Monday, September 3, 2012

The Door

One afternoon at my old house, around 2006, my ex boyfriend and I were sitting in my living room on the couch. Directly behind us was a half-wall that divided my living room from the stairs to the basement. We were watching tv when suddenly, a door slammed SO hard, we both jumped and peered over the wall to the basement. It was so loud, and I also 'felt' the door slam - like a change in air pressure in my ears or something. We both looked at each other and then went down the stairs.... only to find all of the doors (3) were OPEN. Wide open. I lived in a duplex but the other side was empty at the time, but I didnt think that loud of sound could come from next door either, especially since I felt the slam like a change in the air too. Kind of like when you're in a car and someone else gets in and slams the door, while all the windows are up... anyway so he says 'is there a window open?' - thinking perhaps a breeze caught the door and slammed it, but it hadnt latched so just popped wide open again. But all of the windows were closed tightly, as were all of the windows upstairs. It was just plain strange. I had heard a door slam like that in my place once before, but I was alone so you kind of convince yourself that you were just hearing things --- this time I was with another person and he heard it too. He was as baffled as I was and said something like 'That was LOUD'. I said 'I know'. But we never figured it out.

What I didnt like is that a few months later, I was alone and got myself all freaked out reading about ghost stories on the net, so I didnt want to sleep downstairs in my bedroom. I slept on the couch upstairs instead. In the morning, I got up to run downstairs to get clothes for work - and I stopped dead in my tracks at the bottom of the stairs because all three doors were closed tightly. I have a habit of NOT closing my doors  - EVER - because I dont like the thought of opening them to find a person standing there lol. Ive felt like that for a long time, but as a single mom this became stronger. I dont know why, that's just the way it is. So to find all of my doors closed, when I had just been down there the day before to do laundry and to wake up for work the previous morning and left the doors open as usual, it freaked me right out.

And to top it all off, when I finally got moving again and went to carefully open my bedroom door, I found that a latch/hinge for a padlock at the very top of my door frame was CLOSED. I did not put that lock on there, it's from a previous tennant, and there is no padlock - but the hinge part was swung totally closed over the latch and tightly. I could not figure that out. I even videoed myself trying to open and shut the door that day, seeing if slamming it would budge the hinge enough to jump it over the latch, but I could not get that to happen at all because the latch and hinge are not lined up properly. In order to flip the hinge over the latch by hand, I had to hold the door handle and lift the door up half a cm or more, and then use my other hand to flip the hinge over. It was just SO weird. And again, none of my windows were open anyway, so Im not sure how the door could have slammed itself shut, engaging the locking hinge, and do that without waking me up and do it even though the hinge and latch were not lined up properly. I also had to push quite hard to get the hinge over the latch because it was old and dirty or rusty. It was not moving smoothly at all.

Some friends suggested that I did it in my sleep, a sleepwalking adventure that led to me closing 3 basement doors and latching the lock - but I do not have a history of sleepwalking (my kids and brother do, I should point out), and the latch was way too high for my young children to reach anyway (I could barely reach on my tiptoes)... and there are no chairs or anything down there to stand on.

So... what happened? I have no idea. But the doors in that place liked to open, shut, or SLAM, and I have a witness to one event.

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