House With The Downstairs Bathtub

When I was a teenager (in the 90s), I lived in a really old house with my parents. It was so old that it still had skeleton key locks on most of the doors. It was a strange house that had had some even stranger previous owners. The last of which had decided to remove both the tub and the door of the upstairs bathroom downstairs.

See, the house had a basement that had at some point in time been turned into a full separate "apartment". It had a kitchen sink, a full, large bathroom, two gigantic walk-in closets and even its own entrance/exit that lead out to some stairs that climbed up into the backyard.

The place was supposedly haunted according to the deed. An old man and an old woman (no relation, separate owners) had both died in the house. The man had died of natural causes downstairs in the back bedroom sometime in either the 60s or 70s. The woman had died upstairs, but we never found out how or when. Either way I believed it because that basement was creepy to be alone in. And since the crazy lady who owned it previously had moved the only tub downstairs, we had to bathe down there. You constantly felt like you were being watched. I hated it.

One of those aforementioned closets, the first one which was located directly under the stairs and ran the length of the entire house. It was a long, narrow stone walled closet with wooden shelves running the length of it. We stored Christmas decorations and stuff in there. And as a kid it scared the hell out of me because I swore I always heard something moving around in there. But I'd open it's old door, turn on the light by it's pull chain and peer in to see nothing of course.

Anyway, back to when I was a teen. It was Christmas Eve and I had been up with my mom helping her bake cookies. My dad and my younger brother were both already asleep. My mom and I were talking when watching A Christmas Story on repeat as it does so every Christmas on one of the channels.

We suddenly hear this loud crunching explosion followed by two thunderously loud thuds. It came from downstairs. This woke my dad up immediately who came out into the living room wide-eyed and clutching a baseball bat. We explained what had just happened and he decided to go downstairs to investigate and told us to grab the phone and be ready to dial the police. Me, being a macho teenager couldn't just let him go alone, so I tagged along behind him after he started to descend the basement steps.

We get down there and turn off the staircase to see the heavy oak door of the closet has been torn straight off it's hinges and thrown across the hallway. It had collided with a brick support pillar that hid the water heater. The bricks and the stone walls down there were painted a dark shit brown for some reason, and we never changed it. The door was painted white. It had hit the pillar so hard that it left white paint on it and chipped off some of the brown paint from the brick. We could see one of top corners of the wood mangled and smashed in. The hinges were absolutely wrecked too. The metal was twisted and snapped.

No human could have done that. It was a heavy real oaken door. And it had been so violently flung open that it had torn straight through the metal hinges as if they were made of plastic. Then collided so forcefully with the brick pillar across the hallway that it chipped paint and destroyed that corner of the door that had made contact. Mind you this wasn't a narrow hallway either. It was a decently wide hallway, a good 8-10 feet wide.

There was nothing inside of the closet, but it was ransacked. The wooden shelves were torn down and the junk in there was thrown all around the room. Even the light cord was torn off, just leaving the small chain that flipped the switch.

We never did find out what had caused that mess. It never happened again either. To this day I can't explain it. Other weird stuff happened there during my stay there, which was into my early 20s. But this one was the weirdest and hardest to try to rationalize.