All the time people could be heard walking around on the third floor, which used to be the servants' quarters back in the old days. The steps were were so old that they each had a distinct sound to them, and it wasn't unusual to hear someone walking upstairs even when there was no person there at all. There were times when I heard someone rattling the silverware in the kitchen even though I was left in the house alone. Once one of my cousins stayed over at my house. We slept in the den on the second floor, a sort of sleep-over. It was really late, and I was just about asleep when I felt someone literally tug on my leg. I opened my eyes, and standing right next to the window was a little girl smiling at me. But before I could ask to see if it was my cousin, she faded away as if she weren't even there. Two days later, my aunt told me how when my father was only a small boy, she could hear a child playing with his toy trucks at night, but when she checked on him he was dead asleep and the toys remained untouched. My mother called in a psychic in one day. She said that there were ghosts. One was of a little girl named Patricia, and the other of a grown woman named Mary Catherine. She also said she sometimes saw a dog with them. My father came home from work and was utterly shocked when my mother mentioned this. One, he then told her that one of the dogs he had as a kid was buried out back in the yard because the family liked it so much. Two, he showed my mother for the first time that there is a brick in the fireplace in my bedroom that had the name Mary etched into it. The psychic said that one of the ghosts died in a fire. We assumed that meant from the kitchen. There is a firewall to protect the house. My father said that he crawled in the crawl spaces and found no evidence of rebuilding or repair from a fire. However, the kitchen, although it is still very old, is newer than the rest of the house.
My father died just before summer in 2000. He died on a Monday at a Home Depot, but he was cremated on Thursday and the ashes brought back to the house. The upcoming Wednesday I came back home after spending a couple nights at my aunt's house. I was doing genealogy on the internet and heard someone walking around on the first floor. My father's usual routine when he came home from work was that he closed the kitchen door behind after coming into the house. He set his briefcase down on the floor, next to the bar. He walked halfway around the bar to the cabinets where the cups were. He pulled one down, finished walking around the bar to the freezer, put ice in the cup by hand, grabbed a coke from twelve pack that sat on the floor. He stepped over to the counter, opened the can, poured the coke, and walked from the kitchen out into the hall, past the steps leading upstairs, and out into the reception room. There he walked to the front door where this mail-holder with a creaky lid contained the day's mail inside. He'd open it, grab his mail, walk to the stairs, and procede upstairs. That Wednesday night, I heard the whole routine, sounds and all, to the letter, except for walking up the staircase. I thought it might have been some psychological way for me to still retain something of my father, but the next morning, my mother told me she kept his ashes in her bedroom closet, and that the night before she heard the exact same routine, too.
A year later we moved out that house. In May this year, before we finally sold it, I revisited the old monster at ten at night. I was on the first floor in the living room, lounge, whatever you might call it. I lit three candles in the middle of the room in the form of a triangle. I was going to look out the windows because that used to be my favorite room, and this was going to be my final goodbye. Within a few minutes, I heard people walking upstairs again, only it was on the second floor this time. And it was not only a continuous sound until I blew out the candles, but also the loudest I had ever heard it. Eventually the "people," and I was the only one in that house, I guarantee, started coming down the stairs to the first floor. I didn't see them, but again I heard the distinctive steps. The other thing that freaked me out before I freaked and left the house was that only one of the candles had a flame that was blowing. Granted the house was drafty, but two of the candles had flames standing straight up, and the third blew at a ninety degree angle away from the others. I tried to calm myself and cupped my hands around the candle to reassure myself, but sure enough, the flame stayed bent at ninety degrees.
And that is the story of my former house in Norfolk.