You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for an October ghost story.

What would October be without a few ghost stories?

When Mary Anne and I lived in Buckingham in the late 1970s, we rented the upper half of a farmhouse on Holicong Road. It had two bedrooms interconnected by a doorway. What became disturbing was the door swinging open intermittently day and night though securely latched. We couldn’t figure out why. A couple years later we bought out own house and on leaving the Holicong home mentioned the strange happenings to our landlords. They looked at each other knowingly. “Previous tenants told us they had seen the ghost of a little girl in the hall and in the smaller bedroom,” Anna confided. “The house is very old and supposedly a young girl died in the small bedroom.”

Jeepers!

Mysterious shadows, jiggling doorknobs, apparitions and strange knocks are the fun stuff of legend at historic inns throughout our county. But I like those from lesser known places. I discovered a good place to find them at “Your Ghost Stories” on the web. The site is interactive for “publishing, sharing and reading real ghost experiences from real people.” Take this tale from a man in his 20s who describes his experience at a Bucks County farm when he was a teen.

Brandon was 13 when he and brother Blake, 12, visited their cousin Zachary, 14, and his sister Lacey, 2 in a ghostly house and barn rented by Brandon’s aunt and uncle near Lake Tohee in remote Upper Bucks. Just after the family moved in, Lacey woke up nightly babbling while staring at the wall. “After a couple nights she started screaming, not angry baby screams, but screams of terror,” explained Brandon. “After the third night my aunt and uncle moved Lacey into their room and she slept well. They ended up switching her room with Zachary’s. Lacey never displayed the odd behavior again. Zachary would tell Blake and me about footsteps and creaking floorboards he heard at night. My uncle said it was just the sounds of an old house; Zachary would get used to it. He never did.”

The large barn out back intrigued the boys. Though the lease forbid access, the cousins couldn’t resist. The doors were locked so the trio tried to pry open windows but failed. Finally they discovered a small door leading beneath the barn. From inside a ladder led to cow stalls on the ground floor. “We were able to climb up into the top of the barn to a big room filled with furniture,” continued Brandon. “It was very dusty and pretty dark but we could see well enough. We left footprints in the dust; nobody had been up there in a very long time.”

The boys noticed a door to another room. “It was very dark inside, no windows but we could still see pretty well. That’s when we saw the shadow. It was a dog’s shadow, projected onto the wall. We were able to follow the shadow down the wall to the floor where the source should be. There was none. We stared wide-eyed. Then the shadow moved, and we ran. I was the first down the ladder. Zachary wasn’t halfway before we heard Blake scream. We rushed back up to see him on the floor crying because a pipe just happened to fall directly into his path. We grabbed Blake and guided him down the ladder.

“Blake wouldn’t go back into the barn. But Zachary and I were determined to find out what was happening. A week or two later, we were armed with flashlights and large sticks. It makes me laugh to this day that we thought we could battle whatever apparition was in that barn with sticks. But we were brave.

“ We started to get scared as we moved into the room where we witnessed the dog shadow. We lobbed every swear word we knew into the darkness, challenging the shadow. But it didn’t show itself. That’s when we heard the sound.”
The reverberating chime of a piano key being struck.

The boys retraced their steps to the main room. A different peal sounded, repeating over and over again. “We could tell the sound was coming from beyond another door. So I slowly opened it. My cousin raised his stick, ready to beat an incorporeal entity back to death. I pushed the door open. Zachary rushed in, me close behind. There was nothing but a piano. We both froze. We felt something move in between us, touching each of us on the shoulder as it passed, cold as ice. We didn’t move. Finally Zachary says, ‘Did you feel that?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied.”

The piano was covered in dust. Zachery pressed a key. It sounded. He lifted his finger leaving a large impression in the dust. “We saw no other fingerprints. We decided to get out of there. We have since told our parents of our adventures in the barn. To our surprise, they had their own ghost stories. All very similar to ones I have described.”

Jeepers!

Sources include “Haunted Places in Bucks County Pennsylvania” on the web at https://www.hauntedplaces.org/haunted-places-in-bucks-county-pennsylvania/ and “Haunted Bucks County Farmhouse” at https