The house that I was raised in for the latter part of my childhood years is a beautiful American Foursquare built in 1920. When we first looked at the house we immediately fell in love with it and soon moved in. Within the first few months, we had an odd isolated occurrence of a tote from the back of the attic being thrown down the attic staircase, an occurrence that we thought would only happen once. We had several other odd things occur in the early days such as the occasional smell of cigars in the basement staircase and the cats being oddly attracted to the large dressing mirror located in the upstairs guest bedroom. This activity ceased after we started restoring the home. There were, however, several isolated incidents in the following years. During the renovation of my bedroom I was scrubbing the original hardwood floors to remove the residue left by an old carpet padding, I was alone in the house and had the door open behind me when suddenly an incredibly loud noise, as if a hammer was hitting a metal pipe, resonated from the middle of the room. The strange thing was that it didn't sound like it came from the ceiling or the floor, it sounded as if it came from the empty air. I at first thought this must've been someone doing road construction but then all three of the cats in the house came into the room, crawling as if they were stalking something and ready to pounce. They walked around the room and then left. this activity ceased until the past year when more and more odd things have begun to occur. We have a family friend who lives in our basement as it's quite a spacious and bright space considering the age of the house, and he has been remarking that he keeps seeing shadows and the figure of a little girl in the basement he is not a superstitious person and is often the first to call into question the validity of paranormal claims by others. It should be noted that the basement and it's original use is quite the enigma, it was built to originally have one large open area, another large room, and a small workshop/canning room. The room that is the strangest is the largest one, while very obviously it was partly a laundry room as the laundry chute drops into the room it still has many strange features and is far too large to be solely a laundry space. The room originally had a full-sized window looking into it from the inside of the house, and while we initially thought this was later added upon further inspection it's obvious that the wall was built intentionally to house this window, the door into the room also used to have many locks on the interior as well as what appears to be the shadow of an old twist doorbell, there are also deep gauges from what appears to be animal claw marks although they are very high up the door. There is little info on the original owners besides that they lost the home in the Great Depression and it was bought by the VP of the bank who they had the loan through. No one is ever reported to have died in the house. The more recent strange occurrences have all been on the second floor. The bedroom with the large dressing mirror has a door that is incredibly hard to open due to an improperly installed strike plate. It is only my mother in the house a majority of the time as the family friend works in the early morning until the late afternoon. The bedroom in question is furnished entirely with a bedroom set from the 1920's as well as vintage linens, for this reason, the door is always firmly shut to prevent the cats from getting in. She came upstairs to find the door wide open. Roughly a month earlier my sister was staying in the room and asked me if I was up late the night she was there and I said no. She said that during the night someone had loudly knocked on her door and upon opening it she saw no one. The most recent occurrence has thoroughly scared my mother who has been adamantly against the existence of ghosts since moving into the house. My mother is a very very heavy sleeper and has slept through tornado sirens despite them being located in the Catholic churches playground behind the house. She was awoken in the middle of the night by five very hard knocks on a door that she eventually realized was the attic door. The next morning she was downstairs when she heard a tremendously loud crash followed by the sound of broken glass. She initially thought it to be something in the basement as she has a large amount of antique glassware but found nothing, she then went upstairs and started looking in the closets, nothing, and then opened the attic door to find a tote full of paintings that had been firmly put far away from the stairs. Nothing was broken except for an antique glass painting that we had once had in the dining room but had removed due to a large amount of fading that was occurring. She initially thought that it somehow slid from where it was but realized that even if it did slide from the location where it was there was no way for it to have been orientated the way it was at the base of the stairs since it was right side up and facing the opposite direction it had been placed in the attic. The family friend mentioned that the cat a few days earlier had gotten into the attic and while usually, he is impossible to get out of the attic he quickly came barreling down the stairs after only a few seconds as if something had scared him. She has ruled out any animals being in the attic as well as any person doing it and she is concerned that this may be the start of something worse. There are some odd features to the second floor however since several of the doors show signs of once having an interior lock on top of the original mortise lock on the door, similar to an apartment style chain. All of the doors besides the master show signs of being kicked in at one time as well.
I have zero idea what to tell my mother to do or how to explain to her what exactly might be going on so I am asking for some suggestions or ideas as to what might be happening or what to do to alleviate it.
I have zero idea what to tell my mother to do or how to explain to her what exactly might be going on so I am asking for some suggestions or ideas as to what might be happening or what to do to alleviate it.