One of my radio co-hosts was VERY receptive to ghosts as a kid.
Her parents rented a house out behind a bigger house where an older man lived as land-lord. After the old man died, her family moved into the larger house where his estate rented it out as a rental property. She remembers very vividly as a 7 year old, playing in an upstairs bedroom, and the old man appearing in a rocking chair.
The first few times it scared the living crap out of her and she ran to tell her mom, who didn't believe her (at first).
She told me that one of the things that struck her most about the "ghost" is that when he appeared (usually in the rocking chair) that he looked so sad, and that once she got used to his appearing, a "game" she would play with him was to smile at him (even though she was still somewhat scared)....and that he would sometimes smile back.
After awhile, because she KNEW and had spoken to the old man when in life, when he appeared...she spoke to him, and on occasion, would actually get a reply from the "apparation".
She told me that she asked the ghost if he were trying to scare them into leaving the house...and that he look puzzled, and said "I don't mind if ya'll live here" and then disappeared.
There were times later that her parents would walk into the room and find no one there, but the rocking chair would be moving as if there were someone sitting in it. They believed her after that.
She also added that as she grew up, her "ability" to see spirits waned, and that she had not had any experiences past age 12. She believes that kids are more "open" to what they might be seeing than adults who might pass things off as happenstance or a vivid imagination.
As for me...
Our house we rented in Richmond, Virginia was definitely haunted.
The first day we moved in, my wife made sweet & sour meatballs in the microwave and some rice in a brand new out-of-the-box Corelware pot. After the rice was done, she turned the heat off and almost immediately the stoneware pot cracked into multiple pieces on the range in front of us as if it were struck by a hammer.
A week later, we were eating dinner and one of my wife's decorative snow-balls cracked out of no-where and began to leak all the water out from a perch on a china cabinet, again, like it had been hit with a hammer.
My kids came to us and said they were scared at night because they would hear the stairs to the upstairs creak at night, and would see a small ball of dim light, like a dirty snowball, come up the stairs at the same time and disappear into a wall of an unused bedroom.
Things like cash disappeared from a locked briefcase.
My wife and I would be sitting watching tv and out of the corner of our eye would see dark shadows walking from the dining room into the kitchen.
There was never a out and out sighting, but everything seemed to center around the dining room and the stairs up to an unused bedroom. While no one ever said anything, no one ever wanted to go into that bedroom (the kids never played in there) and when I used it for a work-out/excercycle room a couple of times, it felt very strange...like a sense of dread there.
A different co-host who had a Dalmation (deaf) brought her dog over as a treat for my kids who had no dog when we had her over for dinner. When the dog came in the house she started to bark at something unseen in the dining room, and "chased" it into the master bedroom....all the while barking at something up high...as if near the ceiling.
It was a pretty happy day when we moved.
68ROX
