The Farm House

Sounds in the Attic

This is another story from my dad about sounds he and his family would always hear from the attic every now and then. This story involves the first experience my dad has had in this house.

They had moved in to the farmhouse when my dad was a little kid, about six years old. His youngest sister was barely two weeks old while the youngest sibling wasn't born yet. My dad remembers one of the first times he went upstairs, he was in the bedroom he shared with one of his older brothers. This is the same bedroom mentioned in the last story where something sat on my dad's bed. He said when he was in that room, he heard something in the attic right above him fall, making a loud thud.

"It scared the shit out of me," he told me when I asked him about the first time he heard the noises from the attic. When I asked him what exactly the thud sounded like, he said it was like someone had pushed a podium over or like if there were 8 foot long 2 by 4s that slide off the wall and fell to the floor. So it was pretty loud. He says this was his first unexplained experience he's had in that house.

He and his family would occasionally hear the sound of something falling in the attic. Sometimes there would be noises that would go on for a few seconds and then just stop all together; not happening again until a few days or months later. He said if some of them were footsteps, they had to be wearing work boots. Sometimes he would hear what he called rabbit steps. There would be a sound of small thunk thunk thunk like a rabbit hopping across the wooden floor of the attic.

I asked him if there was ever anything up there that could cause the loud noises he had heard. He told me when they had first cleaned out the attic when it was covered in inches of dust and dirt, there was only small bits of junk up there, like a lamp and a charcoal portrait of his great grandpa for example. When he got older, he would go up into the attic more often to investigate, but he could never find anything that could have caused the noises he heard.

Eventually, the sounds in the attic moved to the upper level of the house where the kids' bedrooms were. The spirits or whatever had moved down a level from the attic to actual living quarters. Instead of a bang or a thud in the closet, it was now footsteps walking around upstairs, where everyone but my grandparents slept.

I remember my dad telling me, when all the kids had become adults and moved out, his older brother he used to share a room with would come and stay with my grandma for a while at the farmhouse and then go back to his place on and off. Every time he was there, he would hear the footsteps upstairs. He would hear them walking around all over when he was in his room and down below in the kitchen. When he and his wife were moving back in to live with my grandma for whatever reason, he waited until he was all alone and had a talk with the ghosts that liked to walk around the upper level. In summary, my uncle told them he going to be living there now and knew he wasn't the only one in the residence. He didn't mind they were there and understood the house was theirs as much as it was his. He told them he would do his own thing and leave them alone as long as they would leave him alone as well.

My dad told me the footsteps stopped after having that conversation with the spirits; at least for my uncle.