When I was about 11 or 12 I lived in a small, two-story house in Mississauga, Ontario. It was a new house, built just before we moved in, with no real history of its own, and which sat at the bottom of a hill that once was the ancient shoreline of Lake Iroquois (before the present day Great Lakes).

My bedroom was oddly shaped, being square with an alcove for the door to my room, and the door in the ceiling to the attic. One day, while home alone, I was reading in my room when I heard the front door downstairs crash open, as if violently flung inward. A moment later my own bedroom door burst open, swinging suddenly into the room, and then the door to the attic, which was little more than a square piece of wood resting in a frame, jumped up as if pushed from below, and then settled back into place.

There was no other sound after that, and everything seemed peaceful. I crept downstairs to find the front door wide open. I searched around the house, but there was no one there. Cautiously I returned to my room and regarded the door to the attic. My mind was whizzing with possibilities, the more terrifying and exciting of which was that it might be a ghost. Deciding to cover that possibility (hey, it might not have been the wind) I demanded loudly, "Okay, if you're a ghost that's fine, but I don't want you in my room, so go somewhere else." Nothing happened, of course, and soon after I had forgotten all about it.

Before this event my brother and I had often played in the basement. Our toys were there, and we had a small tv. It was an unfinished basement, all concrete and wood, but with electric lights and the comforting hum of the dryer, it was a fine place. After that day in my room however, after my ultimatum, I began to feel uneasy going down into the basement. Sometimes I caught myself watching behind me as I felt my way up the stairs to make sure no one was there, and eventually I was loathe to descend those steps.

I don't know what it was, but by the time we moved away (when I was 14) I was convinced that a ghost had come to my house, and at my request had vacated the attic and gone down to the basement. Somehow I got the feeling it was the ghost of a girl, and that she was sad. Nothing odd ever happened, it was just a feeling.