Maybe Everyone Else in the Family Was Right | Real Ghost Stories

0:00Today on Real Go Stories Online, Steve had spent years listening to relatives talk about the strange sounds they sometimes heard late at night in his grandparents' house. He always assumed it was just an old house settling, until the night he stayed there alone and he heard it too. Welcome to Real Go Stories Online. Call in your Real Go story now at 855-853-48O2, or write in a Real Go Stories Online.com. You are about to enter the world of the unknown, if we possibly, they are dead. This is Real Go Stories Online. There he is. Be sure to press subscribe wherever you get podcasts, wherever you're listening to us. You don't miss any of our episodes. Thank you for joining us. Love having you here. Tell us your ghost stories. We'd love to hear them. You can write in on our website at RealGoStoriesOnline.com or or you can call in. The phone number is 855-853-48O2.

1:09We used to say toll-free because it used to cost money to make phone calls. Outside of your area code, this is something I think a whole generation. It doesn't even aware of. But that's what it is. 855-853-48O2 toll-free for those of you over 40. And you can share your Real Go Stories with us. It's not really a thing anymore at all, is it? No, and then there was that, and even with cell phones too, it was after a certain time around weekends. It got cheaper. Nineteen weekends were cheaper. Three nights and weekends. But I remember when it was landlines, I was always so poor that I would have to wait to like 10 or 10, 30 to call somebody because it was cheaper. It was like one daily cheaper. There was like one service where it was like 10, 10, to 20 or something. You'd dial that, and then it would be like 10 cents a minute or something, which was cheaper than a carrier, from like then like AT&T or whatever you had at your house, which could be like 20 cents a minute or whatever for a long distance. I remember I was when I was in high school, I was dating a girl

2:11that lived like a county over in Berlin, Wisconsin. And I met her. She worked at the hearties down the road. Yes, exactly. Well, I was like 16 too. And she came to hang out at the TCX nightclub, which was a Saturday night show that we did in the radio station. And it was pretty fun. We were downtown. We had like a fish bowl window out to the city and just drunks wandered around. And you could screw with them. We had speakers, we'd go outside, all that. It was fun. And after work, she came down and I met her. We hung out and she, she was like my first girlfriend. Oh, wait, no, no. That was a different girl. I'm sorry. I'm mixing up early girlfriends. This is a different one. This is a different one. Although there was one that did work at the hearties. This one, she worked at a grocery store in Berlin. But anyway, I would drive out there,

3:16but it was to call it night. It would be very expensive. And if you had no money, you know, like me, you, you know, so oftentimes I would use the, I think there was a memo about this, because I think I use the radio station's long distance basically to communicate with her for a long period of time. And it's just after you left already, Todd, when this was going on. And I would have her call the 800 line into the radio station. I was afraid. And then we could talk. These are, this is like the shit, like young people don't have to think about, like how are you going to be able to communicate without it costing a fortune? Like just not even a thought, you know? And you might go days without actually speaking to somebody because of that, right? There's no texting. No, no, none of that. No. And then if you did get a call from somebody, like if Kathy would call me at a weird time, it's everything okay. Like if it was middle of

4:16the afternoon, why are you calling me? It's really expensive. Why? And there's, there's, like you're going to take that call if it's to you as well, because then you're not paying for it. So you know, there was incentive to answer your phone as well, whereas I'm just going to say, remember going, it's, you give up like fake names just to let people know you were okay. Yeah, because it would go collect call from everything's okay. Exactly. That's exactly right. I never did that. But that's a great idea. Yeah. You just get the quick little, yeah. Yeah. And so then it would be like, you wouldn't have to take it because then you knew everything's okay. But if it was collect call from Todd, I'm like, oh, shit, what's going on? Todd, right, right. Yeah, I'm paying for this call call. I always, I, what my favorite was was sometimes you have a collect call from an inmate of a Tachita correctional. Oh my god, I used to lie low. No, I dated a guy. Yeah, I ended up going to jail. And I would get those

