This is my first posting to this newsgroup, or any other, so forgive me if I screw it up.

I wish to relate one of the strange things that have happened to me within my lifetime, a mere 22 years. I don't claim that any of these occurances are the work or effect of ghosts, but I do believe in spirits, and I do believe that the "spirit" of a person stays here on the earth for a short time after death.

I grew up in north-eastern Ohio, in an area full of lore dealing with hauntings, strange occurences, etc. At the age of 16 my parents began building a new home and moved my sister and myself into a rental unit while the new house was being built. When we first went to the house to view it the then current occupants asked us if we were superstitious. Our family being of the regularly-churchgoing type we said, no not so much. They then told us that a previous renter had died in the house, burned to death while asleep on the sofa.

The spot that the sofa had supposedly occupied was now a dry bar, and the destroyed wall was rebuilt. (It should be noted that some fire damage was still visible in the house. For example wet towels hung on the towel rack in the bathroom caused black stains to appear under the wallpaper.) Nothing more was said about the incident besides some off-hand joking among my family.

The first incident occured late in the fall of that year. After watching television with my mom and dad in the living room, we all prepared to go to sleep. My dad walked past the dry bar and noticed a burning smell. Because we had piled boxes into the area instead of using it, my mother insisted that we check to make sure that no actual burning was going on in the area. We removed the boxes but found nothing. The burning smell returned intermittently for the rest of the time that we lived in the home. The smell was always in that spot, nowhere else in the house, and lasted for a few seconds.

Winter came and other events began to happen. My mother was preparing food in the kitchen and dropped a knife. I watched it fall from her hand and bounce under the overhang of the cabinets. (Most kitchen cabinets have them, they aren't much more than four or five inches deep) When my mother bent down to pick it up it was gone. We searched under all the cabinet overhang and even opened the cabinet doors on the off-chance that it hand bounced in to one, but never found it.

My sister and I were watching television late at night. I decided to go to bed and dragged a blanket with me down the hall. My sister asked that I bring it back to her so that she could use it while she stayed up. Being the typical brother, I dropped it there and told her to come get it. After going into the bathroom to brush my teeth my sister started scoldng me for being such a rotten little brother. "You're such a jerk. Did you have to throw it all the way under my bed?" What she said was true, the blanket had been dragged (?) under the bed in her room some fifty feet from where I had left it. It wasn't thrown and tucked, because the edge under the bed seemed to have been drawn under (pull a piece of cloth through your fist, then cram it in, and you'll get what I'm talking about)

Again that winter my sister was locked in her room when no one else in the family was home. The door was easily opened from the outside, but she swears she tried to open it, and it would not budge. At this point my sister became a true believer that there was something in the house.

The spirit showed itself to me one night. It was the typical "shadowy figure in the doorway", but this time it was different. Usually when this "phenomenon" occurs it is a swift passing, like someone walking by the door, or standing still. This time the figure passed partway past the doorway, stopped, came back a bit, then seemed to crouch or pick something up. The attitude of the shape was like it was looking down the hallway to my sister, and parents rooms. That cold feeling and tightening of the bowels, you know, stark raving fear, gripped me and I could not move. Being afraid, I started to look for a weapon, I was certain that some one had broken into the house and was going to attack me or my family. Just as the figure stood and passed out of my range of sight I jumped from my bed and listened.

I heard my sister whispering from down the hall, but I could not make out the words. I gathered my nerve and stepped out into the hallway. Then my sister screamed because the figure, which she thought was me, obviously wasn't. After my mom and dad woke up, and my sister and I explained what we saw we checked the house. My sister had assumed that it was me prowling the house, and when the figure stopped at her door she asked me what I was doing up. She hadn't seen the figure when it was down the hall by my door, but had said that it seemed to be standing up from a squatting position when she first questioned it. My mother told us after we ahd moved from the house that often at night she would see "someone" moving around the hall, but would close her eyes tight and pray until it was no longer near the door.

I have many other stories, all of them true to my knowledge, and none more removed than the person who experienced them, no friend-of-a-friend. While in highschool my friends and I became somewhat of a group of local ghost story collectors as well. I hope to post some of them to this newsgroup in the future.