Okay, Nosfer asked what the circumstances were around the knock that finally unnerved me in my oddly active house. (See interminable, inappropriate postings under GA)

I had come home early from work.  About 4 PM, sometime in November of 2010.  I called my housemate, who said they were in route, about 15 to 20 minutes from home, then went into the bedroom in the newer part of the house, closed the door and started hanging up clothes that were tossed all over the bed…no, not poltergeist activity, I am just a slob.  I had the TV  news on and was walking back and forth from the bed to the closet feeling very virtuous, when suddenly there was a sharp double rap on the bedroom door.  It was not a muffled or soft knock…it was hard and forceful and quick.  I immediately thought my housemate had arrived home much earlier than expected and called out:

"What?" 

Nothing. 

I kept calling out "what?" while, while I hung up the clothing in my hand and walked toward the door.  In fact I was getting rather annoyed at the lack of response.  But at some point as I neared the door I knew no on was on the other side.  So I rationalised that the knocker, my housemate, must have hit the door with their fist as they passed to go upstairs. Which seemed a bit rude, but not out of character.  I opened the door and the hall was cold and dark and still.  I went upstairs to check the housemate's computer/music room.  No one.  And the dogs outside hadn't barked like they usually do when someone comes home.  So, after checking the other rooms and the backdoor lock, I walked back through the house into the older part and opened the front door.  No housemate's car in the driveway.  Now I was feeling uneasy.  I went back into the hall and tried various ways to recreate the sound short of hitting the door. Nothing worked.  So I gave the door a sharp double rap at the same height I thought the original knocks had been struck, about level with my face.  It was an exact replication of the original sound.

About 10 minutes later my housemate drove up and the dogs started barking.

1)  No, it was definitely not the TV.  The TV was on very low, talking heads, and on the opposite side of the room from the knocks, which were very loud and reverberating.  But I have considered "sound matrixing" in the case of the man's voice in the other room.  In that case I was watching TV while doing something else, there were other ambient sounds that could have confused the aural input (aquarium filters going especially) and the voice seemed to come from near the TV.  In fact, that was my first thought in that case, but when I laughingly looked toward the TV to see what had me fooled, it was a commercial so at odds with the tone and content of what I had heard that I began to question my interpretation.  (High-pitched, hysterically laughing Magpies in a commerical for window cleaner, while the voice was an older man's stating rather flatly and unemotionally: "I lover her". Still, that one I have my doubts about.  I have heard sounds on TV, especially cell phone and doorbell rings, that had me momentarily looking around the room for the source.  I have never mistaken a voice on TV for the real thing. Still.

Having lived in more than one house with rats and chipmunks in the walls, I did consider rats in the thumping upstairs.  It is a little hard to describe the realtionship between the newer and older parts of my current house, but basically the older is a single storey, "Victorian" vernacular, with a crawl-space and an attic that is not really accessable.  I do hear roof rats in that part of the house,  the sound of their scurrying and slipping along is very characteristic and my housemate worked as a pest exterminator directly after grad school, so we are very comfortable with that diagnosis. 

The newer part of the house was built about forty years ago and is two storey with a small basement and no attic at all.  You step down to go into it from a door in the back of the older house and it appears to be an extension or expansion of a smaller single storey section of the orginal house.  The master bedroom on the first level of this addition is directly below an equally large bedroom above it which has a cathedral ceiling and skylights.  Because of the cathedral ceilings, there are absolutely no attic or crawl spaces above this part of the house and no connection between it and the older, lower attic of the original house.  It is in the upper bedroom that we hear the thumping and moving of something heavy.  When it first happened I thought it might be very large rats jumping down from furniture onto the floor…and at first it seemed like that, or a cat jumping down off a bookcase, might explain the sounds.  Although it was odd that they did it so repeatedly.  But there is absolutely no evidence of any animal activity in that room…no droppings, no cats, no chewed up clothing or bedding.  And then it began to intensify, you could lie on the bed downstairs and hear the thumping begin directly above you (there is no plumbing up there…so that rules out air-locked pipes), it would usually start out with thumping, like something fairly heavy being dropped on the floor, then increase to the sound of something being moved, like someone wrestling with large pieces of heavy furniture.  The older part of the house is very solid, built from old growth redwood, but the new part is less solid and sound insulated.  When someone is upstairs in the bedroom, there is very little between you and them, but they have to drop something fairly heavy to replicate the sounds we hear, more like a bowling ball than a book.  This can go on for quite a while…many minutes and happens randomly over the year.  Once it starts it usually goes on for some time, weeks even.  But even when it is active, it is intermittant; it might start at 9 am and go to 9:20 am only to stop and start up again at 11 pm and go on until you fall asleep.  There is no pattern. After awhile you just give up running up the stairs to see what is going on.  Once they begin, the thumping/dragging sounds go on for a while, usually intensifying in frequency and volume, and then stop, sometimes for months, only to start again.  My housemate who sleeps in the downstairs bedroom, also complains of the sound of very purposeful footsteps going down the back hall that leads to the stairs, only it sounds like the footsteps go beyond the actual dimensions of the hall, as if the hall is much longer than it actually is.  I haven't heard this, but I am not in that part of the house at night.  I have awakened to the housemate looking into my room to make sure it isn't me roaming around.

I"m clutching at straws with the potential EMF differences in the separate wiring systems of the house.  It just seems that the fact that almost all the activity occurs in the back and newer part of the house must be significant somehow.

