Tales from a haunted house

My wife and I bought a haunted house in Queanbeyan in approximately 2001. I won't give the exact address out of respect for the new owners but I will say the house is located in Binaburra Place. Our first inkling that something may have been wrong with the house (which we bought brand new) occurred soon after we moved in. There were all the usual foot steps and slamming doors heard when everyone was in bed and my children were sound asleep. After a while we just accepted the strange nocturnal sounds and stopped getting up to check on them.

The first major event occurred soon after the birth of my son Ethan. My wife was in the nursery feeding Ethan and I was in bed. I heard my wife call out to me. Apparently she had seen a man dressed in blue walk past the nursery door and she thought it was me. At the time I chalked it up to her being tired due to having a new born and didn't think to much of the event.

Several years passed with only minor occurrences (noises in the night etc) and then my mother in law who was living with us passed away after a long illness shortly before Christmas. She was to be buried the day after Boxing Day. Now that year I had decided in an attempt to get fit that I would buy a weight bench and weights during the Boxing Day sales. After buying this equipment I decided to set the garage up as a gym. At this point it was more of a junk room so I needed to tidy it up before I could use it as a gym. It was while tidying the garage that the light started to flicker. My initial thought was that the bulb was about to blow. This continued on for about 30 seconds before the bulb apparently blew. Given that I had enough light to see from the sliding door that led outside to the deck I didn't need to change the bulb immediately so I continued tidying. Eventually I found that I needed to go to the kitchen to get a cloth to wipe something down. As I was walking out of the garage I glanced at the light switch and noticed that the light had in fact been turned off at the wall. I flicked the switch and the light came straight on. What I had taken to be the bulb blowing was in fact the flicker caused by some unseen entity slowly turning off the light. Of course with the recent death of my mother in law I speculated to my wife that it was obviously Pat who had turned off the light in a bid to make her presence known. Whether this was actually the case I don't really know.

Ghostly activity through the year was generally fairly low level. It would generally pick up just before Christmas each year and gradually die down several months later. At one stage in the middle of the afternoon whilst home alone watching movies I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I looked up and saw my dead mother in law, dressed in a green dressing gown, walking down the hall and entering her bedroom. I only saw her for a very brief period but there was no doubt in my mind as to whom I had seen. Another time, again in the afternoon whilst home alone watching movies, I caught sight of what appeared to be a dense ball of smoke swirling around in the middle of the dining room. This smoke was only visible whilst looking at it out of the corner of my eye though. Whenever I turned to face it directly it vanished.

In about 2011 when I had obtained my long service leave I took 5 months off work. It was during this period that the paranormal activity in our house seemed to peak. I don't know whether this was simply because I was home all the time and so experienced more things or whether there actually was a surge in activity. In any event a lot of things happened. The most major experience I initially attributed to my son Ethan. I was walking from the back lounge room past the kitchen up towards our bedroom at the front of the house when I saw what I took to be my son Ethan, dressed in a blue shirt, run out of the front loungeroom towards one of the bedrooms. I soon realized this was not Ethan though because rather than run through the bedroom door this apparition seemed to bend over and become enveloped in shadows about a metre to the side of the door. It then simply vanished. This all occurred in a matter of a couple of seconds. I continued walking past this bedroom and glanced in to see my son Ethan asleep in bed and my wife changing my other son. I didn't say anything about this to my wife until the next day as it seemed so unbelievable.

Another event that occurred during this period was that late one night, about 1.00am on either a Friday or Saturday night I was sitting up using my computer in the back loungeroom when I heard an electronic toy going off in the front lounge room. Thinking that this would wake up my family I went out to find the toy to turn it off. Once I had done this I walked back out to the back loungeroom. Before I even had a chance to sit down the toy starts going off again. I turn around and walk back to the front loungeroom and just as I am entering the room a second toy starts going off. So I turned both toys off and then addressed the entity. I basically said "My kids are asleep, you are going to wake them, please stop turning the toys on." There was silence after this and no more disturbances that night.

Yet another event that I remember occurred when I was talking in my bedroom with my son Ethan. This particular event occurred during the day time. I think we may have been talking about ghosts and I had a silver maglite sitting on top of a chest of drawers in the bedroom. I think a comment was made that was somewhat along the lines of, "If a ghost is present please turn on the torch on the chest of drawers.". To our surprise the torch turned on. This particular type of torch is turned on by twisting the head of the torch. They take a bit of work to turn on so I can only conclude that the torch switching on was very much a deliberate act by some unseen presence.

The final event I will relate occurred each night for about a week. My son Bailey slept with us till he was about 4 or 5. He has Cerebral Palsy and it was simply easier to have him sleep in bed with us than to get him to sleep in his own bed. Each night he would take a bottle to bed which we gave him if he woke up. Now at some point on this given week I woke in the middle of the night and could hear Bailey's bottle being slowly dragged across the bedside drawers next to me. I didn't think much of it and went back to sleep. This kept on occurring night after night. After a few nights of this I awoke one morning and dragged the bottle slowly across the drawers to satisfy myself that the sound I was hearing was in fact Bailey's bottle being dragged around. The sound the bottle made was the exact sound that I had been hearing during the night. After a week of this I explained to my wife what had been happening each night. I was fully expecting that this bottle dragging would continue happening indefinitely. To my surprise though it stopped and never occurred again. To this day I believe that it was somebody (probably my late mother in law) who simply wanted some acknowledgement that she was still around.

We sold the house in late 2013 and moved to Junee. I still sometimes wonder whether the present owners have experiences like we did or whether the presences in the house have moved on.