5:22calls and I'd be like, how can I afford to talk to it? I would love to continue this relationship. But you're in jail. And I can't afford to talk to you anymore. But you're going to have to decide between the canteen or talking to me. One or the other. Yeah. And we don't have the gas. Or maybe you need to do some favors for Bubba down the hall. And then you'll get some more money to talk to me, you know, it's, but then Carol wouldn't be his girlfriend anymore. Exactly. But maybe Carol's okay with sharing him, you know, it's, you know, if he's already behind bars, you know, I have to look back on those days and say, I don't think that my standards were very and the warlock might have been the sign that it wasn't. You still have to tell me that story off the air, Carol, you still haven't told me the warlock story. He was so handsome. That's the, that's the reason right there that you date a warlock.

6:27And the only reason you can't them. And you overlook the fact. It's like, I can, I can work around that. I can work around the fact that this guy's going to jail. We can, I can wait for him. But, you know, he'll be fine. His job potentials will be great once he gets out. Like, you don't even think about that. It's like, I'm cute. It's cute. No, I get it. I mean, yeah, I mean, everybody's young and dumb, you know, and, and you don't, you don't think about those sort of things. Yeah, my God. So then the question is from NN mate. What's worse, a warlock, a girl who works at hearties. I mean, there's, there's this, this balancing act. The warlock had a good job. So there's that. He really did have a good job. He made good money. He didn't like to spend it on me, but he did make him, because he's spending it on Baba. Yeah. The one who worked at the grocery store turned kind of witchy. I know later in life. Interesting. Yeah. I want to find out who these people are in Berlin,

7:32because I have some connections to about your age group. And I want to see if they know who that is. You know, the Brown family. I'll find out. Without hesitation. Yeah. I mean, this is like, this is how her mom worked at Kmart, because it was still around. And, and the girl I was dating, she worked at the local grocery store. I believe it's called like green eggs or greenings or something. Okay. And, this is one of those old school grocery stores that were really cool that you still like, oh, those are fun. Yeah. I have no idea what ever happened to her though. Like we, I think the last time we talked, I was 20 maybe. So 20 some years ago. But yeah, I don't know. It was interesting. But there you go. There's, they're consider yourself lucky kids on not having to spend 38 cents a minute. Uh, and we didn't complain. We dealt with it as the way it was. This is the way it was.

8:38It was no other choice. But when they like did away with long distance on cell phones, I was like, what? We don't wait for that. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of amazing. Fans are free now. Yeah. Crazy. And like all of the text messages, like, remember, when you could only do so many text messages. Yeah. Yeah. There was limits on that too. I was late to the text messaging world though. I didn't think I, I don't think I get into that it had already been kind of established. And then I figured it out that I did the thumb thing. The, the keyboard memory used to like knew how to do all the letters. Right. When it was just a keypad. Yeah. Anyway, there you go. Let's go to a ghost story. Uh, 855, 853, 4802 is our phone number here at real ghost stories online. Steve had heard the stories about the house for as long as he could remember. There were never told like ghost stories meant to scare anyone. Most of the time they came up casually in conversation, usually when relatives were talking about the house itself

9:41and someone happened to mention a strange experience. They had once had there the reactions were always similar. No one laughed it off completely. But no one treated it like proof of anything supernatural either. It was more like quiet acknowledgement. Someone would nod and say some something that they remembered hearing something similar years earlier than the conversation should move on. The house had been in Steve's grandparents family for decades. It's at at the end of a long gravel driveway surrounded by woods far enough outside town that the nights were completely dark. Once the sun went down during the day, it felt peaceful and ordinary. There was space to wander trails through the trees in a wide yard where cousins and friends spent long afternoons playing. Steve spent a lot of his childhood there. His mother worked long hours when he was younger. So it was common for him to stay with his grandparents for days at a time

10:45to him. The place was simply their house. The one with the creaky floors, the long hallway upstairs of the familiar smell of old wood that seemed to linger in every room. But every now and then someone mentioned the stories. Over the years, several people in the family had described the same experience. If they were alone in the house late enough at night, they sometimes heard someone moving around downstairs. It was never loud or violent. No doors slamming or dishes crashing, just small sounds. A slow creek across the living room floor. The faint scrape of a chair shifting slightly. Once, according to one of Steve's uncles, the quiet sound of a cabinet door moving in the kitchen sometime after midnight. Whenever anyone went downstairs to check, the house was always empty. Steve never believed any of it. Old houses make noise. Anyone who had lived in one that long enough understood that would expand and contract floorboards shift when the temperature changes overnight.

