This haunting stretched quietly across more than 15 years, unfolding slowly enough that if you weren’t paying attention, you’d miss the obvious truth: the dead really do live among us. So my advice, pay attention to small things.
And it all began with the other house, not mine, but the towering Italian Colonial mansion directly across the street. Built long before my modest home existed, the estate carried the silent weight of history. I always suspected the land my house stood on once belonged to that massive property.
When I first moved in, the mansion was a decaying eyesore, abandoned for over a decade due to probate issues. But just before it hit the market, old vans appeared. Men moved silently through the house, carrying out carpets, portraits, fruit bowls, and fragments of a family’s life. I watched from my porch as memories were removed one piece at a time.Days later, crude cardboard signs went up:
“Estate Sale . Everything Must Go.”
A Child’s Curiosity and the First Signs of Trouble
My son, only five at the time, begged to explore the “haunted house.” Honestly, the name suited it.
Inside, the mansion felt like a once-beautiful woman whose elegance had been worn away by years of neglect. Ten-foot ceilings, ornate molding, blown-glass windows, a clawfoot tub, everything hinted at former grandeur.
An older woman handed us a plastic grocery bag and said, “Fill it up, then come back here to pay”
My son disappeared into the attic and returned clutching a handful of old tin toy soldiers. I examined them. They were nothing like the flimsy plastic green army men kids scatter across living room floors today. These were old. You could feel them before you even touched them. The metal was cool, heavy, and worn smooth along the edges from time and hands long gone.
Their uniforms was painted in faded but once-vibrant colors, the kind you’d expect from a soldier of the French Revolution rather than a mass-produced plastic version. One had a metal, feathered plume in its hat, impossibly delicate for something made of tin, and yet still holding its shape two centuries later.He paid three dollars for them, played for an hour, and forgot them on the floor amongst a Rubik’s Cube, a soccer ball, and a GI Joe doll.
That’s when the strange things began.
The Soldiers That Wouldn’t Stay Put
A few nights later, unable to sleep, I went downstairs to make chamomile tea. The toy soldiers were scattered on the floor. I picked them up, placed them neatly on the coffee table, and went to the kitchen to boil water.
A sudden clink echoed from the living room.
I froze. You could feel it. You wouldn’t understand, and it’s hard to explain, unless you’ve experienced it. But there is a FEELING to being frozen like that.
When I returned, the soldiers were back on the floor, seven or eight feet from where I left them.
No pets were out. My son was asleep. My husband was upstairs.
I moved them to the kitchen counter and watched them carefully as I drank my tea. Nothing happened.
But the next morning, they were back in the original corner on the living room floor… as though they belonged there.
I said nothing. But the feeling that I was no longer alone in the house grew stronger.
A Grenade in the Yard (Yes—A Real Grenade)
Months later, one of our dogs, a hyper Jack Russell, burst through the back door carrying something heavy. When she dropped it, we realized it was a grenade.
A real, metal grenade.
We laughed at first, chalking it up to the house’s military past. Neighbors told us the property had once been owned by an Army family, and the grenade was likely a long-forgotten practice prop.
But we had lived there over a decade. Why would it suddenly appear?It felt… placed. As if someone wanted it found.
The Army Coin That Materialized Out of Nowhere
A few weeks later, after deep cleaning my living room, I walked back in to find a coin sitting dead-center on the freshly mopped floor. It hadn’t been there moments before.
No one in the house recognized it.
I posted a photo on social media, and an older man identified it as an Army toy-drive coin.
Another Army connection.
Another object that appeared out of thin air.
And by then, patterns were forming. Patterns tied to the former owners and connecting them to Allan, the boy who died in front of my house and lived in the mansion across the street. But I’ll get to that in the next chapter…..
Locking Away the Haunted Objects
I placed both the toy soldiers and the Army coin in a safe, where they remain to this day.
Sometimes I take them out.
Every time I do, I feel a strange resistance inside myself—an urge not to let them go, not to sell them, not to disturb them.
As if they’re still… connected.
As if someone still wants them near.
As for the grenade, well, I use it as a paperweight.
There’s humor , even in the haunted …
Coming Next: Who Was Alan , what was his connection to my house, and What Really Happened ?
This haunting didn’t end with the soldiers, the grenade or the coin. The deeper I dug into the family who lived there, especially Alan, the stranger everything became.
Haunted and Waiting 
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