well, okay. This didn't happen in my house or apartment, but was creepy all the same.

Three years ago my then-boyfriend and I went to a small hunting/fishing "resort" in New Hampshire, 14 miles from the Canadian Border. It is a beautiful little place located on the First Connecticut Lake, and is very popular with hunters and fishermen during the respective seasons because of the abundance of deer, moose, fox, etc. My ex and I were/are big wildlife freaks--we love to camp and hike and this was a great place to do so. The three or four times we stayed there, we would leave our cabin at midnight or so and walk up Route 3 towards the Canadian Border and just have a look around. This particular night we had walked a few miles up Route 3 and didn't see much in the way of wildlife, so we decided to get in the car and go all the way to the border and back, just to see what we might observe (this stretch of Rt. 3 is basically deserted). So, off we went.

Roughly five miles from the resort area, we came across a white wooden cross planted in the ground on the side of the road. It was obviously a grave marker and looked as though it had been there for some time, but it had a brass plate nailed to the center. I asked my boyfriend to pull over so that I could shine the flashlight on the marker, and as I leaned out the car window to try to make out what it said, this shudder went through me and my eyes started to water and all the hair on my neck stood on end and I said to him, "Uh, I don't feel so comfortable with this anymore. . .can we get out of here?" He admitted that he felt a little strange, too.

On the drive back to the resort area, we saw some moose and a bobcat and a coyote, so we soon forgot about the grave thing and chattered about the animals. We got back to our cabin at about 1:00 a.m., I took a shower and got into bed, and he followed suit. During the time that he was in the shower I kept hearing strange noises, but I didn't think anything of them, really. These cabins are pretty rustic and the hot water heaters are noisy, and I attributed any weird banging to the heater, so I started to drift off to sleep when he got into bed. Some time later, we heard a sound that distinctly sounded like the front door shutting (we had never heard it opening) and my boyfriend was visibly bothered by the noise. Again, I was not as worried--out in the wilderness, EVERYTHING seems like it makes weird noises--until we heard noises that sounded exactly like heavy work boots tromping up and down the wood floor from the front door to our bedroom door (in this cabin, the walls weren't "finished" per se; they were more like partitions between rooms, rather than full walls). By now, we were sitting bolt upright, hearts pounding. I sat up and turned on the light, and the noise stopped. Quizzically, we looked at each other, and I shut off the light. Within five minutes, the noise had started again. Again, we turned on the light and the noise stopped. Off went the light again, and again, within five minutes, the same pacing footsteps. I said to my boyfriend that I didn't think whatever it was was going to hurt us, and he agreed but he wasn't comfortable with staying in the cabin and he suggested that maybe we should leave. I turned on the light again and got up and threw open the bedroom door, and of course there was nothing there. . .but the room felt weird. . .you could tell something wasn't right.

I decided that it was ridiculous for us to leave--it was 2:30 in the morning and there were no other resorts, hotels or \ motels for a good three hour drive south into New Hampshire. I figured that unless pots and pans started flying or some other bizarre poltergeist-y thing started happening, I wasn't going to get hysterical. So, off went the light. Up started the noises. This time though, the footsteps went all the way to the bedroom door and we sat, saucer eyed in the dark in horror as we listened to the door latch clatter.

Needless to say, we slept with the lights on the whole rest of the night. Greg says he didn't sleep at all--I fell asleep around 4:30 or so. Anyway, the next day we were checking out and we asked the proprietors if they'd ever heard weird noises in their cabins or if anything strange had ever happened on the land. They laughed and said no (of course).

On the way home in the car, I asked if we could go back to the weird gravesite--it had occurred to me that maybe that had something to do with the events of the night. Greg was adamant about not going there, so I never found out about the grave or if it had any correlation to the weird events in this cabin.

Two years ago I started dating another man, whom I am still with, and I told him the story. He acted very nonchalant at the time and sort of treated me like I was being ridiculous, but the following summer we went back to that particular resort. He then confided to me that the story had scared him and he was just the tiniest bit freaked out and curious about what might happen. Different mix of psychic energy, I guess--all was quiet, but I was unbelievably uncomfortable.

During the next day, while Michael was taking a shower, I took the car up to the grave. Everything was as it had been the previous year, and I knelt down in front of the marker to read the brass plate. I don't remember the specifics of what it said, but I recall that it marked a spot of an anonymous drifter, assumed to be Canadian, that was found frozen to death on that spot in the late '30's. After reading this, my eyes watered, I got chills and got back in the car and drove back to the resort.

Friends of mine who are highly into the spiritual speculate that I had a brush with an earth-bound spirit. . .to this day, I'm still not sure what to make of it.

Any ideas?