Every Window in His Room Was Open

When my wife, our seven-year-old son, and I moved into this historic home in St. Augustine, we were excited. It was everything we had wanted, with a lot of character and history, and we could not wait to settle in.

My parents came down to help us unpack. My mother has always been considered sensitive to spiritual activity, and while she was staying with us, I noticed that she seemed uneasy. One morning at breakfast, she kept looking around the house and finally told me she was concerned that something was there that did not belong.

It unsettled me, but I tried not to think too much about it. St. Augustine is one of the oldest cities in the country, and there is history everywhere. I figured she might have been picking up on something connected to the area rather than our house.

A few days after my parents left, I started hearing footsteps at night. It usually happened sometime between one and two in the morning. I would wake up and hear someone slowly walking across the old wood floors and moving through different parts of the house.

I never mentioned it to my wife because she does not really believe in anything paranormal, and I did not want her to think I was imagining things. This continued for a few months, and I mostly tried to ignore it.

Then one night, the footsteps sounded different. Instead of someone walking slowly, it sounded like someone running through the house. There was suddenly a loud bang against our bedroom door, and the door flew open. My wife and I both woke up, and at the same time we heard our son yelling from his room that someone was scaring him.

My wife assumed he had experienced a bad dream and tried to reassure him, but he became more upset and insisted that she go look in his room.

I went down the hallway and found every window in his bedroom wide open. The house is old, and those windows had been painted shut for years. I had been working my way through the house, trying to free the windows one at a time, but I had not touched any of the upstairs windows yet. As far as I knew, they could not be opened.

My wife told me to close them and come back to bed. She thought I might have loosened them while working elsewhere in the house, but I knew I had not. I did not argue with her because I did not have another explanation either.

I still hear the footsteps sometimes. As far as I know, I am the only one who hears them now, and thankfully our son has not experienced anything else like what happened that night.

We still live in the house, and most nights are completely quiet. But when I wake up between one and two in the morning, I usually lie there for a moment and listen.

Honestly, I am still very unsettled by the house and have never been able to explain how those windows opened.