Haunted House in Hixon
This is an attempt to compile the various stories I have heard from family members about our ranch in Hixon, British Columbia. This is a small town in the northern interior, fairly close to Prince George. I am not sure if anyone still lives in the house (when I last saw it, some ten years ago the current owners had moved into a trailer on the property).
The house was quite large and at the time was the nicest and biggest house my family had lived in. My grandfather had just turned to ranching after being a logger on the Oregon coast and so was used to living in less than luxurious conditions. He moved into this house with my grandmother, father (who was twenty-seven), and younger aunt and uncle (they were five and six). The next year my father married my mother and she moved in as well. We moved out when I was two, so I don't have much in the way of firsthand stories, but I have gathered and attempted to put together details from all of the family members involved to come up with a complete picture of the place. I will post as many stories as I can, but it will probably take several postings as there were many occurences over the eight years we lived there. Right now the only one I can check details with is my grandma, but when I talk to my parents and aunt and uncle I will get more.
According to my grandma there were probably several things that happened before my first story, but they were all fairly skeptical and didn't think to look for paranormal explanations. The first clue that something really odd was going on was something that happened to grandma when she was in the house alone (except for the little uncle and aunt, asleep in their rooms). Dad and grandpa had gone on a week trip into the Yukon on a job, and she was asleep in her room when something woke her up. She looked up to see what she first described as a lady in a white dress. When I asked for more details she said it was actually more like just a human sized shape that she "assumed" was a woman in a dress. She yelled at it and switched the light on and it dissappeared, but all of the pictures from the dresser (grandma has always been a big believer in LOTS of pictures of family) across the room had been lined up face down across the foot of her bed. She thinks that one of them hitting her foot is what woke her up.
The next thing that they clearly remember happening was a similar occurence with my father in his room. He woke in the night to see a figure he described as sort of like a woman wearing a blue dress, but it really was just a blue shape. It was also near the foot of his bed, but he could see it taking clothes out of his dresser, going through the pockets, and folding them to lay on the foot of his bed. He turned the light on (no yelling from dad, he just wanted to see it better) and it disappeared, but a number of items of clothing had been folded and put on the bed with the pockets turned out, and his pants from the night before had been taken off the chair he had put it on, the wallet and change and keys put on the dresser, and the pants folded and put on the bed as well.
The two things that anyone can remember from before these events that they think might be ghost-related involved a rocking chair that would always move if it were left in the room with the stairs (both rocking and moving around the room; it stopped when moved to another room) and what everyone thought was at first an extremely annoying sound of what they assumed was a rat rolling something in the crawlway between the ground floor ceiling and upstairs floor. Every night for weeks it would roll up and down the length of the house. Finally dad cut a hole into the floor to put a trap in the crawlway and found that there wasn't one. The floor was solid wood! He tried a few more places (following the area where the noise was coming from) but it seemed the whole floor was solid except for tiny holes for wiring and fixtures. Both of these things were rationalized away before they saw the figures in the rooms.
