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Okay, I've got one...this would be number 5 of 483 and is decidedly different from the earlier stories.  I'm sitting in the house where the majority of this story happened as I write and there is no fictionalization involved here.  This story is true, believe it or not.

 

Keith and I, like many of our self-styled counterculture friends in 1974, were interested in the occult.  We'd done the ouigi board thing, attempted seances and talked about things like astral projection, telekinesis, the spirit world...all the paranormal stuff.  Many times it was an attempt to get the girls we were with naked by any means, sometimes successfully, but sometimes it was just curiousity.

 

My Mom inherited a house from her family in about 1969, I'm fuzzy on the date.  It's really a stretch to call it a house the way it was in '76.  It hadn't been lived in in over 50 years.  It had no electricity and no running water.  There was a privy in the ramshackle shed that adjoined the back of the house and that was pretty much it for amenities. 

 

The good qualities of the house were that it was historic and it was in the most picturesque little town on the Southern Maine Seacoast, Kennebunkport.  It was even on the walking tour.  

 

It was a creepy old shack of a place then.  When we first entered the place, (I was about 11), my brother Steve went up to the loft.  There was a rope hanging from the rafters and he said, "This would be a good place for someone to hang themselves." 

 

Noone in my immediate family knew it then, but my Great-Grandfather had done just that, committed suicide.  One of his daughters, Aunt Belle, was a town character.  She didn't actually live in the house as apparantly she wasn't completely able to care for herself, but she would go there every afternoon and rock in her rocking chair for hours alone.

 

Due to the location there were good looking tourist girls from all over the Northeast and Canada swarming the town during the summer and that made it a natural spot for Keith and I to choose to take a vacation from our minimum wage jobs.

 

I don't remember how we got there, but I suspect we fanagled one of our parents to drive 2 1/2 hours North and drop us off.  In any case, we were there with nothing but our feet for transportation, arriving on a hot summer afternoon.  After deciding what room to set up camp in, we took a mile walk down to the beach for a swim. 

 

Cooled by the chilly Atlantic, we took a couple of hours to poke around in the shops in Dock Square, the town center.  The last shop we stopped in was a candle shop catering to tourists and the occasional occultist. 

 

Looking at the wide array of colored candles, I turned to Keith and said, "Hey man, how about this?  We need some candles for light anyway, let's get black ones and have a seance.  We'll try to talk to my relatives.  Who knows where I got the idea for using black candles, maybe the set for a Vincent Price movie or something but it seemed like the right color.

 

On the way back, we stopped off at Shackford and Gooch's clam shack and got fried clams and french fries for supper, sharing them with the seagulls that divebombed the fries in mid-air, sometimes crashing into one another to get them.

 

When we got back to the house, it was twilight.  Being from a more densely settled area, we weren't really accustomed to how dark it really gets with no ambient light from the streetlights and the sky was just hazy enough so very few stars shone.

 

Our sleeping bags were set up in a small room toward the back of the house off the kitchen.  We were both a bit tired and it was getting really dark.  We lit a couple of the candles and talked for a while.  Since the room was small and the house was, as I said, kind of creepy, we left the door open. 

 

"Let's forget about the seance", I said, "It's getting late and I'm tired".    Keith agreed and we sat in the candlelight on our sleeping bags and talked.  After a time, we noticed that the door to the room was no longer open.

 

Keith asked, "What the hell?  Did you close the door?" 
"Not me, maybe a draft", I replied.  I then got up and opened it again.  We blew out the candles and curled up in our sleeping bags.

 

Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard the door shut.  Both of us were wide awake immediately.  I turned my flashlight on and pointed it at the now closed door.  The weak light cast crazy shadows so the room no longer looked square but, I don't know how to describe it but just wrong.  The proportions were mismatched and it, it just wasn't right.

 

Mustering some bravado, I got up, propped the door open with one of my parents chaise lounge chairs and said, "There, that ought to hold it open." 

 

We again got back in our bags and I turned out the weakening light.  After lying there awake for a time, Keith started snoring.  I started to drift off to sleep.

 

I was wide awake a minute later though and so was Keith.  There was the sound of footsteps in the upstairs loft and a dragging sound.  The steps came down the creaking stairs on the other side of the house. 

 

"Is it just me or did you hear it to?", I whispered.  Keith said, "It's not just you, there's someone here."  Once again I turned on the flashlight.  We both got up to investigate and found nothing.  "It's an old house", Keith said, "It could be just the breeze outside making it creak."   Once again, we returned to our sleeping bags and made ready to sleep.

 

A few minutes later, the door slammed shut forcefully, with a bang and a crash.  We jumped up and turned on the flashlight that by now was flickering.  Though it was easily 75 degrees, the room felt suddenly cold. 

 

I opened the door and saw the chaise lounge that we'd used to prop the door open, bent and mangled on the other side of the kitchen against the wall. 

 

"I'm out of here, I'm leaving.  I don't care where I sleep but I'm not spending another minute here!" Keith exclaimed as he rolled up his sleeping bag and stuffed his stuff into his backpack. 

 

"I'm with you buddy", I agreed as I threw my things into my pack.  We spent the next several hours hitchhiking back home, arriving at my house just before lunchtime.

 

As a footnote, I should add that my brother has had this house cleared by a Native American Shamen.  Steve told me that the Shamen told him when he entered the house, "There's something dangerous here, something angry."  Up until the "clearing",  many people who visited the house, which is now renovated and is a very nice property, had unsettling experiences here.  Since then, there are still occasional footsteps, a rhythmic creaking like the sound of an old rocking chair and indentations appearing beside people on bedding.  (This happened in front of my eyes on my son's bed this summer.)  None of this felt scary at all.  I assume this is my family.  Whatever else was here is gone.

 

 

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