, etc) that happen. Who is causing those is anyone’s guess.

The ghost seen most often is my maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Ramey (Lizzie).

 I have written about her a fair amount elsewhere on the blog, largely due to the fact of the number of times she has been seen in the house long after her death.

Background info:

She was born in our house in 1891 and lived to be 90 years old. We attribute this milestone age to a few different things:

#1: Luck. Back in those days, a bout of the flu or something much less curable such as tuberculosis was taking out people left, right and center. So the fact that she escaped all the potentially lethal diseases she could have contracted was pretty impressive.

#2. Medications. Remember the large 4 liter ice cream containers you used to be able to buy? My grandmother had one of those FULL of pills that her so-called doctor prescribed for her--even though there was very little, if anything, wrong with her. All she had to do was show him a broken fingernail and he’d shove 6 prescriptions at her. She loved it. Also, she was known to get into a bottle of brandy and her homemade chokecherry wine several times a day. I would say she felt pretty good most of the time from this combination, which possibly contributed to prolonging her life.

#3. Attitude. To say some of the Joudreys were stubborn is a bit of an understatement   from what I heard about some of them over the years. My grandmother 100% had this trait. (I may also have it). So when she insisted that she was never leaving her house for any reason, she meant it. She was completely against going into any nursing home or anything else even remotely resembling one and was hell bent on staying in her house until her dying day.

So she did manage to live in her house right up until the last few days of her life (which she spent in the hospital) and true to her word, she has never entirely left the house as she has been seen here multiple times following her death in 1981.

Number of times she has been seen: 5

Number of witnesses to Lizzie’s ghost: 3 (2 people saw her twice)

Evidence besides eye witness testimony: She showed up in a photograph taken of the outside of the house many years after her death. Her face is very clearly in a window. (see ghost #3 below)

Conclusion: Obviously, she is not here constantly. But based on the reports of her spirit seen on the premises 5 times, I can say with 100% certainty that she definitely comes to visit. In 3 out of the 5 sightings, she was interacting with the witness and not simply appearing suddenly in a residual kind of way, oblivious to her own whereabouts.

When I say interacting, this is what I mean:

Two of the incidents involved her staring menacingly at the witnesses. She could see them. They could see her; just like an interaction between two living people. In a third incident, she stood next to my aunt who was in bed and had her arms outstretched towards her, as if she wanted an embrace. Again, they were clearly seeing each other.

She has been interactive in other ways also. One time, quite a few years after her death, she called my mother on the phone. And many years ago I heard her call my name when I was in the kitchen.

Do I believe she is still here? Most definitely. I concluded that the ongoing noises in the dining room when no one is in there is likely her shuffling around and moving about because she always sat in her rocking chair in that room beside the window. It was her favorite spot. I fully expect to see her one day.

 

The second ghost we have positively identified is Willie Joudrey.

Background info:

He was the son of my great-great-grandparents and Willie’s father, Simeon, built our house. When Willie was 5, he came down with the measles and died here in 1873.

Around the year 2000, I was asleep in an upstairs bedroom when I was awoken by the bedroom door opening. When your door opens in this house in the middle of the night, you sit up and take notice. There stood a small boy. Part of me knew this was not my son, who was also 5 and supposed to be asleep across the hall in his room. But I was trying to be reasonable. And there were no other children on the premises. I was 100% not asleep and dreaming this.

I immediately got up, at which time the boy laughed and turned and ran out into the hall from the direction he had come from. I followed but found no one in the hall. I went in my son’s room. He was asleep. Sound asleep—I checked in case this was some prank by him. It definitely wasn’t.

The next day while telling my mother of this incident, she concluded it was probably little Willie, based on the ancestral tree of those who have lived and died here.

Number of times he has been seen: 1

Number of witnesses to Willie’s ghost: 1

Evidence besides eye witness testimony: Previously on the blog, I recounted the incident of mysterious child-size footprints that appeared on the living room floor mid-renovation.

Refresh your memory here:   LINK

As we know there is a child ghost in the house (because I have seen him) these footprints could belong to him. Other young family members have also died here in the 1800s so I cannot say with 100% certainty the footprints are Willie’s but it is very likely.

When my son was young, he would often refer to an imaginary playmate and sometimes wanted a place set at the table for him. Once, I heard him outside playing in the snow having a conversation with someone, but when I looked he was out there all by himself. This does not mean he was interacting with a ghost but it’s a possibility since they were, and are, on the premises.

Within the last year there was also a day when I heard little quick footsteps on the stairs, which seemed like what a child would sound like if they were going up or coming down the stairs. Once, again, I attributed this to Willie.

Conclusion:

We know he’s around ever since his appearance in my bedroom that night. He probably had a traumatic death here being sick with the measles with little to no treatment as anti-virals hadn’t been invented yet. He appeared to me once, maybe he will show up again. Let’s do it in the daytime next, okay, Willie? Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of him.

 

The third identifiable ghost is my father, Murray.

Background info:

He died in our house in 1981 from a sudden massive heart attack at age 51.

Number of times he has been seen: 1, in a photograph taken many years after his death.

Number of witnesses to Murray’s ghost: 0

Evidence besides eye witness testimony: While my father has not been seen in the traditional sense like other ghosts have, there are indications he has been around. I have included him in this post about “ghosts we’ve seen” because the picture I took of the outside of the house one day shows him clearly in the dining room window, above the ghost of my grandmother (Lizzie), who died the same year he did. That's his face in the top circle, looking off to the side, while my grandmother (bottom circle) appears to be looking straight ahead, at me. This is pretty solid proof he has been here after his death. My mother was sure he was responsible for the kitchen light coming on by itself not long after he died, although she was assuming so once again, we cannot be completely certain it was him.

The picture:

My father for comparison:

Conclusion:

The picture speaks for itself. I was innocently playing with my camera that day and decided to take a few shots of the house. When I took a closer look at my amateur photography, I was quite astounded to see my father and grandmother looking out the window. If this is not proof that these two were posing for the camera that day, then I don’t know what is. Showing up unexpectedly in a picture is the same as materializing right in front of someone. It’s still proof a ghost was here.

 

So this is three of our ghosts that we can actually put a name to. Who the other spirits are/were (and there were lots of sightings spanning many years) who like to drop in from time to time is anyone’s guess. A long list of relatives have lived here since 1871. Any one of them could come back at any time. And this doesn’t account for the 5 ghosts my mother has seen on the premises, which she could not identify. Or the one my brother saw in an upstairs bedroom in the 80’s who he could not identify. Or the one I saw in the upstairs hallway in 1996 who I could not identify.

It has been fairly quiet as far as ghostly activity is concerned over the last couple of months. As I have mentioned quite a few times, this is normal. No one has ghosts 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I don’t know why but that’s just not how they operate. Of course, they could be around more and we just don’t happen to notice. I have reminded them they better get their act together as I have blog to write so hopefully something will happen again soon.

Lastly, for those of you who aren’t aware, our house was recently written about in the book “Even More Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia” by the award-winning author, Vernon Oickle, published in August 2025. I suggest you pick up a copy of this intriguing new release as soon as possible. There’s lots of haunted places in Nova Scotia you need to know about.

LOTS.

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