My grandparent's house has sat uninhabited now for, ohh, five or six months now. There's a lock on the door as well as a security system, because the house sits on a fair amount of land on the fringes of being nowhere. The neighbors are close, but you wouldn't have to know they were there if you didn't want to. Most specifically, no one has been in the house for at least a month, and the last people there were my parents.
Last night, I got an e-mail from my father. He says they went over to the house yesterday morning and found certain small objects sitting in definately the wrong places all around the house. In particular, there was a little creepy doll made out of thin plastic, it was a little black boy (it probably makes someone's list of offensive stereotypes, but it's not "black face" at all) with bobble-y eyes. I used to find it frighteningly fascinating, because it used to sit up on a bookshelf that was just too tall for me to reach until I was about twelve. Yesterday morning, my father tells me, the little black boy was down off the bookshelf and sitting in the middle of the room.
That's just one of several queer things that happened there. The oddest thing about the whole affair is that, to my knowledge, nothing's ever happened in that house up to now. It's always belonged to my father's side of the family in one way or another, and my father's side is the peculiar side. Every generation has a death omen story, and we're full of ghosts and even a pretty good story about a curse. Ordinarily, this ought to lead to that being one heck of a creepy house, but I don't think anything has ever happened.
So, is it because the place is empty and everyone has come out of the woodwork? Or, is it my grandfather? Or, have there always been so many people in and out of the house, and with my grandmother's chronic disorganisation and my grandfather's constant cleaning, no one has noticed this even though it has happened?