03/23/2005: Thanks to Matt Stilwell for submitting this story about his former residence in Lancaster. The house seemed to be haunted by three spirits…a young girl, her “nanny,” and a man who wore a brown suit. As you will read, his children played with the ghost of the little girl, and her nanny appeared as a skull.
A couple of years ago, my family and I lived in Lancaster, Ohio, in a rental home that was built in 1910. It didn’t take long for us to begin noticing that things were odd. The washer lid would be up when we’d go to check on the laundry, with water still in the tub. We would hear someone walking upstairs when our neighbor was not home. The kids would constantly be talking to their “friend.” On one occasion, I called my parents to tell them what was going on. While I was on the phone with my dad in the kitchen, I heard our wok lid in the dining room slam down onto the table. I went to the dining room, apologized for talking about the happenings in the house, and WATCHED the lid go from the edge of the table back to the center. I was the only one in the house at the time.
A couple of nights later, I was in bed sleeping when I “woke up” in a sort of dream-like state and saw a little girl of about 8-years-old come down the steps that led to the upstairs apartment and come through a door into our room. She stood by the bed for a minute or two and looked at me like she wanted help. Then she ran back upstairs. Shortly after, I ‘felt’ someone at the foot of my bed, but when I looked up, it was more like a skull with a transparent black cloth draped over it, and two skeletal hands reaching out to grab me. It kept coming closer. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. The next thing I remember is my wife waking me up. She said that she had just talked to a man in a tan suit standing by the fireplace. The door that “Mary” (the 8-year-old) walked through had been blocked off and the closet was there with its own door, but that was not there when she came to visit me.
That morning, we took the kids outside to ride their bikes. We took some pictures of them, and had what looked like a glass “drop,” like what you would see in old windows, show up on one picture, and the outline of a man on the sidewalk show up in another. Things kept happening until we moved out of necessity. I’ll never forget living there.