My sister and I were talking, and we got to talking about one weird thing

[conuly]

We used to spend summers in Belgium with our grandparents. Our grandparents had a nice patch of land, with red currants and black currants and gooseberries over here, and roses over there, and a field, and a little copse that, as a child, seemed more than large enough to house a few bears (oh my!) and I used to think all that land nearly went on forever. I'd go through the woods, avoiding the nettle at the entrance (or not) and wander until I hit the neighboring farmland. I'd stand there a while, carefully not stepping onto the field, and look at the Wallaby balloon in the distance, and then I'd get lost on my way back.

There were two houses on the property, the big one they rented out and the little one they lived in. The little one had outside stairs to a small attic, covered in ivy. I loved to sit on those stairs and pull off the ivy bit by bit and pretend I was a princess in a tower, right up until Bonne-Maman called me in and gave me an ice cream cone. Which I thought we were supposed to eat from the bottom up, so you can see why my face got messy.

The first year we went, when I was just leaving kindergarten, we had no bedroom of our own, but afterwards they added a small studio and an extra bedroom next to the attic. Jenn (Ginger, back then) and I had beds right next to each other, touching and there were two windows with a small patch of wall in between them.

And one night, quite randomly, we woke up when it was dark (and you know it gets dark very late in Belgium in the summer) and that little patch of wall was glowing. Pale, bright green. I eventually sat up and touched it, and the glowing patch was colder than the rest of the wall, and I swear Jenn saw it too or I'd never believe it now that I'm grown.

I have no idea what caused it. To this day, it is absolutely the weirdest, creepiest thing about my childhood. The only explanation I can think of is "practical joke", but not only are the logistics wildly out of character for my grandparents (painting on the wall!?) but there is no way they'd take a joke this funny to the grave. So I've got nothing.

Any explanation that isn't "aliens" or "ghosts" would be much appreciated, because I'm baffled. We both are.

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Comments

[archangelbeth]

Just so's you know, I now have goosebumps.

If you believe in ghosts... Well, we had one that basically wandered through the upper floor of the house. We had some brachiation bars in one of the dormer windows, in the Big Room (the developer of the subdivision had weird design choices, and had built that house for himself; it had a secret closet behind a built-in bookcase in what became my room eventually!), and if you stood beside them in the dark, you could feel the breeze as if someone were swinging on them.

I would have friends over and we'd turn off the lights in that room at night and give everyone flashlights (...not in that order...), and then do Hide In The Dark, which is like hide and seek only standing in the dark. The seeker doesn't get to use a flashlight. (I once perched on top of the huge speakers near the TV. Another time, I got in between the cushions of the couch and the back of the couch, and the seeker decided she was gonna just move one of the cushions and lie down on the couch and I turned on my flashlight as she moved the cushion, for a "!!!!" moment.) Standing in the dark, next to the brachiation bars... Yeah, fun.

Anyway, my friends were all pretty darn sure that SOMETHING IS MAKING STUFF MOVE (sheets, curtains, etc.) and while we would play up there, often we wound up sleeping downstairs for slumber parties.

One of my next-door-ish friends inherited her house, and was doing housecleaning in the neighborhood, and she says that the ghost was, frankly, in EVERY upstairs of a house that had an upstairs. (A lot were single-story.) It wandered around, playing like a kid, in all of them.

So! Sure, wandering ghost. Not impossible!

[conuly]

I would have friends over and we'd turn off the lights in that room at night and give everyone flashlights (...not in that order...), and then do Hide In The Dark, which is like hide and seek only standing in the dark.

We called that Manhunt, for some reason.

One of my next-door-ish friends inherited her house, and was doing housecleaning in the neighborhood, and she says that the ghost was, frankly, in EVERY upstairs of a house that had an upstairs. (A lot were single-story.) It wandered around, playing like a kid, in all of them.

Or you could've all had a weird draft?

[archangelbeth]

In every house, only the upstairs?

I mean, yeah, it could've been our imaginations. It was just... weird. Veeeeeery weird.

[conuly]

Were they all built to a similar design?

[archangelbeth]

Nope! The guy who did all the houses -- or so I heard, 'cause he was the one who was living in ours before us -- liked to make them all unique or something. It wasn't the "churn 'em out" style like in our current subdivision. There were some similarities in 'em, but more style than absolute layout.

Ours was especially weird, with a ginormous big room (seriously, I think it was about 30 feet by 15, with three (four?) dormer windows that each had a closet (slant-ceilinged) and were... 5 feet wide? A couple of sleeping bags could go down in one, anyway, with no problem, and they generally had benches at the ends to sit in. Then there was the "sink room," the bathroom with shower, the weirdly-proportioned I guess bedroom with the door into the gun closet (it had a lock; my sire kept his boyfriend's porn in there till he discovered I'd gotten into it (I copied the key and returned it))... My own weirdly-proportioned room upstairs, where the walk-in closet went into an unfinished attic space with enough floor to be storage... (I stuck my twin-sized bed into the dormer window there, with the built-in desk at the head of the bed.)

Anyway, no, each house was very different.

[conuly]

So I got nuthin'.

Unless! Unless your guy, the artiste, decided to uniquely make each house drafty on the second floor.

[archangelbeth]

*thinks about this*
*thinks about the secret closet behind the bookcase*

Not... impossible. I wouldn't think he'd be that good, but not impossible. >_>

[conuly]

Everybody needs a secret room behind a bookcase, but a closet seems unnecessarily small.

[archangelbeth]

Well, it was the "closet" behind the dormer (slanted roof and all) that the other dormer windows had with a real door. In fact, when we were moving in, my parents were discussing knocking a hole in the wall to put another closet in, to match the ones in the Big Room! Then local kids explained the built-in bookcase... pushed inwards.

[conuly]

Inwards? Why inwards?

[archangelbeth]

So the hinges wouldn't show!