11:46Pipes knock softly in the walls as they cool. If a family stays in the same house long enough, those sounds eventually become stories. That explanation always made perfect sense to him. Even when different relatives describe hearing the same thing years apart, Steve disoomed it was nothing more than coincidence mixed with imagination. Once a story like that exists, the family people start listening for it whether they realize it or not. And when someone is alone in a quiet house late at night, imagination can fill the rest. For most of his life, that was the way Steve thought about it until the summer he turned 16. That year he stayed with his grandparents for several weeks while his mother worked a stretch of night shifts at the hospital in town. By then, he was old enough that no one worried about leaving him alone in the evenings when they needed to run into town or visit friends. One Friday night, they left just before sunset to have dinner with friends across town. Steve stayed behind. He didn't mind having the house

12:49to himself. The evening passed quietly while he watched television in the living room and watched and wandered into the kitchen for snacks. Outside the last of the daylight faded behind the trees until the windows reflected nothing but darkness. By the time he shut off the television and headed upstairs, the house had settled into that deep night time silence that only old country houses seemed to have. Steve brushed his teeth, changed into a t-shirt and climbed into bed. From his bedroom window, he could see the long stretch of driveway disappearing into the trees. For a while, he lay there scrolling through his phone before eventually setting it aside and turning off the lamp. At first, everything felt completely normal. The house made its usual quiet sounds of pipe ticking somewhere in the wall of faint creek from the hallway door. Outside insects hum softly in the distance. Then he heard something downstairs. The first sound was so faint he almost ignored it

13:50just a small creek from the living room floor. The kind of noise the house made all the time. Steve rolled on to his side and closed his eyes, assuming it was nothing more than the wood settling as the air cooled overnight. A few seconds later, it happened again. This time, the sound carried a rhythm that caught his attention. A slow step across the floor. Steve opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling, listening. For several seconds, the house was quiet again, part of him immediately tried to explain it away. Floors shift in strange ways sometimes, under the right conditions, they can sound surprisingly human. Then another sound followed. A faint scrape of wood against wood. It sounded exactly like a chair being nudged slightly out of place. Steve pushed himself upright in bed. What unsettled him wasn't just the sound itself. It was how familiar it felt. Every story he had heard about that house over the years began exactly this way. Someone alone upstairs, late at night, hearing movements downstairs. He swung his legs

14:55over the side of the bed and walked to the bedroom door. The hallway outside was dark and still, at the far end, the staircase disappeared into shadow. Steve stepped into the hallway and stood there listening. Another creek drifted up from below, slow, deliberate. He walked to the top of the staircase and looked down into the darkness, from where he stood he couldn't see much of the living room, but he knew the layout of the house well enough to picture exactly where the sound had come from. From a moment or for a moment, he considered going downstairs to check, maybe his grandparents had come back early, maybe they had forgotten something and slipped back inside quietly. With that explanation, didn't feel right. The front door always made a loud click when it opened and he was sure he hadn't heard it. Another creek sounded from below, then silence Steve stayed at the top of the stairs for nearly a minute, listening for anything else. Eventually the house returned to its normal night time quiet. After another moment, he stepped back from the

