Hope this comes out right. I'm just learning to do this newsgroup thang.

In January of 1990, my husband and I, then expecting our first child, moved into our first home, a modest ranch-style house, about 15 years old, in what I referred to as a sub-rural neighborhood in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Our son was born in March, and it was soon after he was born that I began to notice I was uncomfortable spending time alone in the living room. I mentioned this to my husband, who also admitted to feeling somewhat uncomfortable in the living room. What was even more disturbing was our son's reaction. He was the kind of baby who liked to be walked late at night. As he got older, he learned how to steer me where he wanted to go by pushing at me or leaning in the direction he wanted to go. Night after night, after we'd all gone to bed, he would get me up and steer me down the hall to check out the living room. I would stop in every other room along the way (our bedrooms were at the opposite end of the house from the living room), hoping he would content himself with checking those (and turning on lights along the way), but he WOULD insist on checking the living room. Once we'd actually peeked into the living room, he would be content to return to his own room for rocking, nursing, and pacing. This went on for a few months, although it never got worse than our feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome in the living room. We tried a couple of different solutions (a friend gave us a quartz ball to absorb the negative energy and I tried making a "witch bottle" with the same purpose in mind). However, what I think eventually lessened the feeling was that the Presence (as we came to call it) just got used to us. It got to the point where I was quite comfortable sewing in the living room by myself into 2 a.m., although I was quick to leave the room after turning the light off. Things took a slight turn for the worse when we sold the house last year. We had gotten an offer from another family with small children, and the Presence seemed content with that, but the offer went bad and we ended up selling the house to a young, unmarried man. We definitely got the feeling the Presence was not very happy with this. We think it had come to like the presence of children in the house (an older couple had lived in the house before we bought it). An interesting note: although we did not discuss the Presence with many of our friends (just the one who gave us the quartz ball, to my knowledge), at a gathering with friends soon after our house went on the market, we happened to mention that we thought the Presence was unhappy with our decision to move. Since one of the people present was someone with whom I was sure we had NOT discussed our "haunting" (not the right word), I turned to explain to her what I meant by "the Presence." She immediately piped up with "The one in your living room? Why do you think I never spend any time in there?"

We never did any research into the history of the house. It had been a rental unit for some years, like the house next to it. We knew the landlord of the house next door who had also owned our house before the people from whom we bought it. He never mentioned anything interesting about the house or its history. I therefore do not venture to guess what the Presence was. It has not followed us to our current house, and we haven't checked with the other house's new owner to see how (if?) he and the Presence are getting along.

-Moon
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"You didn't exactly miss," said Pooh, "but you missed the balloon."