Patrick’s Home Hauntings

Background: Patrick grew up as the youngest of three children, all boys. They lived in the same house all their lives, but the incidents did not start happening until Pat was about four years old.

The Toy Train

Patrick had a little wooden train with plastic wheels with which he used to love to play. When you wound up the smoke stack, the straight-axed wheels would turn, propelling the train forward on any hard surface, usually the kitchen linoleum in Pat’s case. He always wanted to play where everyone else was gathered, but it was impossible to run the train in the living room due to the orange shag carpet. The train’s wheels had only an eighth-inch clearance between its bottom and the floor, so Pat knew enough to not even try to run it on the carpet in the living room. Regardless, he’d use his hands to push it along anyway; this was indeed his favorite toy!

One evening around 7 P.M., Pat sat on the living room floor and played with his train while his mother and next older brother watched television from their chairs. Suddenly, his mother looked up towards the hallway and started to “freak out”. She was saying things that Pat didn’t understand. His brother looked down the hallway and then, wide-eyed, also began to get upset. Both of them seemed very excited in a scared sort of way, but Pat didn’t know what was going on or why. His mother leaned forward, put her arms around him, dragged him back towards her, and held him tightly and protectively. Pat followed the gaze of his mom and brother to the hall where he saw a large, white, bright, glowing mist about six feet tall and three-and-a-half feet wide. It had no definite form to it; it shimmered and swirled within itself as it approached the living room.

The bottom of the mist figure was touching the floor, and it stopped about a foot away from Pat’s toy train. The train suddenly jumped to life and started moving forward, driving itself around in circles. As it did so, it made the sound as if it had been wound up, but it obviously had not been. His mother and brother were terrified, but Pat thought this was the absolute coolest thing he had ever witnessed and giggled gleefully. This went on for about ten seconds.

“Stay away from my son!” his mother cried out, reaffirming her grasp on young Patrick. At that, the train stopped moving, and the mist figure hovered as about the first ten inches of it touching the floor disappeared. After about three seconds, it went back into the hallway and out of sight. Pat’s brother eventually worked up the courage to go after it, but by then it was nowhere to be found.

For weeks afterward, Pat demanded that his mother somehow make the train work in the living room. She insisted that it would not because of the carpet, but Pat argued that he saw it work once, so it should work again! His mother was very reluctant to talk about it and just shooed him into the kitchen, back on the linoleum.

Unknown Footsteps

The next incident did not occur until Patrick was twelve years old. By then, his parents had divorced, and he lived in the house with only his mother. An addition had been built onto the house, and the way to Pat’s bedroom in the back was via a long hallway. On the night in question, his friend Denny was sleeping over. They were settled in Pat’s room with he on the bed with his faithful, fearless pit bull named Frisbee on the bed, and his friend Denny was in a sleeping bag on the floor next to the bed. It was approximately 11:30 P.M., and the boys were trying hard to stay awake as young boys do, but they were exhausted and finally decided to turn off the lights and TV and go to sleep.

In the dark, they were still awake and talking when they heard the sound of approaching footsteps coming from the hallway. Pat’s door was cracked open, and he thought they were going to be in trouble for being up so late. But just as one can tell the familiar footfall of a family member, Pat was relatively sure this was not his mother coming. He closed his eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep as whoever it was entered the room, causing the door to creak as it opened wider. Pat’s nervousness turned to fear when he felt his dog Frisbee start to shake… This was the dog that had once bit him thinking he was an intruder in the house! Frisbee had no fear of anything, not storms, strangers, nothing. And yet now his fearless companion was shaking like a leaf in the wind.

The person or thing walked across the room; Pat could follow its movement by the sound of the footsteps. It eventually walked right next to the bed, so close that Pat believed it must have been stepping on Denny! Terrified, Pat refused to open his eyes and prayed for it to just go away. The person or thing walked back across the room, shuffled around for a few seconds, headed towards the door, opened it a little wider (as told by the creaking), and then walked back down the hallway towards the rest of the house. When the sound of the footsteps faded away, Pat whispered to see if his friend on the floor was alright.

“Holy shit!” was Denny’s response, “What the heck was that?!”

Pat was surprised that his friend had sworn; they were still too young for that. However, it was justified as both boys were completely terrified. Patrick hugged and pet his dog Frisbee, who finally stopped shaking. The boys asked each other what they saw, and both confessed to being too scared to open their eyes. Denny said that whatever it was had stepped right in front of his face, but he still refused to look. Neither of them could sleep the rest of the night.

