OK, I'll post some of my better experiences while living in the haunted house.
The house actually belonged to my wife's grandfather and they had converted the upstairs into an apartment. It is on approximately 800 E. and 1100 S. and is well over 100 years old. I think we looked it up once and it is closer to 150 years old. I spent a good deal of time there while we dated and eventually moved in when we married. I lived there for about 2 years.
When I first met my wife she lived in the apartment by herself with my 1 year old daughter. On our first date we stopped by so she could grab something and she invited me in. When we walked into the kitchen every single cupboard and every single drawer was open or pulled out. She looked at me kind of funnily and started quickly closing everything. I didn't think much of it. I just thought maybe she had been looking for something earlier and had to hurry out the door for work. Nothing more was mentioned about this. I found out later that it was a common occurrence to come home and find everything opened like that.
Over the next several weeks I spent more and more time there and there was always odd noises, movement out of the corner of your eye, unexplained reasons for odd objects to either disappear or be found in the middle of the floor. Nothing really crazy but stuff that would make you think, "What the hell? How did this get here?" One day I casually mentioned that there must be a ghost, just making a joke. My wife jumped all over that and said that she was glad I had noticed. I took me aback somewhat as I was joking but she proceeded to tell me about all sorts of weird crap that would go on up there.
I wasn't sure what to think as everything I had experienced up to that point could easily be explained on a cat, the house being very old or an active imagination. I actually started to tease my wife somewhat. As I was teasing her, I was bending over to dig out a bowl of cat food from the bin where it was kept. As I was scooping it out the light bulb over my head literally exploded. Not just pop and burn out. It shattered and rained hot glass down on my head. Incandescent bulbs simply do not shatter when they go out.
Once I moved in more and more stuff started to happen. I’m of the opinion that there were at least 2 ghosts that were present. One seemed to be an older, more caring spirit that liked to help and take care of things. If we would leave the windows open during the day and it started to rain, we would come home to closed windows. The other seemed to be a younger, joking spirit that would play tricks and hide things or make loud noises. This ghost also seemed to have an intense interest in my daughter. A lot of the crazier things that happened involved or were directly associated with my daughter.
On one occasion my wife bought a very expensive winter coat for our daughter. There was some “intense discussion” regarding the purchase of a $120 coat for a 1 year old. 3 days later the coat came up missing. We checked her daycare, our parent’s homes, anywhere she would have been the past couple of days that it might have been left. We could not find the coat anywhere which ticked me off even more. About 2 weeks later we came home from visiting my wife’s parents and the coat was sitting right in the middle of the kitchen floor.
We were forever buying new baby bottle nipples as these disappeared at a rate that was mind boggling. We never did find them even when we moved and cleaned everything out.
I had a large aquarium in my daughter’s room. The top of it was a good 5’ off the ground. Very early one morning, about 4 am, I could hear her playing in her room and went in to see if I could get her back in bed. I found her sitting on top of the tank playing with a couple of stuffed animals. There was no way this little girl could physically get herself on top of this tank.
One night my wife and I had my younger brother babysit for us while we went out. As he had been sitting there on the couch watching TV it had started to rain. The windows in the living room all closed by themselves one by one. As he sat there not daring to even move he said he was able to convince himself that he may have imagined it. He also needed to use the bathroom in the worst way. Just as he decided everything was OK and he could get himself to the bathroom it stopped raining. All of the windows opened themselves back up. He nearly wet himself. When we got home he was sitting on the couch in a fetal position with this look of terror on his face. Poor 12 year old kid had not left the couch in 2 hours just hoping that we would get home so he could go pee.
There were always footsteps in the middle of the night, loud bangs, and sometimes you knew if you opened a certain door you were going to see something. None of this compares to the final straw that made us move. My daughter was 2 ½ years old at the time and we had put her down to bed. My daughter is a heavy sleeper. Once she falls asleep she does not wake up until the next morning. She slept through a 6.8 earthquake that literally shook her halfway off her bed. About 2 hours after having put her to bed my wife and I were sitting on the couch watching TV. We heard her start to cry quite loudly. It was borderline screaming. This was extremely unusual for her. We both jumped off the couch and ran to her room. When we opened the door we found her “lying” on the floor. She was crawling but was moving backwards under her bed. It was then that I noticed she wasn’t touching the floor. My wife screamed, reached down and grabbed her. As she was lifting my daughter up, something tugged back. My daughter slept with us that night and every night until we moved a couple of weeks later.
Until that last incident it was kind of cool saying that we lived in a haunted house and it seemed relatively benign other than the irritation of items missing or having a loud bang go off behind you making you jump. Not sure which ghost was involved but it seemed so mean if not evil compared to everything else up to that point.