AND a bunch of weird stuff happened in the house I grew up in in Indiana. I already told you about the ghost in the chair (and the writing on the wall).
Sometime after this incident, my mother, my brother Chuck, and I were in the living room slow at night watching TV when a clamorous noise startled us. It was a clamorous, buzzing sound coming from the basement.
We had a really musty elderly basement—half of it was a mud-floored basement that opened up to a poured concrete basement. It was just a storage room, full of elderly paint cans, fishing tackle, tools, storm windows, a huge freezer that usually held a whole pig and half a beef that we bought twice a year to survive. There was a drain for the washing machine, and the furnace and water heater.
The “ceiling” was merely the exposed beams of the ground-floor rooms, one of which we were sitting in when he heard a clamorous noise coming from the basement. Startled, we went downstairs to see what was happening.
The stairs had no risers (only treads, no risers). Our dog, a huge German shepherd, was always afraid to go down to the basement. He would almost have a fit when he had to go past that door to get out into the backyard. But there we were, me, Mom, and Chuck, standing on those open-back basement stairs, looking down at the cement floor with a single horseshoe on it. The cement was chipped where it had hit. It had been spray-painted silver.
We had a silver pair and a red pair for playing horseshoes, and they were real horseshoes—bulky. We had them hanging from a pair of nails driven into one of the exposed floor beams. As we stood there, a second silver horseshoe fell on the first one.
It was surprising. Very strange. That's when I saw a whitish line shoot out from the horseshoe that was already on the floor. No one else had seen it. But to me it looked like a shape had reached up and tapped the other one, a bit like looking at a skinny man from the side. I remember talking about maybe running across the dining room to the stairs, we could knock it off the nail…
But we were on the stairs when it fell… and the nail it fell off was still there, just as it should have been. A huge 10p nail driven in at about a 45 degree angle. The horseshoes would have had to “walk” up the nail and jump over the head of the huge nail.
My brother was taller than all of us and he grabbed the nail to see if it was loose or if he could turn it. It was as tight as ever.
We hung the silver ones back up on the same nail they had fallen off of and went back upstairs. I think we spent the rest of the evening waiting to see if they would fall again or not.
They never fell again, as far as I know. And it had been at least a month since anyone had played horseshoes – so they had been on that nail for a long time.