The next day, they asked Pat’s mom why she had been in his room, hoping that somehow it had indeed been her after all, but knowing that it wasn’t. She, of course, denied being there. They asked if she had heard anything, and she said no. However, years later, she confessed that something had been in her room that night; she did not tell them then because she didn’t want to further scare them. Her story mimicked their own: footsteps approached from the hallway, entered the room, came by the bed, and stood there for a moment. She, however, did have the courage to open her eyes but could not see anyone or anything. The footsteps left, and she had no idea who or what had been there.

Pots and Pans

The next weekend, Denny and Pat decided it would be a good idea to repeat the sleepover and see if the footsteps would return. This time, they would open their eyes and see who or what it really was! So Denny laid in his sleeping bag on the floor, and Pat snuggled up with Frisbee on his bed. 11:00 P.M. came and went, then 11:30, then midnight… nothing. The boys tried very hard to stay awake but just couldn’t. Eventually they fell asleep.

At nearly 2:00 A.M. they were promptly awakened by the sound of pots and pans banging together “like a pissed off chef” as Pat put it. The cacophony was coming from the kitchen. “What the heck is Mom making at two in the morning?!” Pat asked Denny. So they went to investigate.

The hall was pitch black as they turned the corner into the stretch that led to the kitchen. They were right about where Pat’s mother’s bedroom was, and it was closed. Across from it was the bathroom. Far too afraid to venture any further in the dark with the calamitous noise still going on, Pat reached into the bathroom and flipped on the light switch as he stared down the hall into the blackness of the kitchen. The very instant that light spilled into the area, all the banging stopped, but Pat and Denny both saw the pots and pans on the counter and stovetop settling; they had obviously been moving.

Patrick cried out in fear and raced back to his room, and Denny followed. A few minutes passed, and Pat worked up the courage to creep back towards the kitchen. He was within sight of his mother’s bedroom door when it swung open and she stormed out, saying, “What on earth are you kids doing?!”

They fumbled at an explanation. At first, she was too angry to believe them, but then the fear on their faces and in their voices was enough to convince her that it had not been them in the kitchen after all. Denny had enough; he promptly called his mother and demanded to go home. He never slept over again. Pat finally returned to his room, held his dog close to him, and laid awake for the remainder of the night, too terrified to sleep.

Mrs. Hahn

In the year to follow, Pat’s mom did some research and found that one of the previous owners, Mrs. Hahn, had died in the house. Lesser incidents continued to occur, such as strange knocking sounds from the walls, footsteps from parts of the house where no one was, cold spots where there were no drafts, unexplained chills, intense feelings of being watched, and movements out of the corner of your eyes only to see that nothing was there. Most often, you would hear sounds from upstairs while you were in the basement when no one else was home. Again, these were not major incidents as the previously mentioned occurrences, so not much was made of them.

The Slamming Door

At about fourteen years of age, Patrick was old enough to be left home alone. His father was desperately trying to reconcile with Pat’s mother, and so they were heading out to dinner for a couple hours. Pat received a lecture about locking the doors (something no one did back then), answering the phone, not opening the door for strangers, etc. He was somewhat nervous to be left home alone, although he did not understand why. He thought he should be excited! His parents left, and he watched TV in the living room. After about forty-five minutes, he started feeling more on-edge, and he went to his bedroom to get something. His room was in the back addition of the house, down a long hallway, divided by a door that was always kept open. There was a window in this hall, but never in the history of this house had the wind been strong enough – even in a storm – to blow through the hallway and shut the heavy door that always remained open.

So Pat went to his room, got whatever it was that he went there to get, and returned to the living room. He no more than sat down on a chair than he heard a loud, hard slamming of a door… the hallway door! Pat could not believe it. He got up, went over, opened the door, checked around, looked at the window, and found it odd that there was no breeze whatsoever. It was a still, hot summer evening. Confused, he went back to the living room.

As he was just about to sit down, the door violently slammed shut once again. Pat jumped, crept towards the door, but he lost his nerve. Terrified, he went out the front door and sat on the front steps of the house. There he waited until his parents arrived home. They checked everywhere in the house but found nothing amiss. To date, that door has never closed by itself again.

Aftermath

The strange little noises and footsteps did continue, but finally it got to be so common that Pat and his mother would nonchalantly address the ghost as Mrs. Hahn. “Oh whatever, that’s probably her,” they’d say, and go about their business. Nothing major ever happened again, and perhaps it was the cavalier attitude of the family that made the activity stop, or maybe Mrs. Hahn (or whatever was causing the things to happen) finally moved on. Either way, around the time Pat turned eighteen, the occurrences finally ceased.