This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
From: Anonymous
To: "'ghost-discuss@aurora.cdb.com'"
Subject: Ghost Story1
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 23:32:45 -0400
Hi Folks,
I've lurked, I've discussed, now it's time to share a ghost story with you.
The situation took place in my parent's home, in mid-January 1984. Like a typical mid-January evening in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, it was bitterly cold outside. I was helping my brother shovel snow off of the backyard patio and walkway. We put the shovels in the garage, and we were just about to open the back door, when I noticed a strange odour. It smelled like something dead somewhere around the porch. The odour was especially strong near the back door. I asked my brother if he could smell something weird. He said that it smelled like an animal (mouse or rat) probably crawled behind something around the porch and died. We checked everywhere, under and around the porch. It was not cluttered, so it was easy to do a thorough check. We found nothing, and we went inside, thinking nothing about it further.
Later that evening, my sister and I were sitting in the kitchen. I was on the phone with a friend, and my sister was sitting in the rocking chair with her cat on her lap. During my phone conversation, I heard the 'beep' of the Call Waiting service, so I put my friend on hold and answered the incoming call. It was a friend of my brother's, wondering if he was home. I was positive my brother was home, because I could hear his weight set clanking occasionally (he was into body building). I put the phone down and called my brother's name. My sister then said he wasn't home. I said, "Sure he is..he's in the basement..", and I started walking toward the basement door. My sister repeated, "Val, he's not home...he left a couple hours ago. He's at Mark's." We both went completely silent and still for a few seconds, then we heard one of his weights rolling across the floor! We both became extremely creeped out. I returned to the phone, took a message for my brother, got back to my friend and told him I'd call him back later. My sister and I just sat there listening closely to the noises coming from the basement. We confirmed that nobody else was home, we had no other animals in the house (the cat was with us), and whoever was downstairs could move a minimum 5 lbs (the lightest unit weight in the set). We then heard what sounded like a very heavy weight roll across the concrete floor of the basement, and we screamed and ran out of the kitchen, and into our parent's bedroom. We sat by the cold air return vent, listening to the clanking and commotion in the basement. Finally, my brother came home, and we told him about everything we'd been hearing. He went down to the basement, and he accused us of messing with his weights. They were scattered all around the basement. He checked the basement for anything or anyone that might be down there, and didn't find anything. No one could figure out what caused this. Actually, my brother thought we were playing a joke on him, so he didn't take us seriously. That really bothered us.
This activity continued for about a week (between dusk and dawn), and would stop if someone entered the basement. It focussed on the weights and barbells. They were the steel cast Real McCoy weights, so they made a thundering sound when they rolled across the concrete floor. We heard footsteps creeking up the basement steps, and they would stop at the basement door, which opens to our kitchen.
One evening, we didn't hear any strange noises in the basement. The next day, as I opened the back door and stepped onto the porch, I noticed that the rotting meat smell was gone. The odour had remained on the porch and at the back door for the entire duration of the basement activity. I mentioned this to my brother, and then he looked at me with a confused look on his face. He said, "You know, it's f***ing cold out here and everything is frozen......even if something died out hear or was dead, it wouldn't be rotting and smelling like that." Another thing I noticed about the odour, was that it didn't fade at all over the week. It was not overpowering, but it was distinctly pungent, and then suddenly, it was completely gone, within the same time that the activity stopped.
No one else has lived in our house before us (my parents had it custom built). We've thought about it many times, and we've tried to come up with a logical explanation for it, but we can't. We all think it was a ghost, who might have been into working out with weights in his life, and we had the impression it was a guy in his 20's or 30's. It might have been 'passing by' and decided to hang around our basement for a week. Go figure!