I've done this one before here and elsewhere.
I grew up in a house that had once been a large farmhouse. Parts of it were 18thC, 19thC and my parents kncked down and rebuilt the back of the house in the 1950s, so to all intents and purpose, the kitchen and the bedroom above it looked "modern" still, when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s.
In the early 1970s, my mum and grandad died within a couple of months of eachother, in that 1950s' back bedroom. My brother and I had rooms in the front (Victorian part) of the house and dad continued to sleep in the 1950s' room at the back.
The 'old' part of the house was notoriously haunted. Locally our house was spoken about as if it was Borley Rectory, put it like that! Everyone at school knew I lived in the "haunted" house - I have no idea how it got that rep but it was before my parents bought it. My mother was full of ghost stories but none about that house, as I recall. My dad an arch sceptic and had no time for the paranormal so living in a famously haunted house didn't faze him in the least. He thought it was all bollocks.
At school I was told what the ghost in our house (supposedly the room below mine) looked like. But that wasn't what we repeatedly saw and heard. We heard it a lot and usually coming from the front of the house, and my bedroom if I'm honest - but only in broad daylight, oddly, never at night. I wasn't scared to sleep in that room because we never heard or saw owt at night. Plus I had lived there all my life so it was just "home". We would usually hear an abusive elderly sounding man swearing and shouting and carrying on - but usually in the afternoons. You'd go upstairs and it went quiet.
Old farmhouse with walls three foot thick, solid limestone, and in any case no male neighbour one side and on the other, the male neighbour out at work all day. Plus the shouting clearly came from upstairs. You can't mistake that.
I heard it and my brother heard it. My dad not at home in the day but I am guessing (can't clearly remember) mum heard it too. Lots of swearing and real abuse being shouted. I remember my brother once caught it on tape (and wasn't trying to - he was recording music from the radio). But he can no longer remember. And predictably, the tape is long gone. We were lucky to have a cassette recorder when they were a new thing.
I asked my bro about this recently and he says he can't remember. But I find it hard to believe he can't remember. He did live in a badly haunted flat after he left, and something happened (he won't say what) that means he hates talking about anything supernatural.
Anyway, mum died and dad looking for wife 2, stumbles on his childhood sweetheart who was also coincidentally widowed.
She has a lot of kids. She lives the other side of the UK. She came up to visit with her younger kids in tow and this incident was the last visit before they married.
With so many guests in the house, dad slept downstairs on the sofa and me and the girl my age shared his double bed in the "modern" bedroom. Not spooky at all. Big picture window. The one part of the house no-one heard or saw owt, before. And although my mum and grandad had died only 18 mths or so before in that very room - I never thought of it as spooky. In fact I'd always loved that room as it had mum's dressing table and the things she had I loved playing with were in the drawers. She'd draw me pictures there (she was in bed ill a lot) and tell me stories. It was a very bright, sunny room.
My soon to be stepsister slept on the left side of the bed, I on the right as you looked at it from the doorway. It was a fairly small room. She was by the window, I was by the dressing table.
They were staying for a week or so. I was awoken in the night, to see just a yard or so in front of me, on my side (between the bed and the dressing table), an elderly man. He has floating several feet in the air, but sitting on a chair or so it looked. He was intently concentrating on something he looked to be making (I couldn;t see what). So he was looking down. If he'd glanced up, he can't not have seen me there. He was transparent. I knew nothing about clothing then but later saw pictures of late 19thC/early 20thC farmers/labourers, and he was dressed like that (shirt sleeves, and waistcoat).
After I don't know how long, I turned round rapidly to face away from him and banged my head on the metal headboard (because it wasn't my bed, I forgot the metal was there). This made it worse as I hit myself so hard if I'd been asleep it would've woken me up. I literally hid under the covers and didn't dare glance back again to see if he'd gone. I remember vividly thinking if he looked up, he'd see me.
Was so shaken next day (and had a bruise on my forehead) I told dad when we were alone. I didn't want my soon to be stepfamily to get wind of this - as they'd think I was nuts.
I expected my dad to piss himself laughing but in fact he seemed to believe me, whilst swearing he'd slept in there for years and never seen a thing. Then he told me that maybe old houses were like recording devices, and could hold 'echoes' of the past (what I now know to be the stone tape theory). Evidently, he never mentioned it to my stepfamily either, presumably for the same reason I didn't.
He did tell me that when him and mum had remodelled the back of the house, the floor level had dropped a couple of foot. Which may be why he believed me. He knew I had no way of knowing that - it was several years before I was born.
This stepsister and I were sort of set against eachother by our parents and when they moved in, we never got on. (Extension was built to make more bedrooms). So we didn't confide in eachother and never developed that relationship where we'd talk. So I never told her, or any of my stepfamily, what I'd seen.
15 years on, stepsister moved to live in the same city as me and we went out for a meal one night.
She said:
"I never told you, but that time we stayed with you...."
and went on to recount seeing the exact same thing, the same week, in the same room. When she saw it, I had been asleep. When I saw it - she had been asleep.
She also told me of a later incident when she went to stay there one week when other step relatives converged on the house and two folk on two different flooors were woken up at 2AM by an old man hammering on the front door (which wasn't quite where the front door was) shrieking abuse so loud they both wondered why the entire street wasn't woken up. Next morning at breakfast, one mentioned it the other confirmed it and everyone else said they'd heard nothing. One of the two to my knowledge didn't know about the old man apparition.
There is another codicil. When dad was selling the house in the 1990s, he stripped off the old pebble dash only to find something he'd never known. The original front door was slightly to one side... precisely where the two houseguests heard the commotion.
After my dad remarried, that bedroom became my youngest stepsister's and I don't think she had any supernatural experiences.
The house still stands and I pass it occasionally. I have done a lot of research in 19thC newspapers, and censuses, and can't find a trace of anything particularly horrific happening there.
A few years back we went to an exhibition of 19thC/Edwardian photos of the village. And there, standing at the top of the lane, outside our old house... a fecking old man looking exactly like the one we saw.