Reader Submission: Footsteps on the Stairs
“This story took place three years ago at my dad’s house. My husband and I had lost our home to foreclosure and good soul that he is, my dad offered to let us stay with him for a while till we got back on our feet financially. So he gave us the upstairs quarters of his house while he slept on a bed downstairs.
The house used to be a tractor shed, and when my family moved to Georgia from California 29 years ago they converted the tractor shed into a two-story house. My grandma lived in it until my dad took her to a nursing home in 2007. She passed away later that same year and he moved into her house where he still is now. Anyway, that’s the history of the place.
On the day in question, when I had my experience, my dad and husband were both at work and my daughter was at school. It was around eleven in the morning and too early for all three to be home yet. I was alone there since I was out of work at the time and was upstairs in the bathroom.
There’s a door that opens into the upstairs quarters and I had it closed as well as the bathroom door. As I was sitting in the bathroom, I heard these heavy, slow footsteps coming up the stairs. My grandma used to walk like that before she died. I got nervous and called out ‘Who’s there?’ and no one answered. Yes, I was scared! I had locked both doors downstairs, front and back, before going up to the bathroom.
I tried to ignore the sounds and go back to the book I was reading, but my reading was interrupted a second time by the footsteps. Each time, they stopped on the top step just outside the closed door that led upstairs. I didn’t hear them a third time, but when I went down to wash my hands (there wasn’t a sink installed in the upstairs bath), I found the house completely empty and both doors still locked.
My husband scoffs at the idea of ghosts and says there are only demons. I asked him what the footsteps could’ve been since he thought he was so well informed about the afterlife or lack thereof, and he couldn’t come up with an answer. I don’t remember if my hairs were standing up or not, it’s been three years, but I do remember being anxious to get out of the house and outside away from it.”
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Only demons -_★ what the heck?
I have similar experience I know I heard footsteps on the stairs after my brother died. My husband was at work. I was terrified but know I wasn’t imagining it cause even my dog heard it. She looked towards the stairs. We both went to look who it was as I looked the footsteps stopped and there was nobody there. The front door were locked. I will never forget it. It hasn’t happened again. I have no other explanation for it.
I stayed at a friend’s house in Garforth in the city of Leeds,England about twenty years ago when we were thirteen years old.His mother and father had gone out for the evening.We were the only beings in the house apart from two small dogs.We decided to do a Ouija board.Nothing happened at first.Half an hour later I was stood at the top of the stairs when the wooden boards of the stairs started to creak as if someone was walking up the stairs.Yet I could see no one on the stairs.Dogs started barking downstairs in the kitchen yet the two little dogs were asleep in the kitchen.An door slammed somewhere downstairs.We were out of that house so fast!
This happened to me almost exactly as you described it, but no family members died. I was home alone, and in the bathroom washing my hands (the bathroom is about 3 feet from where the stairs begin). I heard something on the stairs, so I turned the water off to listen – and heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I could even hear a sound like the material of someone’s pants rubbing together as they walked. I sat in horrified silence for the next 20 minutes, terrified that somebody broke in.