One of the first stories I collected was from a librarian, Joan, who lived with her husband and two children in an old foursquare house on a broad avenue in South Minneapolis.
Because the librarian worked days and sometimes evenings and her husband worked night shift, they hired a babysitter to stay with the children until their mother got home in the evenings. As the weeks went by, Joan frequently found the kids curled up with the babysitter on the sofa instead of in bed. The babysitter said that the kids didn't want to go upstairs and be alone in their beds. When Joan asked why, the babysitter replied that there were sounds of someone moving around in the central landing hallway, but when Joan investigated, she found no one there.
At the same time, the door from the third floor onto the landing kept opening. Joan was sure they'd shut it, but they'd find it open even when no one in the family had been on the floor. As with the attorney with the opening hatch, Joan's husband got annoyed that the heat was flying up into the attic, increasing heating bills. He locked the door and assumed that would be the end of it. It wasn't. The locked door was unlocked and opened as before.
After the husband started locking the door, disturbances increased on the second floor. When Joan came home at night the kids and babysitter were always on the first floor, huddled together. Even though Joan and her husband had witnessed none of these nocturnal disruptions, the kids had, and they grew increasingly scared. It got to the point that they refused to sleep in their second floor bedrooms.
The husband decided to fix the problem for good. He nailed the door shut--not just one nail, but a dozen of them hammered all around the frame. He was reluctant to take this measure, but it was January, and the heating costs were increasing alarmingly. In addition, he and Joan thought that securing the door would perhaps stop the sounds the kids and babysitter were hearing at night.
The house was quiet for several nights. The kids returned to sleeping upstairs. But then, on one below-zero January night, Joan was preparing for bed in the master bedroom, which shared a wall with the staircase from the third floor. She turned out the light and was about to get into bed when she heard a faint scratching sound coming from one of the bedroom windows. Was she imagining it? No. Although barely audible, there was definitively a scratching noise.
Joan looked around the dark bedroom, trying to figure out the source. She went to the window to see if the wind was scraping a branch against the glass. No branches were anywhere near the window. White vapors from the chimneys of the neighboring houses rose silently into the air. All was dead still, as it is on extremely cold nights. Even the slightest sound will carry a long way. Abruptly, the scratching sound stopped.
Joan grew uneasy, overcome with a feeling of dread. She glanced at the clock. Almost midnight. Hesitantly, she prepared again to go to bed. But she heard another faint sound, this time coming from inside the stairwell from the attic. It sounded like fabric being brushed against the wall as someone descended the stairs. Swish, swish. Then, footsteps very slowly coming down, stopping after each step. Joan was frozen with fear as she stared at the wall, trying to imagine what was behind it.
The footsteps stopped at the door. Silence. Then. . . Crash! All hell broke loose. Joan heard the nails ripping out of the door, some rattling against the wood floor. The door burst open, slamming against the wall. And then suddenly, all was quiet again. The terrified kids and Joan ventured out of their rooms into the hallway. Joan turned on the light. The door was wide open. The nails were scattered around on the floor. No one was there.
It took a long time for Joan to calm down herself and the children. She shut the attic door, and they all went downstairs to finish the night on the sofa. When her husband got home in the morning and Joan told him what had happened, he was very upset. They obviously needed to do something different. After some discussion, they decided to call upon the elders of their church to do a cleansing ceremony.
Within a few days, the elders came out and did a prayer service. And here's where this story ends very differently than most similar stories: The prayers worked. There were no more weird sounds on the landing and stairway, and the door stayed shut.
Although this story has an anticlimactic conclusion, Joan and her family were very grateful that there were no more disturbances and they all were able to sleep in their beds in peace.
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