MMy first summer out of high school, I worked for a neighbor. He had a construction company that did mostly airy home improvement. Painting, general carpentry, basic landscaping, deck building, that sort of thing. The crew usually consisted of this guy, his partner, me, and one or two of my friends, along with one or two other laborers, depending on the size of the job.
In mid-summer we got a job to tidy up a house a few towns over that had been neglected for a while. Paint inside and out, fix creaky floors and water damage, tidy up the yard, etc. It was a decent sized house and needed a ton of work and the estimate was that it would take about a month to do it right. The homeowners had no problem with that since they didn't live there and were planning to sell the house. Everything inside had already been emptied (mostly).
The first few days were spent just clearing the yards of brush and other stuff so we could get the equipment to work outside. Once that was done, we split into two crews, one scraping the outside of the house and the other working inside. It was summer and the house had no air conditioning, so it was easier to work outside and we would take turns who was inside and who was outside.
To give you an idea of the layout of the house. When you walked in through the front door you had a huge room to the right and left. Straight ahead and to the left were the stairs leading to the second floor, to the right was a petite bathroom and then straight back to the kitchen and another huge room. Upstairs were 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. There was only one staircase leading to the second floor.
We started in the front rooms and after an hour or two our radio started acting up. It was an older style boombox, with a handheld cassette player and a slider knob to tune stations. In other words, everything was mechanical, not digital. At least 3 times the station changed by itself, from 102.7 we were listening to to other random stations (sorry, no scary oldies or anything). Interestingly, when it changed stations, the station it was on was perfectly tuned, and the jump between stations was very rapid, much faster than turning the knob and tuning in and then walking away from the radio without being noticed, maybe a second, just enough time for the slider to travel the distance to another station. No, the radio did not have mechanical station settings.
On at least two occasions when this has happened, I have been in a room and while my back is to it, the radio was in a place where it would be nearly impossible for someone to reach it, tune in and get out. It was also not by a window. Several times the volume has increased significantly, beyond what I thought the device was capable of producing. We then moved the radio to another room, blamed it on a bad power supply, and the problems stopped.
Other weird things: Lights would turn on and off while you were working, including our portable spotlights. It wasn't a power cut or anything, but an actual switch had been flipped. You could also hear footsteps above you when you were sure no one was upstairs.
The final kicker as we were finishing up the place was replacing some molding in the second floor bedroom. I had a substantial hefty steel toolbox with a ton of tools in it that must have weighed 30 or 40 pounds. One of those substantial craft jobs. I had most of what I was doing finished and had most of my stuff put away when our lunch arrived. It was raining outside so we were all sitting in the main entrance by the stairs, actually me and another guy were sitting on the stairs. EVERYONE was present. At this point we were all joking around that we were working in a haunted house because of all the weird stuff that was going on but no one took it seriously. Everyone was convinced that it was a combination of the elderly house, our imaginations and probably a few of us messing around that caused it. While we were talking about this there was a huge bang upstairs. One of the guys panicked and just ran for the door. Me and the guy sitting on the stairs turned around and went up. At the top of the stairs we had a clear view of the entrance to all the rooms, so in the 3 seconds it took us to get in, no one could have left the room without being seen.
In the room I was working in, my hefty metal toolbox was thrown across the room and its contents scattered. The time from when this happened to when I got there was so miniature that things were still rolling. Again, it was a 30-40 pound toolbox that was lying on the floor and had clearly been thrown a good 10 feet. We checked the other rooms and of course found nothing. Getting out the window (which was closed because it was raining) would have meant a 15 foot fall into the nasty bushes. There were no ladders on the house that day, or even on the truck, because of the rain. Everyone working there sat with us while we ate, and no one could walk past us and down the stairs while we were checking the rooms because there were people watching the stairs.
It was fucking scary, and the last few days we worked there we were all really on edge. No one went into the rooms alone and you could tell everyone was scared to death.
The boss mentioned it to the homeowner, who was just like, “ehh, whatever.” A few years later, the place burned to the ground, and one of the guys I worked with that summer who now lives in town sent me the story from the local paper. It turns out the previous owner who lived there was a withdrawn person after his wife died about a decade earlier, and never really went out/did much, which explained the neglect. He died about a year before we started working on the house, but no one found his body for at least 6 months. The people who hired us were his estranged son’s family who had inherited the house and were trying to sell it.
The house changed hands several times in the years we worked on it, but no one ever stayed there long-term, and a legend of the place being “haunted” began to form in the town.
In the interest of brevity, I've left out a few smaller parts of the story that were odd or could have been more easily explained, but suffice it to say that something strange was going on while we were there. I'm not one to really believe in ghosts or anything, but I can't rationally explain some of the things that happened there. Thinking about it still gives me the creeps. No one was aware of the story behind the house when we were working there, and you could tell from the incident with the toolbox that everyone was really nervous.
