Odd door behaviour. AIBU to be a bit frightened?

[GrumpyLovegood]

Firstly I am absolutely not suggesting anything woo is going on. I am very very not woo-minded.
A couple of nights ago I went upstairs to check on dd7, who had gone to sleep in our bed. As I passed her bedroom door I heard a thud from inside. The door was closed tight and I thought the cat might be closed in there. But I had my hands full so went on into our room to drop off the clothes I was carrying. Dd was fast asleep and the cat was snoring peacefully next to her. I went back onto the landing intending to go into her room to investigate and found her bedroom door wide open and the light on. I went in and saw nothing out of the ordinary but was a bit freaked out. Decided something must’ve fallen off her bed for some reason although the room was completely still, no open window or anything. DH was downstairs.
Last night something woke DH at 3am. He got up for a wee, passing dd’s closed bedroom door on his way to the toilet. When he came out of the bathroom, dd’s door was wide open. He spent the rest of the night in her bed as he felt unsettled by it.
Cat was asleep on our bedroom floor.

So what is going into?
it’s not a draughty house though it is old. No other pets and cat is old and doesn’t bring home critters any more.

Thank goodness for that 😁👍

Reading that gave me shivers!

I was thinking the same. Have a look in the loft (not on your own though!). See if anyone has been living up there. Put a camera up (but don't discuss this whilst in the house) near the loft hatch and also in your child's room.

@Pyloneu me too when i first read it! And it's still the first thing i think of when anyone mentions imaginary friends all these years later.

Mum relieved because child is happy again. Child happy 'cos the IF's not in the house any more. But the bloody thing's now outside pressed against the window ffs ... 😫

Two of my children had imaginery friends, My DD imaginery friend was a mouse and the mouse left in my mothers bag when she was around 5. My DS used to tell me we were his new family. He consistently relayed a story that he lived in the woods and he had two brothers and a mum and dad, the soldiers came and shot them. Kept telling me i was his new mum. He stopped saying it when he was around 5 and doesnt know what I am talking about if i mention it. He had an imaginery friend too called eric...

We never have imaginary friends, but DD4 did used to 'see' a man in our old house. When she was just old enough to hold up her head while we carried her she would crane and twist her neck to look up at this one (empty) spot in the corner of our bedroom. Always the same one. Later on she'd look up there and point and babble at it while being changed ect.

Once old enough to talk she'd point to the same place and say ''man''.

Then at 2 ish or something we'd have her pointing at something going from that corner and then across the ceiling and she'd say ''man in wall''. Then later still; ''man lives in the wall. Man in blue''.

We didn't encourage or ask her more about any of this because it freaked us both out a bit tbh! We'd both just smile and say hmmm that's nice and side eye each other. (Out of interest - same room - one day both of our cats sat and watched something go up one wall, over the ceiling and down the other wall)(neither me nor DH could see anything).

Anyway:

About a week before we moved out of that house I was up in the night with DD for something. We were in her room and she was sitting on my lap. She was 3 now. We had just a dim little table lamp on. Suddenly she pointed up and behind me and said ''man''. I thought fabulous. Different room. I just smiled and carried on with whatever we were doing. Then she said ''His face is like this mummy .... and leaned towards my face and pulled this god awful teeth fully bared angry snarl with wide open mad eyes* *expression 😵I mean ......

I was sooooo freaked out - i'd never seen her pull anything like that sort of face for a start. It's not the reason we moved, but i'm glad we did! That was 5 years ago and she's never said a single word of anything like that since we left. And we haven't reminded her!

@Laiste - woah, that's freaky. And weird that she totally stopped seeing anything after you had moved.

How old was the house?

I wonder if there are any old archives for it and if anything bad had happened there?

My best friend as a child lived in a farmhouse in the depths of Lincolnshire- and a previous owner had shot someone dead in their kitchen- you could still see a hole in the floor where the gun went off. Or at least that was the story.

@CorsicaDreaming good lord about the gun shot thing!

Sadly the old house was a very uninspiring 1960s detached 4 bedder. Lovely village, but wholly unremarkable house. Previous occupant had been an old man who had died. But the house we're in now is older!

@Laiste - do you think she was seeing the old man? Or it just was her imagination?

The scary pulling a face thing does remind me of things we did as kids just to scare each other, so she might have got that from another child, but as a whole it sounds v weird. Especially the cats joining in on the act!

@CorsicaDreaming she hadn't mixed with a lot of kids tbh as she didn't go to nursery and was only just 3.

Cat thing was weird.

The old man - we hadn't mentioned him to her. It was no one we knew. BUT - i remember this - the first 2 or 3 days after we moved in (newly preg with DD) when ever i was mooching about the place on my own i would suddenly get a strong whiff of tobacco. Pipe, not cigar or cigarette. One of those times was when i'd found a load of really handy shelves and hooks in a nook in the kitchen. I hadn't noticed them before and said out loud oooh these are good! Thanks who ever put all these up. And got a strong whiff. It stopped after about day 3 and i felt we were accepted. Daft i know.

