From: lls@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Lori Smallwood)
Subject: Barn story
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois.
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 19:48:04 GMT


Our family used to live in Ohio.  My little brothers (now age 16) were
friends with Chris, a kid who lived with his parents and siblings out in
the boonies (granted, Delaware Ohio *is* boony but this place is even
boonier) in a big old house with a cool big old barn in the back.  Connie
(Chris' mom) was an antique dealer, and would store and sell antiques out
of this old barn.  

First were the lights.  Connie would make sure she turned out all the
lights in the barn when she left, and when she would turn back to look,
some would be on.  They would turn themselves off and on at random, even 
though the wiring was brand new and not faulty.  Then there were the
footsteps -- heavy ones, along with cool breezes and strange shadows on the
wall.  Connie eventually got used to this;  as it did not seem to be
malevolent, she referred to it as just "the ghost" or Mr. "Smith"
(Actually, she referred to it as the previous (dead) owner of the house;
his name isn't Smith, but I can't remember what it is right now).

The barn had some leaks in the roof, so before it could be fixed, she put
some buckets up in the third (top) level of the barn to catch the drips.
One was an antique tin bucket that was painted red.  She owned no other
bucket like that.  At the time of the following incident, all the buckets
were completely full of water.

One day, Connie was showing some guy some antiques in a rather remote
area of the barn.  She was completely alone, out in the boonies, except for
this guy.  Who, all of a sudden, started getting close -- too close.
Suddenly -- the aforementioned red bucket dropped *out of nowhere* to the
cement floor and started slowly rolling back and forth.  All of a sudden,
the slimeball had a sudden urge to leave.  After he did, Connie looked at
the bucket.  It was bone dry.  There were no ledges in this particular
room that it could have fallen off of, and no way could it have fallen over
and rolled down to the first level of the barn.

Another incident involves Connie's husband, Mike, who kept his big manly
power tools in a part of the barn.  (This barn is big.)  Mike's table saw
has a little yellow key that looks like a plug, that's a safety key.  When
you pull it out, the saw won't turn on.  Anyway, Mike moved his table saw
about 15 feet to the other side of the room.  When he looked back to where
it was, the safety key was floating in mid air.  As he stood gaping, the
key dropped to the floor.

Another minor incident that kept occuring is that someone would lay
something down, turn to do something else, and when they would look back,
it would be gone.  After searching around for it for a while, they would
find it in the place that they had left it.  So, this was a friendly ghost,
and a protective one, but also one that liked to play tricks.

Finally, Connie got a psychic out there, who informed her that the barn had
this incredible "aura" because of all the antiques.  The psychic said that
there was definitely a ghost there, though, and Connie guessed correctly
that it was Mr. "Smith."  After Connie noticed that the pranks had ended,
the psychic informed her that she and some others had conjured up Mr. Smith
at a seance and moved him along into another realm or some such thing.

COMING SOON:  The barn *possesses* someone! 

I hope you enjoyed it!

-- Lori
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories