Our family all heard, at one time or another, weird noises in the house.
It rarely happened when we were together. Rather, it would happen when
one of us was at home alone.

My brother, then about 16, was taking a shower upstairs when he heard
a knock on the bathroom door. Thinking someone had come home and needed
to talk, he turned off the water and yelled "What?" through the door.
There was no response. He turned the shower back on and seconds later,
there was a louder knock at the door. Again, he turned off the water.
"WHAT!" Again, no answer. Annoyed, he finished his shower and got out
to towel off. He opened the bathroom door and looked up and own the hall.
No one there. He had just closed the door when it was hit by a hard blow.
Then came another, harder. Again and again the door was pounded until he
thought it might come off its hinges.

And then, the pounding ceased. All was quiet. He threw a towel around his
waist and raced out of the bathroom and down the stairs. He looked all
around the house. No one was there. The doors were locked.
 
 - - - - -

Once, when I was about 15, I was sick at home on a school day. I spent
most of the day in bed or dozing on the couch. Sometime in the afternoon
a noise woke me up, but I couldn't tell what it had been. Then, just at
the threshold of being audible, I began to hear a kind of periodic thumping
on an outside wall of the house. Every few seconds, I would hear a low
thump from the back of the house. Each time it was a little louder, but
not much louder than a hand smacking softly on a wall.

I started to rise from the couch to investigate the noise when, suddenly,
a tremendous BANG shook the entire house. I ran outside to look for what
had crashed into the house. But I found nothing. There were no unusual
marks or signs of damage on the walls of the house. There were no boulders.
No smoldering wreckage. No evidence at all of the impact that I had
felt and heard.

I was left feeling bewildered.

...

I told the above story to my father recently. As I told it, his face took
on an interesting look, as if he'd uncovered some important bit of information.
Like his sons were looney-tunes.

It turned out that he had experienced a similar event when my brother and
I were still very young. My mother had taken us to visit our grandparents
in West Texas for a few days. Dad was left to fend for himself while we
were gone.

Late one night, he woke to a house-shaking tremor. He went through the
same inspection process. He also found no clues.
 
 Part 5