J is the source of many more eerie tales, though I only know the majority of them second hand. To outline a few before I return to the ones I was present for, a few stand out to me as particularly difficult to explain.
The Green Paint
When J was young, he and his family went away on holiday, leaving the pets with friends and family and the house empty. Two weeks later the family return home and find nothing amiss...
Except for the strange drops of green trailing through the dining room, the living room, up the stairs and stopping abruptly at the top. His mother, thinking it was something biological -- an annoying and unexpected mould, or even grass stains she hadn't noticed before -- set to work cleaning the mess up from her carpets.
It was then she discovered it was paint.
Somewhat perturbed, she scrubbed the carpets clean and left no trace of the green paint, whose appearance certainly had no logical explanation while the house had been empty for a fortnight.
But the next day, the green paint was back. Through the dining room, the living room, up the stairs and ending at the top.
Spookier still is the fact that J's departed great uncle used to work in a paint factory.
The Drumming Inside the Walls
Right away, when I first heard this story, I assumed the explanation to be rattling piping or the wood expanding or contracting to the ambient temperature inside the house. We all know what these things sound like. Creaks and knocking within the walls, that, assuming we don't allow our imaginations to run away with, we eventually grow accustomed to.
But there is something different about this story. Something aggressive, urgent and terrifying. And it is not for me to doubt the familiarity the affected family has with the usual rhythm of their household, so I certainly didn't take the tale lightly.
My friend's father, C, is not at peace with the paranormal. He's experienced too many unexplainable phenomena as his son grew up, and is now soberingly intolerant of entertaining it, inviting it, acknowledging it or even speaking of it.
I did manage to squeeze one story out of him that, for a moment in time many years ago, caused the man to go off the deep end in the middle of the night.
In his bedroom, for many years, there were built-in wardrobes spanning the entire back wall. They were old and had been there since he'd moved into the house with his wife, who had grown up there. There was nothing particularly unusual about the wardrobes in the beginning, but once they had their son, the drumming began.
C and his wife largely ignored it for many nights, like myself, putting it down to the expected expanding and cooling of the house, or piping. Though once the drumming became more frequent and more urgent, C decided to ask their neighbours (they didn't get along, actually. I distinctly remember him referring to them as vampires). The neighbours knew nothing about it, could not explain it and hadn't heard a peep. Though the two households didn't get along, it remains unlikely that the couple next door stayed up into the dead of night, every night, to bang on the other side of the wall.
I mean, vampires don't sleep, but surely they have better things to do.
Dismissing the idea that the neighbours had upped their petty savagery beyond car parking disputes, C investigated the wardrobes himself. Nothing was out of the ordinary. There was no evidence of mice (pretty big mice to be capable of marching bands, if you ask me...), no loose piping, panels, drafts, you name it. It wasn't there. And I believe him, because you can be sure as the drumming grew worse every night, his obsession to uncover the source of it grew more and more frantic.
In the dead of night the drumming and rattling escalated. C describes it as somebody banging on the inside of the doors with their fists, desperately trying to get their attention. Louder and louder it grew. More urgent, more distressing, more unnatural, until...
C jumped out of his bed in the middle of the night. He opened their bedroom window and tore down the wardrobe doors bit by bit, hurling them from the upper storey down onto the front garden below.
He claims he has never been more scared in his life, and his fear possessed him to the point there was no other option but for the wardrobe doors to go in an impulsive, destructive display.
But he doesn't regret it, because the wardrobes have been silent ever since.
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