u/Maxeemtoons

NOTE: This is a crosspost of a post from like a decade ago, and after re-reading it, I realize there may be too much context, and I apologize for that, and its length. But in the interest of comments from those who experienced things like this I guess I will leave it as is, warts and all. Again, apologies if the writing is annoying/unwelcome:
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So I want to ask about this particular shape floating through the air, but it is also specifically tied to a haunting story and I need to give the complete context of all the strange things that were happening when we saw this shape. So I hope you don't mind that I am combining a "haunting" story and "question" in the same post.

It was Spring of 2006, almost two years after my first ghostly encounter (with the phantom cat of Bagno a Ripoli) and I had just gotten out of a lease with my exgf, let's call her Sarah. As an extra odd factor to this story, the past few months I had been noticing a strange repeat occurrence. The long pull chain in my closet kept appearing on the upper shelf, some 6 or 7 feet high. I would get up in the morning, get dressed, turn off the light with the long pull chain and by the time I got home from work it was tucked up on the top shelf. When I asked Sarah nicely if she had been in my room for any reason at all she would just laugh as though I were being unnecessarily suspicious. We might have even discussed the fact that the building was built just after the turn of the 20th century (1906 if I recall?) and she might have suggested with some amusement that it was probably haunted. I didn't really know what to think about that since even though I'd had my first ghost encounter I hadn't experienced something as odd since. Although she and I didn't hate each other by any means, it was obviously a limitation on our lifestyles to be living together so when I found a place with friends and had the free time, I was so excited I booked it in the middle of the night.

I will never forget that night moving all my things by myself. I finished packing early in the morning in a beat up old yellow pick up whose driver side door I had to hold closed while taking right hand turns. I was ecstatic. By 3am I was at the new place, an old house in a part of town that had built up in the 1970s. I had no idea the house I was moving into was actually erected in the 1890's. The three story had been converted into two units and the top story or attic sealed. The front of the house has a formal entrance with an elegant wooden staircase that looked disused. The back has a small deck. And from the deck there are two screen doors. One of them opens to the doorway to our first floor unit's kitchen. The other leads to the door directly to the back stair case, from which you can proceed to the same kitchen through another door, go downstairs to the basement or go up to the second floor unit.

The first strange incident with the house happened that very hour of moving in. My roommates had said they would join me later in the week so I was going to be the first to stay in the house and by myself. There was absolutely no breeze that night. I remember the seed pods in the tree in the yard by the deck hanging straight down as still as a statue. I propped open the door and screen door to the main kitchen entry and didn't even bother to turn on the lights since the street lights provided enough to see and it was a nice atmosphere. As I moved my fourth or so armful of boxes to stack on the counter and oven, I froze in my tracks.

As I stood at the South entrance facing North, the pull chain for the kitchen light in the roughly 10 foot high kitchen was swinging widely in something like an 80-degree arc on its own accord from East to West in an even metronome motion. My neck still tingles thinking about it. It was almost as if it were waving "Hello" or "Beware".

It was so even in semblance that I could not determine any explanation for its motion unless something invisible were hanging on the end of the cord and keeping it swinging so regularly and evenly. My mind raced as I stood there frozen with box in hands watching it swing. I felt again that there was no breeze. It was a perfect night, not too cool or warm. And it didn't make sense that the cord would be swinging perpendicular to the door rather than towards it, if it were a pressure or temperature difference. I glanced at the window, vaguely in the East-Northeast position from the cord. Then I wondered if a bat had silently flitted in and out of the house since I had propped the doors open. But then I thought it surely must be my neighbors playing a trick on me, with some control mechanism attached to the cord. They heard me come in at 3am and annoyed had set their trap in motion.

I thought to myself all these things in what must have been 15 seconds before I ventured a couple hellos and received no response from within the dark house. I am sure I then said something about wishing to be friends with anything that lived there and proceeded to put the box down. Maybe 30 seconds had passed now and the cord showed no sign of relenting so I took a step forward, reached up very carefully and took the end of the cord from the air. Then released it. It did just what a cord is more likely to be doing at 3am in the morning and swang in gradually smaller arcs until it nearly stopped. I announced that I intended to live here and didn't want any trouble.

I finished moving all the items and laid my mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms. It was a dark room and the house was old. So I could not tell if the clicking or tapping in the room that kept moving in a triangle shape above me -- click -- tap -- click -- were just the pipes in some kind of old rhythm or something else. As I drifted to sleep a vivid vision appeared to me. It was so odd because unlike my thoughts at night it was bright as if my vision had some extra glow to it. I saw an old yellowed 1900s era photograph with torn edges of a child in overalls standing in the kitchen doorway with a small toy. It was a wooden duck with wheels, and the wheels had some kind of rubber duck feet on each wheel so that pulling the toy would produce a funny waddle effect. The boy was holding a leash, a simple white cord attached to this wooden toy. It occurs to me as I write this that the cord was a thicker version of the simple string hanging from the pull chain in the kitchen, but at the time I was just fascinated by this image my brain produced. Then as I tried to look at the picture more carefully and ask my brain to give me better details of this vision, sickly dark dots began to spread on the photo and it appeared to age and deteriorate before my eyes as the dots spread across the image revealing a glowing sickly green. It was like I witnessed this old photo get sick and die. But it was just a weird vision before bed. I shook it from my thoughts and tried to just get to sleep. Somehow I managed to do so despite the eerie evening.

