From: rholmes@athena.cs.uga.edu (Robb Holmes)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: Not much of a ghost story
Date: 5 Sep 92 21:36:34 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens


        When I was nine years old, my family moved into a two-story,
four-bedroom house in Griffin, Georgia.  The house had previously
belonged to a widow, who no longer had children at home.  It was a
needlessly large house for a family consisting of two parents and an
only child, but at the time my grandmother lived with us and an
elderly great-uncle was a frequent visitor.

        A few years later, after my grandmother had died and Uncle
Paul was no longer able to visit, my parents moved to the downstairs
bedroom, leaving me alone in the upstairs.  It was an ideal setup for
an adolescent who was fond of staying up to all hours of the night,
quietly playing my guitar or reading.

        One night, when I was about fifteen, I was so absorbed in the
book I was reading that I never turned out my light and went to sleep.
About four in the morning, an odd thing happened: the door connecting
my room to the back bedroom started rattling in its frame, as though
someone were standing on the other side and gently shaking the
doorknob.

        There was nothing frightening about this.  It was a bit
irritating, though, because it distracted me from my reading.
Finally, I got up to investigate.  I opened the door.  Nothing there.
Closed it again.  It resumed rattling.  Out of curiosity, I tried
closing the door between my room and the other front bedroom.  It,
too, rattled.

        At this point, my curiosity was engaged enough to lead me to
look for possible causes.  The window fan we used to cool the house on
summer nights was not running.  There was no noticeable breeze, and in
any case the windows and blinds showed no activity at all.  The floor
didn't seem to be vibrating, and in fact nothing else seemed to be
moving, other than the two doors.

        Curious as I was, I also wanted to get back to my book, so I
finally hypothesized that the washer must be running downstairs,
causing vibrations that I couldn't feel, but which were still strong
enough to rattle the doors.  It didn't occur to me that it was four in
the morning and no one else was awake to run the washer!  At the
moment, though, that explanation was satisfactory enough to let me
resume reading, and I did.  After about an hour, the rattling stopped,
and I never experienced it again.

        I was not frightened by the rattling, and I didn't think about
it much afterward, other than to remember it occasionally as a
slightly odd and unexplained event.  It wasn't until much later that
it occurred to me that there might be some connection between the
rattling and the fact that the house's previous owner had had an adult
son who shot himself to death one night, in one of the upstairs
bedrooms.

        This would be a better ghost story if I could tell you that
the rattling doors occurred on an anniversary of the suicide, or if I
could say that it was about four a.m. when the suicide occurred.  But
I don't know that either of these is true, and have no reason to think
that they are.  I am inclined to think that there is a rational
explanation for the rattling doors -- perhaps something on the order
of low-grade seismic activity -- but I do not know what that
explanation could be.  Thus, it remains an unsolved mystery for me.


Robb Holmes  WUGA  Ga Ctr for Continuing Ed  The University of Georgia
holmesr@gacsrv.gactr.uga.edu   rholmes@athena.cs.uga.edu   rholmes@uga
Xref: sparky alt.folklore.ghost-stories:339 alt.folklore.urban:23207