Dead Man's Shoes
I am not sure this fits exactly into Poltergeist territory, but since it did include a very active and noisy spirit I decided to include it here.
The teller of the story was a quite sound and sensible individual, getting on in his years. After receiving an invitation to a funeral he decided to go charity shop shopping for some ‘smart’ shoes in a shop. He found some, in the right size and in decent order and was quite pleased when he headed home.
Avoiding superstitions, he put the shoes on the floor and not on the table. His view was that they were new to him, and he should not put them on a table to avoid bad luck. So he put them on the floor and went to make a cuppa. When he turned around, to his horror, they were on the table! He grabbed them and immediately dropped them as they felt incredibly hot!
After recovering from the experience and coming to the conclusion that despite all, he had actually put them on the table and blamed it on a ‘grey’ moment.
That night he woke in the early hours to hear the floorboards creaking on the landing as if someone was walking down it. He got up and searched the upper floors and then went downstairs to the kitchen to find all the cupboards emptied and crockery and food piled up on the table in a pyramid - but nothing was broken.
He then noticed the shoes on the mat by the back door. He picked them up and threw them in the garden. After getting into bed he heard a knocking at the front door. Stick in hand he went down, but rather hoped someone had noticed his nocturnal activity and had come to help. No such thing. The shoes sat on the front doorstep. He took them back inside, in the fear that he would be plagued all night by knocking and bangings. He decided to lock the shoes in a blanket trunk. Which seemed to work.
The next morning he went down to the kitchen, bleary-eyed, to find it as he left it last night, except all the crockery and food, were back where they should be. At this point, he began to question his sanity - especially as the shoes were back on the table. He also experienced a very strong musty odour. He says a cold shiver ran down his spine. He felt watched.
He decided to take decisive action. Picked up the haunted shoes and took them into the garden, put them in the garden bin, doused them with petrol, and burned them.
A couple of days later he went to a charity shop shopping again. When in the shop the assistant asked him if he had brought the shoes back. She explained that they had been returned twice before, and they would never stay in the same place in the shop, falling off shelves and even turning up on other displays …..
