What It’s Like To Live In A Haunted House When You’re A 100% Rational Human Being

Producer’s note: Someone on Quora asked: Have you ever been haunted? Here is one of the best answers that’s been pulled from the thread from someone who describes themselves as rational and doesn’t believe in ghosts.

I lived in a haunted duplex in Northport NY for a year. Evidence included:

Opening doors. I happened to be sitting in the living room, looking at the front door, which was locked with a deadbolt. The door swung open as I watched. The deadbolt was still sticking out. I’m positive it had been closed with the deadbolt in the frame.

Responding to verbal requests. My wife was sitting on the toilet. The locked bathroom door swung open. She said, “Can I have some privacy please?” The door swung closed and latched, still locked.

Partying. Two guys living upstairs went somewhere for the weekend. As they were leaving, they said they would return Sunday. That night my wife and I heard people talking upstairs, footsteps, toilets flushing, water running. There were no guest cars in the driveway. Sunday, when the neighbors returned, I told them someone had been in their apartment Friday night. They denied it. I asked them to check. They said it was exactly as they left it. No one had partied there.

Playing with table. We had a kitchen table with a glass top, tubular frame, and four plastic clips between the frame and tabletop. The clips kept falling out. I would replace them, and they would fall out again. I could not see how they were coming off because they were sandwiched between a heavy glass top and the frame below. One day I superglued the clips to the frame, waited for the glue to set, found them to be rock solid, replaced the top. As I admired my work, I heard a ping and saw all four come off simultaneously.

Orbs visible to camera, not to the eye. A picture taken in the kitchen showed two red spots on the wall. My eye did not see them. The upstairs neighbor, who was a professional photographer working for Nikon, could not explain it. He definitely ruled out lens flare and a defective pixel on the camera’s sensor.

Faces in window. A picture taken in the kitchen showed a man’s and woman’s looking in the window from the outside, and a little girl leaning through a closed storm door with her upper body inside the kitchen. Another picture taken from outside showed the same family looking through the bedroom window from inside. There was nothing wrong with my high-end Olympus camera.

The upstairs neighbors had seen no sign of ghosts. The landlords, who had owned the house since it was built ten years earlier, said no one had died there. The ghosts did nothing harmful or scary, they seemed mischievous.