15:59staircase and returned to his room. Sleep didn't come easily after that. The sounds downstairs eventually stopped, though he couldn't say exactly when. At some point, the house simply settled into silence again. Later, he heard his grandparents car pulling slowly up the gravel driveway sometime after midnight. The familiar noise brought an unexpected wave of relief. The next morning, he mentioned the experience while they were sitting in the kitchen. Steve described hearing movement downstairs while he was alone the night before. At first, he thought his grandparents might have returned early, but the sounds continued even though no one had come through the door. His grandmother responded with a sort of practical explanation most people would offer. Old houses shift during the night. Pipes can make strange noises. Sometimes the air conditioner turns on and away that rattles the floorboards. Steve nodded along while she spoke, but his attention had shifted to his grandfather. The older man had gone quiet. He listened carefully while Steve described

17:02the sounds. The slow creeks across the living room floor and the faint scrape of the chair shifting. When Steve finished, his grandfather asked only a few simple questions about where the sounds had seemed to come from. The answers didn't appear to surprise him. After a moment, the older man leaned back slightly in his chair and nodded in a thoughtful way that suggested recognition more than disbelief. The reaction wasn't dramatic. If anything, it seemed almost sympathetic. Over the years, he explained several people in the family had described hearing something similar while they were alone in the house late at night. The descriptions had always been remarkably consistent. A few quiet steps across the living room floor. Sometimes the sound of the chair shifting slightly out of place. The same small sound. Steve had heard. His grandfather didn't try to give the experience a supernatural explanation. Instead, he spoke about it in the same calm way the rest of his family always had as something that occasionally happened in the house and had never

18:04caused anyone any harm. The conversation drifted to other things after that. Steve never pressed the subject again. Even now, he doesn't go around telling people the house is haunted. He still believes there are logical explanations for most strange things people experience. Old houses make noise. Wood shifts as the temperature changes, pipes knock in the walls. When someone grows up hearing stories about a place, it's easy for the mind to connect ordinary sounds to something more mysterious. But every once in a while, he still finds himself thinking about that night. Do you remember standing at the top of the staircase, listening to someone or something, moving slowly across the living room floor of a house that he knew was empty. The sounds weren't loud or dramatic, just a few quiet steps. The faint scrape of a chair shifting slightly out of place. Exactly the way the stories had always described it. For most of his life, he had assumed those stories were nothing more than family folklore. The kind of thing that grows over time as relatives repeat the same strange memory over again and again. Now he isn't quite so sure.

19:11And what bothers him most isn't the possibility that something unexplained might exist in that house. It's a realization that for years, everyone else in the family may have been telling the truth. Well, he was the only one who refused to believe them. Ta-da. See? You don't believe it until it happens to you. And how could you believe it until it happens to you? Yeah, well, right. You know, if it doesn't happen to you, you just think everyone and your families full of shit. They're making up stories. Of course, they are. They're trying to scare me. I'm a kid. And if nothing's happened to you, and it sounds like you spent a lot of time there, you would never believe them. And you don't want to, like last thing you want to believe, at 16 is that your grandparents house is haunted. I would have wanted to believe that quite honestly. I kind of hoped it was. Yeah, you would be the type. 100% it's, it's funny because as he's, as the story started, he was explaining a little bit about the house, telling about the house and, you know,

20:13out in the country, blah, blah, blah. And he, he mentioned the smell of old wood in all the rooms. And I'm thinking my God, he's talking about my grandparents house. 100% is what that reminded me of. And even the fact like, you know, there were times when I was younger, I'd be in the house alone while my grandfather was out doing something. And my grandmother was, and you would hear those things, you know, throughout the house, some things you recognize and you were like, oh, that's just the pump in the sister and going off for whatever the heck it was. But my God, like that house to me was like the perfect house and the scariest house at the same time. So I mean, that, the house that he was describing was my grandparents house. 100%. Yeah. But in the perfect house too, in that it's your grandparents house. And chances are you loved your grandparents very much. And at the place that you felt safe, you know, it just brings back good memories. You know what's missing from the world today, wood paneling. We need more wood

