I've already told you about the ghost in the chair (and the writing on the wall).

Sometime after that incident, my mother, my brother Chuck, and I were in the living room, in the late evening, watching television when a loud noise startled us. It was a loud clanging kind of sound from down in the basement.

We had a really musty old basement -- half of it was a dirt floor crawlspace that opened into the poured concrete part of the basement. It was just a storage area, full of old paint cans, fishing tackle, tools, storm windows, a big freezer that usually held a whole hog and a side of beef we'd pick-up twice a year to live off of. There was a sump pit that the washer drained into and the furnace and hot water heater were down there.

The "ceiling" of it was just the exposed floor joists of the ground floor rooms -- one of which we were sitting in when he heard this loud clanging noise from the basement. Startled, we went down to see what was going on.

The stairs had no backs (just the treads, no risers). Our dog, a big German Shephard, was always afraid to go down in that basement. She'd almost pitch a fit to have to go past that door to get out in the backyard. But there we were, me, and Mom, and Chuck, standing on those openbacked basement stairs looking at the cement floor, where a single horse shoe was laying. The cement was chipped were it hit. It was spraypainted silver.

We had a silver pair and a red pair for playing horshoes, and these were real ones -- heavy. We kept them hanging on a pair of nails driven into one of the exposed floor joists. As we stood there, the second silver one fell onto the first.

That was startling. Freaky weird. Just as it happened I saw a white-ish line shoot up from the horshoe already on the floor. Nobody else saw it. But to me, it looked just like some kind of shape reached up and tapped the other one, sort of like looking at a thin man sideways. I can remember us talking back and forth about how maybe us running through the dining room to the stairs might have knocked it off the nail....

But we were on the stairs when it fell.... and the nail it fell from was still just like it ought to be. A big 10 penney nail stuck in at about a 45 degree angle. The horseshoes would have had to have "walked" up the nail and gotten themselves over the big nail head.

My brother was taller than the rest of us and he grabbed the nail to see if it was loose or could be twisted. It was tight as ever.

We hung the silver ones back up on the same nail they fell from and went back upstairs. I think we spent the rest of the evening waiting to hear if they were gonna fall again, or not.

They never fell again that I know of. And it had been at least a month since anyone had played horshoes -- so they'd been on that nail a long time.