Never any bad feeling in the house. Nothing weird for the whole 9 months being preg.

If we're going to bite the bullet and assume DD was seeing something/someone i don't think it was pipe smoke man.

That's really fascinating @Laiste
He sounds like a good old guy, not the face puller! Love that you felt his was presence after you had complimented his shelves
I try to be objective, but can't help feeling there's more to it all than meets the eye...

The smell thing is really interesting.
We always had a v weird smell that came and went with no obvious reason in the hallway of our old Victorian house. Smelt like an old church smell. But it would be there and then gone for no traceable reason. Not connected to rain or other weather or anything that might make sense.

This really is a bonkers thing, but we had some work done on the bathroom in our new house (which is another old house!) and they had to remove a whole section of the lath and plaster. And I actually ended up saying sorry to the house as I felt like we had gone in and broken her ribs or something. Told you it was crackers.

I think it was just looking at the workmanship in each lath, and each nail, and none were identical, each made by hand and put up by hand. And thinking about the amount of labour that had gone into it all originally. And so it felt sacrilegious to be ripping some of it out and having to replace it with a modern sheet of mass produced wedi board... (which I thought they were calling welly board because it was waterproof...).

Anyway, this really is a derail. Sorry OP.

@CorsicaDreaming we have derailed! Sorry OP x

It doesn't sound mad, feeling like that about the house. They say (who are 'they'?) that sometimes when you make alterations to a house it can set off certain disturbances. It's nice to apologise :) Did you know that it used to be a thing that the builder would conceal a shoe in the wall to ward off evil?

In the house i grew up in my mum would very occasionally (4/5 times in 20 years) see the shadowy outline of a man in a smart grey suit standing in the hall with his face up pressed right against the wall. She never felt any bad feelings and he would disappear when she walked further down the hall. The second time she saw him she told my dad. He'd lived here since he was a boy, and he told her that years and years ago his dad had blocked up a doorway in that spot and moved it down the hall a bit. Shadowy man doesn't have his face against the wall in his world. He's looking through the old doorway into the living room.

Re: smells - with each of my older 3 DCs, (back in London) at some point during the first night home i would get a strong smell of my maternal nan. Devon violets. Just the once each time. Not with DC4 though. Different house - the tobacco house. Perhaps it was too crowded already for nan to come, what with pipe man and face man! 😜

The house i had before pipe house was VERY old and there was nothing weird about that. We did have some work done - yes we had the lath and plaster too. No shoes! A few times in that house i felt a cat around my legs and looked down to see nothing was all.

The house i'm in now is 1940s and we've knocked it around and built right round it and goodness knows what. It has no atmos at all. I'm glad because this is our forever house 😄

So much rambling! Sorry.

@Laiste - so interesting. Thank you

We did not find a shoe (although one of our decorators told me about this as a way of warding off evil spirits in older houses, they would often put a child's shoe in the wall, but I still don't really get why tbh) - but we did find a playing card of the Queen of Hearts behind an electrical socket here, which I thought was quite interesting. I'm not sure if there is any particular reason for that one. And more prosaically a British rail parking ticket under the floor carpet in the front bedroom!
The lounge in our current house has a distinctive smell and it's different from anywhere else in the house. It seems like a 'Victorian' smell somehow! But very relaxing. I've never actually seen anyone/thing though (I'd rather not!)
.... Apart from brief rentals, I have alway lived in old houses. I tried valiantly to buy a newer, sensible one with no work to do this time around. But nope! In fact, I was sold before we even came inside as it has a huge fig tree in the garden and when we looked around in the September the smell made me so emotional I nearly cried (v embarrassing in front of an Estate Agent!). So weird, I've never had such a visceral reaction to a house before or since. Just as well, as I hope it will get me through all the work still needed!

@CorsicaDreaming ah that's lovely! I love to hear about that sort of thing. The fig tree and that ''i've found my home'' feeling

I got it when i viewed my old cottage the first time (one with cat round your legs feeling and lathe + plaster). It was in an awful state and had been decorated like something out of a 70s sitcom. But i walked into the living room and took one look at the low ceilings and the wide doors and the fireplace (still just visible under the BRIGHT YELLOW 😩paint) and the huge depth of the old window cills and thought. I want it. I must have it! I could see it in my mind's eye all restored. I said out loud to myself ''It's gorgeous'' (thinking about how i was going to make it look) and the owner and the estate agent both looked at me as if it was mad 😂 I looked round the rest of the place in a sort of dream state.

I bought it and i did restore it all 😇I miss it.

I'm wondering how OP is doing with her doors?

I don't think it will be a mouse, they don't come in much this time of year and they tend to stay in the kitchen anyway, they're only really interested in food.