I'm Gonna Tell This Story

Disclaimer - if you have a heart-attack of suffer any fright-related injuries while reading the following blog entry, I - the pseudonymed author - hereby absolve myself of any responsibility, so consider thyself warned! All of the events that follow are completely true, and have been witnessed by both my wife and me (I?) over the last few months - the first that we have been living in our new home. On the surface, they may not seem that unusual, but are unexplained nonetheless and so until a more attractive option presents itself, I will continue to attribute these events to - poltergeists. Oooooooooo, dum dum dum!

Our new home is a 27-year old beast in what is known as Old Colby Village. To the best of my knowledge, it has had at least two previous owners, the latest of which divorced recently and were forced to put the home to market. The house sat empty for the better part of a year before Terri and I saw potential in the disgusting kitchen, barren walls, peeling paint and broken trim. We moved in at the end of May. Soon after, we met a few of the neighbours - none of whom had anything noteworthy to say about the home or its owners, although no one knew anything about the owners previous those ones who sold us the place. Also - there was no mention of any murder-suicides, hangings, freaky lights, haunted appliances or hidden burial grounds (Indian or otherwise). They did, however, tell us that our back deck was looking pretty shabby and y'know, might need to be fixed up (in an off-the-cuff, passive-aggressive kind-of way). Further, the Realtor maintains that the building is in no way "stigmatized", but we have no way of verifying that.

So here's the time line of "events":

• In our early scrub-down of the place, I noticed a few random spots of a black oil-like substance on the bottom of the bathroom tub and on the floor just outside. Thinking nothing of it, I simply complained to myself and wiped it up, or rather, nearly gave myself a scrubbing-induced embolism trying to wipe it up - this shit was hard to get off (dum dum dum).
• Then - a month of nothing interesting.
• About a month ago, Terri was cleaning the same washroom and she noticed the same thing: spots of oil on the floor. She asked me what I had been doing and noted that I should be more careful and to not track oil through our new house lest I want to sleep in the basement with the silverfish (paraphrasing). I assumed that I had walked on some grease from the lawnmower etc. and thought nothing of it.
• Fast-forward to yesterday. With a few friends on their way for a visit, we took to making the house look presentable. I walked into the upstairs washroom and saw, smack in the middle of the floor, a singe drop of this oil-like substance. It was round and not smudged in any way, as if it has dripped from someplace. I looked up - nothing on the ceiling. I looked around - no other spots on the floor or the carpet outside the door. I checked my feet - nothing. Hmm, I thought, that's interesting, and I bent down to remove the grease from the floor, which as you might recall is deceptively onerous.

Now, I know you're thinking - wow, a few drops of oil on your bathroom floor, thank you for completely wasting my time. Butbutbut - from no discernible source? appearing sporadically? unreasonably difficult to remove? Hey, I've read my fair share of supposedly-true ghost stories, and I've seen Poltergeist and The Haunting and The Ammityville Horror (the old one with Barbara Streisand's husband, not the new one with Alanis' ex). I know that these things always start out small and innocuous enough, and before you know it your walls are bleeding, your television is stealing your children and your basement is disintegrating into the LaBrea tar pits.

I'll keep you posted... (dum dum dum).