During the summer of 1984 we moved into the house my family would spend the next 10 years in. My baby sister had just been born in July and we were a growing family. I was getting ready to go into the 2nd grade.

Our house was the first house built on our street 95 years prior. It had been inhabited by a Latvian family who had moved to Michigan to farm the land and in those 95 years, 4 generations of the family had lived there. The most recent was the original builder's great grandson and his wife, who had raised seven children in this three bedroom home. When we bought the house it had been converted to electricity and running water but the wires and pipes ran on the outside of the walls.

During the 10 years we lived in our house on Maple Avenue we remodeled every room at least once. The major construction work that took place at our home included knocking down walls, putting in new wiring and plumbing, putting a whole new roof on the house, building a deck, and various manifestations of yard work. We did everything from cutting down trees to putting in a pool. Any experienced ghost-head knows that when you remodel, it brings out the spooks. I don't think the spirits enjoyed the changes--or the noise. That year and for many years following, my family experienced eerie visions, disembodied voices, apparitions, bangs on the walls and floors, footsteps, and other random odd phenomena. This is just one of those stories.

In 1988, when my sisters were still young, they shared a bedroom with a double bed. The room had a small closet and the bed sat across from it. One night they began complaining about the lady who would walk in and out of their closet at night. Of course, my parents thought they were just imagining things... until they realized that these two very small girls--about 4 and 5 years old--were not only terrified, but were telling the exact same story. Imaginations were not this accurate, so something must have been going on.

The story is that when the girls would fall asleep, some nights the closet would open up and a lady in a gray dress would come out of it. She would walk across the room and out the door. This did not happen every night but when it did, they would scream and cry and carry on. It was horrible for them. After a while the only thing my parents could do was move them out of that room. So, they gave me their bedroom in the basement, moved the girls into my old room, and moved their own stuff into the "haunted" room.

Word is that my parents never saw the lady. The girls stopped seeing her and talking about her after moving out of that room. Later on, I ended up sleeping in that room after breaking my foot in 8th grade, when the basement stairs were too difficult to maneuver with crutches, and I never saw the lady, either. But that doesn't mean that she didn't exist or that we stopped seeing her in the house--we just never saw her in that room again. Of course, that doesn't mean she wasn't in that room, walking through the closet. She just did it without being noticed.