Our Ghostly Room Mate

I have had some usual experiences, which I hope to post here in the future. Nothing really scary, but interesting and all absolutely true.
I was a single parent raising my two daughters and we moved into a small townhouse that was built in the 1930s. Many families had lived there over the years. We moved in in 1995. It was two levels, a large living/dining room on the ground floor, a flight of stairs led to three bedrooms.
I don’t know when it started, but we starting hearing someone run up and down the stairs, all hours of the day or night. It sounded like a child just rapidly running up and down the stairs. I didn’t get alarmed, I just told myself it was coming from the neighbor’s house. No matter that the neighbor was an elderly man who lived alone, had no family and wouldn’t be running up and down stairs.
We also would be in the living room and hear above us sounds like heavy furniture being moved around and chairs scraping.
My one daughter’s bed was a futon mattress that was on a wood platform about three inches off the floor. We would hear popping noises, like popcorn or bubble wrap, coming from under her bed. Once a music box that was in another room on a shelf and hadn’t been touched in ages started playing all by itself.
It was all strange, but I tried to make excuses for it all. I thought there had to be logical explanations. None the less we referred to these mysteries as workings of The Ghost. Some of my daughters friends would not visit our house twice, though.
The house was long and narrow. At the back of the house there were three windows I had mini blinds on and large plants hanging from hooks hung in front of the windows. Since it was just one big room I had my sofa in the middle of the room to divide the space.

One morning, while my daughter was sound sleep (her sister had moved out) I wanted to run to the store. Jenny slept like a log, and I checked on her and she was out cold! So I ran to the store which was only 5 minutes away, I was back in less than 15 minutes. When I walked in the house things were out of place. The blinds from the window and one of the large hanging plants were on the floor on the other side of the sofa, at least 20 feet from the window. Although it wasn’t her custom to do such things, all I could think was “What is Jenny doing?” and I went upstairs only to find Jenny still deeply sleeping and in the same exact position she was in when I left. Well this was something I didn’t have an explanation for.
One evening I had gone out and Jenny had some friends over. She called me on the cell phone and said “Mom, the ghost is jumping on the floor upstairs so hard that dust and plaster is coming down from the ceiling and it’s scaring my friends!”
I told her “Tell it firmly to stop and go away, then burn some sage or nag champa”. My daughter told it to stop and go away and Immediately all the ruckus stopped.
We never heard the running on the stairs or the noises above again. It was kinda of sad really. Our ghost never did any harm, it was more like a mischievous child.
Shortly thereafter though, I was sleeping and I woke up feeling like something was watching me. It wasn’t a good feeling and I told it in God’s name to leave. The next morning I told my daughter about it and she sheepishly told me she asked the ghost to come back — something I had always told her never to do was to summon spirits because you don’t know what’s going to respond. It’s like dialing a cosmic telephone and not knowing who is going to answer.
Fortunately though, I was not troubled again and we never heard any more sounds or had any other strange activity. Well not for awhile anyway, but that’s another story.