Ghosts, Haunting, and Legends
Home Encounters The Rattling Door

This Way Out by Frank Grace
4.00 avg. rating (83% score) - 1 vote

Witness: Dave
Location: Lancaster, California
Date of Encounter: 1970

In 1967 we moved in to a home in Lancaster, California. This was in the desert, and when it got really hot in the summer me and my older brother liked to sleep outside. Occasionally, I thought I heard footsteps pacing up and down the hall. I just covered my head. Then one night I heard the back doorknob moving like someone was trying to get in. I screamed for my dad and we both walked down the hall toward the kitchen where the back door was located. As soon as we got within sight of the door, it stopped. The footsteps in the hall continued.

Then one night my brother and I were sleeping outside. We had just finished listening to a Dodgers game on the radio. I recall that game was very long, going in to multiple extra innings. We fell asleep under the stars when the game was over. We suddenly woke up to our dog, who had been leashed to the tree we were under, running around the yard barking. We gather up the dog and noticed that the metal clasp of the leash was bent backward! This was a heavy cast clasp and it would not be possible to bend it back unless we put it in a vise and used a hammer. So we tied the leash on. The dog could not have done it because this dog was just a little poodle terrier mix, and the bend was the wrong direction for it to have been made if the leash was pulled on. Then I noticed it: The back door (which was half glass and inside of our glassed-in porch) was shaking and the doorknob was rattling all by itself. I told my brother, “See! That’s what I’ve been hearing.” Now I had a witness. We watched it for a bit before it stopped. I heard the rattling doorknob several more times, once when I was sleeping outside by myself and it was almost light out.

This is where the story takes a freaky turn. The lady who sold the house to us was selling it because her husband had just died, all their children were gone, and she no longer needed a large four-bedroom house. Also, the day we moved in, I was sick with a sore throat. The doorbell rang and my mom went to answer it. I followed her. At the door was a little girl my age named Kim, who I later became friends with (I was 7 when we moved in). She said that she had come to our house to inform us that we were moving into a house that was known in the neighborhood to be haunted. Then she left. I later did some research and read that poltergeists can’t get through locked doors. When we slept outside, this back door was locked. If we needed to get in, there was another back door that led to my parents bedroom.

2 replies to this post
  1. Thank you for existing!!!!!! I am currently getting things together to start a Paranormal Research Group that is going to be called the Phoenix Group of Anomalies. This is going to help the kids and everyone realize that their is a place they can go to and people they can communicate with that will help them understand what exactly is out there. Thanks for being.
    Amber

  2. thanks for telling me about the research group because i had a experience but more scary because i saw a creature in my sleepover.

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