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?