My eerie family

First off, thanks so much for your thoughtful responses to my question. I love it when people take the time to express their perspectives--too little of that goes on, imho--in a way that encourages learning. Meaning that I learned a lot from your words and experiences.

A while back, I mentioned in passing that I grew up in a haunted house. "A ha!" some of you may now be gloating. "You had Casper as a sibling, you only child poseur!"

Not quite. But in the interest of distracting myself and keeping out of the clutches of the evil Dr. Google, I'm going to tell you more about my eerie adolescence.

My mom's side of the family, in particular as it comes down my maternal granddad's (Welsh) line, is beset with weirdness. Dead relatives appearing in photographs. Clocks--electric, pendulum, battery, you name it--all stopping at the minute of my granddad's death for several hours. A woman in a mental hospital where my dad was working telling my mom about her "beautiful baby girl" when she was already pregnant but didn't know it yet. Strange lucid dreams that come true. You know, that kind of thing.

These were, for the most part, stories I heard and didn't witness. But in the 100-year-old old prairie four-square where I spent my teenage years, I heard and saw some odd things. Strangely enough, it was never scary. Just...bizarre.

One night, I was lying in bed. My parents were both out of the house. I was reading and suddenly heard what I thought was them coming home: the distinctive slam of the heavy plate glass front door, the particular creaks of each stair. I heard it, plain as day.

Then I looked out on the landing, and there was no one there.

You'd think, as a gal alone at night in a big old house, that I'd be pretty shaken. But I wasn't, not at all. It felt oddly normal.

My parents both saw the ghost, each on separate occasions, a female figure in white who turned around and disappeared. We would sometimes here loud crashes and bangs from the kitchen at night, as if every glass and dish were breaking at once. Sometimes, the whole house would smell distinctly and powerfully of roses in the winter, with no potpourri or whatnot to explain the scent. Once, a stained glass window somehow flew smack dab into the middle of the kitchen floor, smashing into a hundred pieces but not disturbing the breakables in front of it. Once, a single piece of the family silver disappeared mysteriously, only to reappear a thousand miles away several years later. My mother still jealously guards the spoons, keeping an eagle-eye out for the pilfering phantom.

I don't know; perhaps there are other explanations for all this, besides the supernatural. Perhaps my family and I are one big happy band of mutually supportive loonies. But I have to say, regardless, my teenage experiences taught me that there is definitely more to heaven and earth than we can see and understand.

Any inexplicable happenings in your family history? Any eerie tales you can tell?