Post edited 4:03 pm – January 13, 2011 by Axel Olrik
Post edited 4:09 pm – January 13, 2011 by Axel Olrik

I actually did think of the dog-tail-thumping-angle at the time….the only one of the dogs in the house with me was my 14 year old GSD with severe spinal degeneration…even in her glory days not much of a tail wagger.  Nevertheless, I dragged the poor thing into the hall and tried wacking her tail against the door.  A much different sound resulted,  muffled and low down on the door.  The knocks I heard were higher up, at head level, very hard, brisk and in rapid succession, "bang, bang", like someone trying to get your attention.

I've grown accustomed to the other unexplained sounds in this house…they puzzle me, but I am never afraid of being here alone.  When they aren't actually going on, I pretty much forget about them.

But for some reason, the knocking at the door really unnerved me. I think it is because it did seem like a call for attention.  Which I really don't want to give.  My housemate says it sounds like someone trying to mess with you…which I hate to say, but was my own reaction to it at the time.  Unlike everything else that goes on here, this seemed personal.

Post edited 7:50 pm – January 13, 2011 by Axel Olrik
Post edited 7:52 pm – January 13, 2011 by Axel Olrik

Umm, a bit difficult to describe. 

The room is long, about 24 feet long and 17 feet wide, and runs from north to south with the hall running along the west side.  There are three stained glass windows high in the north wall and two long windows on the east . The door from the hall into the bedroom is at the south end of that west bedroom wall.  The closet runs the entire length of the the south wall and is fairly shallow with heavy mirrored sliding doors which are almost always partially open.   The floor of the closet is also completely covered with piles of shoes and clothing…I am, as I said, pretty untidy. I was hanging clothes in the east section of the closet, which is a good 15 feet from the door.  When I heard the knocks, I was standing at the far east side of the room at the foot of the bed, about 14 feet from the door and six feet from the closet.  There is really nothing in the closet that could make that sort of sound (the most that could come from there would be the drop and clack of heavily ladden plastic hangers) and the way the sound reached me made me turn quickly toward the door.  I am not sure how we process sounds in terms of origin, but not only did the sound  seem to come strongly from my right (i.e., the door) but it seemed to be coming from higher up and "radiating" toward me, not from something hitting the ground or originating in an adjoining closed space.

And then there is the "fact" that the only thing it sounded like was someone knocking hard and sharply on a hollow core wooden door…it had that quality of reverberation.  I really tried everything I could think of to reproduce it short of knocking on the door.  Nothing I came up with (foregive me Stella) even remotely approached it.  But knocking on the door sounded exactly the same.  Two sharp raps in rapid succession.  Like someone trying to wake you up in an emergency.

I am trying not to think too much about the fact that that is the same door that Stella (the GSD) spent the entire night standing, staring, growling and whining at a few months after I first moved in.  At that time she was about 5 or 6 and had been trained by a previous owner as a "protection dog", meaning she knew all the attack commands in German and was pretty fearless.  But that night (and to a lesser degree the next), I couldn't get her to lie and down and sleep at all, even though we had been sleeping uneventfully in the room for months.  When I tried to make her go outside, she would bolt through the door, down the hall and out the back and then stand whining, wanting to come back in.  When I brought her back in, she did the same thing in reverse, bolting down the hall into the bedroom and then turning and repeating the hard, fixed stare, hackle-raised growling/whining at the door.  The impression was definitely that she "saw" something she didn't like and feared…but after those two nights it never happened again at all.  Even the next day it was if it had never happened.

Go figure.

Post edited 12:29 pm – January 14, 2011 by Axel Olrik

Yes, Oubliette (love the name!), it is hard to entirely discount Stella's behaviour; especially since it was uncharacteristic and has never been repeated under any circumstances.  I have to say that at the time I was feeling absolutely no sense of "a presence", although everything Stella did suggested she did.  In fact, I have never had any odd feelings in the house.  It seems like an utterly normal old house…prosaic really.  Which may be why I am forced to consider that the strange things that seem to happen may actually be something "paranormal". But what "paranormal" means, in this case, is unclear to me.  I was spooked by the knocking, but I don't think I was feeling any supernatural dread…just uneasy about such a strong, seemingly human physical action, without an explanation.

I do think that I will try to set up some sort of recording device in the "active" bedroom.  Right now, I am not sleeping in the lower bedroom, but I am sure my housemate will alert me if the thumping starts again. We have both been present when it was ongoing, so we are in agreement about what it sounds like.  When I have guests, they sleep up there and no one has ever mentioned anything odd occurring.  It is actually a very pleasant, bright room, with natural light pouring in through the windows and skylights. 

Maybe I am just a really strong "insensitive."

I watch the show "The Haunted" on Animal Planet and they try to show that animals in general have this sixth sense about the supernatural. Sadly, I find that the show often starts to focus more on the human element rather than the animal element, but when they do, it's fascinating to see the animals reaction in some of the actual footage they replay. It truly does appear that the dog or cat is reacting to something unseen, but as Oubliette says (which I too like your screen name :)) their reactions are very hard to interpret because they can sense things much farther away then humans. 

What's stopping you from just placing a recording device in the spare bedroom anyways instead of waiting for it to start again because it is so sporadic?  Like maybe a video camera that you can swap out tapes or something more hi-techie that you can maintain a constant stream of data collecting, while reviewing what you already collected. I visited this paranormal museum in New Orleans (which I posted somewhere in this particular forem) and this is precisely what they do in the building because it is supposedly haunted by 9 ghosts. It is monitored 24/7; however, they don't show on their official site if they retrieved any raw footage of evidence of the supposed haunting, which as you can imagine makes me a little skeptical. Maybe you will be able to find something for this site to review!