A possible haunting

    A local aquaintance of ours who was always polite but obviously  would have nothing to do with "ghosts" or anything paranormal; has had an episode that calls her beliefs into question. I guess the fact that we do not openly buy into the ghost theory of the strange, she felt she could ask us about something she and her granddaughters experienced this past week. It seems she has had, since her days of youth, a doll house which she admits she tends to rearrange the furniture in from time to time, so she is very familiar with all the furniture and things in that house. Her own residence, while not in this town, is in the same county. It is an old farmhouse, built in the late 1800s and sits pretty much to itself. In the ten years she has lived there she has not had any sort of paranormal experience until now. Her story is thus: My granddaughters came to visit with their mother last week. The girls saw the old doll house of mine and asked if they could play with it. Knowing these girls to be quite responsible for their ages (6 and 10) she said they certainly could so long as they put anything taken out of the doll house back in it when they were finished playing with it. She said the girls amused themselves with it for quite some time, but came bedtime they placed all of the pieces back into the doll house and went to bed. The next day one of the girls came to her and said, "Honest Grandma we didn't break it", "Break what?" "The little chair in the dollhouse", the child replied. The older grand daughter entered the kitchen at this time saying, "Honest, she's telling the truth, We really didn't". Well I said lets go see what you are talking about and we went into the room with the doll house. Lying in the corner of the dollhouse parlour was a small wooden chair; retriving it, I immediately knew it was not out of my dollhouse where almost all of the furniture is plastic except  a bureau and china closet which are wood. The little chair was wood. Two rear legs were broken so the chair would not sit up right. But this chair had to have been one expensive piece when it was new, it had intricate ingraving up the existing legs and across the back. I assured the girls that I believed them and wondered where on earth this little broken chair came from. We were discussing this whole business at the breakfast table when the younger child said, Maybe it was the little girl's that Sherrie saw last night. The mother gave the younger child a hard look, like "Shut up". "OK that did it, I said I wanted to know what was going on". The mother, who is the lady in questions own daughter, said, "Oh nothing Mother". Well we all know you don't say Oh nothing to any Mother and live to hear the end of it. So the daughter had to reveal all. "Last night, Sherrie thought she saw a little girl in the upstairs hall, you know how kids are, they have a very intense imagination." Then the younger child piped up with, "Then why did you make us sleep with the lights on last night?" Grandma thought that was funny. "OK, OK, the daughter admitted, it unnerved me, so shoot me." Grandma asked what the little girl looked like. Sherrie said "She was a little smaller than me but bigger than my sister. She was wearing a long flowered dress that almost went clear to the floor. She ran down the upstairs hall." "I still think it was her imagination", replied a slightly red face mother. Grandma took the little broken chair and laid it upon a bureau, thinking she could get a friend of hers , who was an expert in old childrens toys to look at it. The girls and their mother left for home. Grandma looked at the tiny chair again before going to bed. The next day she planned to run some errands so she figured she'd stop off at the toy mans shop with the broken chair and get his opinion. She went to retrive the chair....it wasn't there. She looked all over, it was not there. So she said, "What do you think?" There are some very remote possibilities, but I really didn't feel they were grounded enough to suggest; none of them covered all aspects of this episode anyway. What do YOU think?

Update on Thunderous blast

     I finally found another individual who heard that thunderous blast that shook the windows and the ground I was standing on. A villager who lives about a quarter of a mile from us told me it shook the windows of her house and about scared her to death. Then she said in a very discusted tone; my husband was in the livingroom and when I asked him about the blast he said, "What blast?" He didn't hear anything, so he said, and he is not hard of hearing. She was relieved that someone besides herself  had heard it. We still have no idea what it was or why the majority of people in town have no idea what we are talking about. I'm not kidding when I said the ground shook and my ears rang. My wife said the windows rattled and so did the lady up the street; but nobody but us three heard it. Selective hearing?

Thunderous blast

First of all, keep in mind this town is rather small. Most of the towns residents live on Mainstreet which is less than a mile long and is a part of the Old National Road. The town only has four roads running east and west, but there are many alleys and side streets. In short the village is pretty  much clustered in a small area. Last Saturday night as I was working in my garden, just as the final rays of light were passing into the evening shadows, I heard the first of several volunteer firemen come down the street and hurry into the fire station. Within less than a minute the firetruck, siren blazing, had headed out of the station and west on mainstreet toward the Interstate. The firetruck had had about enough time to leave the village limits when a thunderous blast was heard that was so loud the ground shook where I stood. I wondered if the Firetruck had hit something. My wife came out the backdoor of our house which faces our garage and garden, asking what on earth happened.  I assured her I did not know. Strangely, I did not see another neighbor anywhere. The blast was loud enough to (my wife said) rattle the windows in our house; surely others were curious....wouldn't you think? My wife got into our car and drove around town looking for the source of the explosion. She came back, shaking her head. "I saw absolutely no one" she said. "Nobody in their yard or along the street to ask, nobody." This is strange, the town is small, but usually busy on a week end. Today, I asked around at church and the neighbors.....strangest thing.....none of them heard a thing. You tell me.

An update

We have entered the period that is normally quiet in this house. That is not to say the strange doesn't happen in summer and early fall, but it seems to be far less frequent. To bring you up to date on past events. The "Thumping" sound that plagued us for months, occuring only in the Library until the last month that we heard it (that month it was heard only in the kitchen), it suddenly stopped and has not been heard since. The lightbulbs that suddenly went missing in the diningroom have never, as yet, reappeared. Perhaps the "haunts" have grown tired; we haven't experienced as many episodes this past year that we normally do. But if things occur, I will report it here.