Creepy, heavy footsteps in the dark

Not surprisingly, I remember this like it was yesterday. Something unseen at the door. While our house in Garrettsville was not as old as we thought — or appeared to be — it was a veteran of many a northern winter and vicious storms. It was a formidable bulwark. And with a basement that was little more than a deep hole in the ground with basically unsupported walls, our house was like a big, two-story, high-ceilinged log cabin built in the Victorian style.

I always say that I don’t believe in ghosts or anything supernatural, but then I remember the incidents in that old house and I become uneasy. Strange noises at night like a baby crying in the stillness of the wee hours — the only baby blocks away — and a loud rubbery sound heard throughout the house but mostly from the basement. Yes, the earthen-floored basement with two or three shallow and suspicious oblong indentations.

It is important to say that our house sat on its own little hill with the backyard sloping down and finally flattening out into a kind of marshy water meadow about a football field long. With a little stream with frogs splashing and croaking.

The back door was thick and substantial — but with no lock ,which I didn’t realize at the time. Almost no one locked their doors at night anyway; it was that kind of town in a different era.

But if I had known it was not locked, it would have panicked me because as I was standing in the dark kitchen in the late night I heard the thudding on the outside door. It was close to midnight and I did not jump to answer it immediately. There was a window with a view of that door; the moon was bright and full and I could see there was no one there. But the thudding continued.

In only a moment, however, I heard running-away footsteps, heavy and loud. Nothing visible.

I didn’t realize until later, that footsteps in the soft grass should have been scarcely heard if at all, but I heard them clearly and even splashing through the water into the grove of trees at the far end of our lot. And the usually — noisy frogs were silent.

Well, the house was pulled down shortly after I moved to California and all those unearthly noises and all the other incidents will have to remain unexplained.