The old lady in the wheelchair
I was awakened one cold, dark, autumn night by a muffled thump downstairs. It sounded like something heavy had collided with the wall downstairs, directly beneath our bedroom. This was followed a few seconds later by a quiet female voice, then silence...

My wife and I had just bought an large old house that required everything doing to it. The previous owner, an old lady who had recently died, had been mostly wheelchair-bound. Manouvering a wheelchair in this house resulted in many of the walls and skirting boards to be bumped and scratched. So, letting my imagination run riot at two-thirty in the morning, my brain conjured a wheel-chair bound spirit coming back to haunt our house.

After a couple of minutes, I managed to haul myself out of bed and check each room downstairs - nothing was out of place, and there was only silence. I ensured all the doors and windows were secure, and returned to bed.

Within 20 minutes or so, I had drifted back to sleep. Not for long, though. Once more I was roused; another 2 thuds in quick succession. Again, a few seconds later, I heard the same female voice quietly talking downstairs. Then, once more, stillness.

I lay absolutely still in bed, hearing only the gentle swish of the trees outside our bedroom window. I rolled over and looked at my clock. Ten past four. Haunted, and what's more, the alarm clock had decided to taunt me further by flashing the time rather than displaying with its usual familiar neon glow.

The penny suddenly dropped - a power interruption makes an alarm clock flash like that.

So the source of the thump? I leave my stereo amplifier on all the time; attached to the amp at the time were a large pair of floor-standing speakers. When I did occasionally power the amp down, you would get a distinctive thump. There must have been a couple of brown-outs during the night - enough to cause the power to briefly interrupt on the amp, but not enough to reset the time on the clock.

So the final piece in the puzzle? Who was the mysterious lady talking downstairs? Well, when we moved in, there was an old answering machine already set up which had belonged to the previous owner. Once we had unpacked ours, we had disconnected the old answering machine from the phone line, but had omitted to unplug the power cord. So when the brief power outages occurred, the old answering machine booted-up, and the default message played.
(eukaryote, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 23:21, 1 reply)

Creepy, but with a logical explanation - just as these should be. Have a click.

EDIT My creepy-but-logical story - not going to pea it, as it wasn't a ghost...
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 22:07, closed)