After my two roommates moved in, I told them what happened and one of them told me she did not wish to talk about this sort of thing because she had grown up with ghostly disembodied screams in their household when she was a child. My other roommate and I, let's call her Sally, would stay up late working on our comics on back to back desks in the living room and listening to Coast to Coast AM mostly making fun of the show and how lax George Noory had become in questioning his audience with relevant questions. We enjoyed a lovely household for many months. We also had 3 cats in total and we would laugh as they chased invisible things around the wooden floors and sometimes just sit and move their heads as if watching something bob through the air. There was only one little complaint we had, which was that our upstairs neighbors seemed kind of loud. Around 45 minutes after midnight, while we were trying to work, there would be a loud dragging noise as if heavy oak furniture or a pool table were being slid across their entire floor (hence heard through our ceiling). There would be loud men's voices as they climbed the back stairs and then this shuffling and rumbling. We joked that perhaps our neighbors set up a bowling alley at night.

One night I was inspired to catch these "loud boyfriends" of the two young students living in the upper unit and I went to the kitchen door leading to the stairwell and looked through the old key hole. Although I could hear them climbing and talking, I saw no figures or even shadows cast on the stairs as they'd rounded the top. I figured it must have been echoes and I just missed them.

It was one night that we were working in the living room as usual when I kept seeing a very odd thing out of the corner of my eye. It was like a dustball of energy with a little jet coming from it. I said, "I keep seeing something out of the corner of my eye." To my surprise she immediately responded, "I thought I was the only one seeing them. But they don't look like anything." I replied, "Yeah and if you try to look at them it's like they're not there." "Exactly! I thought I was going crazy. Do they have like tails?" We proceeded to describe the same thing to one another down to the minute optical effects. Our description formed of these "air fish" things that look like a child's drawing of a meteorite, with a dust ball of energy at the center that draws your attention but you can't look directly at it.

The shapes looked like this, with the ball no bigger than 2\" around

We discussed the possibility that we were seeing energy vortexes of some kind at the center of these strange objects and speculated that is what the cats were looking at and occasionally chasing around the house. Our other roommate did not see these objects that appeared in the evening, however she slept at night while we worked.

This would have been the end of our odd experiences in this house except in the days of moving out a year later we had a conversation with the girls upstairs whom we barely ever saw. We reflected on a good year of living together out of each others' hair but mentioned the loud noises at night and wanted to know what it was they had been up to all those evenings. They looked at each other and then at us and said, "We were wondering the same thing about you."

It turns out the entire time we thought they had been moving heavy objects across their floor, they thought we were moving heavy objects downstairs. When we thought they were having loud boyfriends over, they were trying to sleep and thinking we were the loud annoying housemates. "But you do occasionally use the back stairs, right?" we tried to catch them.

They shook their heads. "No, we don't have our boyfriends over and we always use the front stairs."

So the front "disused" stairs were the ones they were entering through while the back stairs that nobody was using ... were the loudest and noisiest. Our third confirmed this because she lived in the front of the house and she on occasion heard them come home through the front stairs, never the back.

As the weight of this revelation sunk in, and we realized there was nothing between us except a foot or two of separation, we excitedly shared details about the noises. They invited us upstairs to show us their lightweight mod furniture that could not possibly have created the "rolling bowling ball" and "heavy oak furniture" noises dragging across our ceiling (yet also under their floor). They also explained that their small dog would hide in their room while the noises were going on. They asked us if we ever went upstairs and we asked why.

They showed us the sealed entrance to the attic and explained that they heard a young girl's voice and footsteps up there but they were always too afraid to say anything or look.

When the tenant showed up we asked him if he knew anything about the house or if he'd ever had renters complain of hauntings. He said, "No," and then, "but I wouldn't be surprised."

It turns out the place had been constructed as a boarding house in the 1890's and of all the information preserved about it he just remembered that the men had a curfew of 1 A.M. Sally and I were amazed that this detail came up. It was just before 1 A.M. that the noises of invisible men coming home and going up stairs had been occurring so many nights while the five of us (plus 3 cats and 1 dog) had lived there experiencing it and feeling it was the fault of that "other half". I wonder if it had also been an orphanage for those children that ended up not "belonging" to anyone, as many such operations existed in the area back in the day. There was one time we were in the basement and noticed an opening in the wall. Being dumb and curious one day I dog-crawled inside the small opening with a flashlight only to find a small rectangle of Earth missing there.

It was about the size, I noted, of a child's casket but there was nothing there.

Despite the mixture of odd experiences with a perhaps grim history, I do remember the house and our time there fondly. One day we drove by and came across a present occupant of the house. We asked him if he had experienced anything odd while living there and he replied that he had not. (My friend insisted that I write down this story and send it to him so I will send him a link to this page too for sure.)

Upon reflection, I would like to know if any mediums or people with sensitivities or experiences with these matters might now what these "swimming" shapes are. Are they the same as human ghosts? Why do they look like electric dust balls with triangle shaped jets coming out the back?

And also, I wonder why the two pullchain experiences happened to me or if that's just a coincidence. One of them in my old place, with the mysterious shelf-climbing chain (just to annoy me?) and then the next one seeming to "follow me" to the next house yet also because of that odd vision seeming specific to the new house.

I understand I may never have answers for these things but if anyone knows more please tell me. Thank you.