21:16paneling. I mean, there's smell of the old wood, you know, I mean, because so many of those houses had had so much of it. And I loved it. When I look back at like some of those like 19, like if you go back to like the 19, like 60s type houses and stuff. And so few are still, you know, original to that. But Wisconsin basement in the 60s with the with the carpet on the wall, the wood paneling. There's probably a bar and there's probably like a, a cushy, like, you know, bar top around the rail. Those were just homey places. And they, and they had that smell too. There was that old wood smell in those type of settings. And for you to say probably had a bar in the basement, they all had a bar in the basement. That's just the way it was. Yeah. My, I had an uncle that had this the coolest basement setup. And it was like that. And

22:17I don't know, whatever happened years later, they, they changed it all. It was all gone. But I have so many fond memories of of being like this, this is totally Wisconsin. But being, you know, like a little kid, like five, six, seven, eight, playing in that basement, they had a pool table. They had a bar. There was, it was a carpet at walls. It was like a little tavern basically down there. Yeah. And, and the adults would be upstairs at the get togethers. And me and my cousins would be downstairs. And we would be the designated bartenders. And we would go upstairs. And, and we would, we make it into a game. Um, and it was so fun. We would give all the adults monopoly money. And then we'd go around and they would buy drinks to the monopoly money. And then we'd go downstairs and learn and make the drink. I learned how to make drinks at this bar at like six. And, you know, so you're making like old fashions or whatever. It's a fully stocked bar. And your children are making the drinks. And then they bring it up to you. Isn't this cute? Look

23:18at little Tony's coming over here. And then I'd, I'd bring the drink up. And then I'd go back downstairs. I have another drink order and I'd be preparing that. And then my cousins would lock the door, turn off the lights and the record player upstairs controlled the music downstairs. And they put on the end of thriller. And it was just, uh, just Vincent Price over and over and over and over doing the, um, the thunk of 40,000 years. Creatures crawling full of blood to terrorize your neighborhood. And then the laugh and the fucking laugh. And by the laugh, I'd be up by the door crying begging to be let out. And then the parents are like, why is our bartender downstairs crying? Why isn't taking so long for my old fashion? Not adding the proper amount of bitters. When he said we're going to tell him to make better drop of bitters in this. Why would happen to that kid? Well, there he is right there.

24:20I was just thinking my cousins had a bar like that in the basement. And that we would play bar tender. And that's when I first learned about bitters, you know, like you learn at a young age in Wisconsin how things work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first time I, I smelled gin and it smelled like a, I was like, Tangeray. And it was like, that's a very, uh, piny, uh, one. And, um, I was like, what? And I remember like, I didn't have a drink till it was 14. But I remember like, I touched my finger into the bottle just to like taste like, and I was like, oh my god, this is the most god awful day. Who the, what, you're putting this into drinks? Like, what are you people doing? Who would ever enjoy this? I'm having a gin and tonic right now. Refreshing. Piny, you know, um, but yeah, that's, uh, it was fun. It was fun. It was good times.

25:23I, uh, I, I, I loved the, but paneling is, uh, nobody does paneling anymore. It's a shame. When I look at, you know, I, you guys know, I like retro houses and stuff like that. So I'll just keep an eye on line of maybe there might be like a, uh, 1970s or 1960s ranch style that hands that kind of stuff in. And every, every, pretty much every one I look at that hasn't been overly touched. Has the paneling in the basement? It's got the bar. It's got the hanging lights kind of like what you have behind you, but less attractive. Yeah. And, um, and they, they all smell like cigarettes because people smell like chimneys back then. Yeah. That's what I want. That's, I, I almost made the background here. A basement like that. I actually, I have some mockups on it. Maybe I can find one during a call here and I'll pull that out. That'd be awesome. But, um, it, um, I, yeah, I always, I was made at that sort of a look to, uh, for that sort of a feel. Um, anyway, there you go. Um, all right. That's going to wrap up this episode of Real Go Stories Online. If you want to share your ghost story with us, please do check it out. Uh,

26:26and, uh, and share it with us on realgoestoriesonline.com or by picking up your telephone and calling us at 855-855-348-02. Get all the extra stuff on Patreon. Just search Real Go Stories online. Until next time for Carol and Todd. I'm Tony. Thanks for listening to Real Go Stories Online.