Reports from the Void: 'I Think There's a Ghost in My House'

The Singular Fortean Society received the following email with the subject line “I think there’s a ghost in my house” on May 26th, 2022.

I’ve lived in a house in Downers Grove, [Illinois], for as long as I can remember. I used to remember hearing voices that didn’t belong to my parents from other rooms, but when I looked to see who was there, the TV wasn’t on. I also used to see doors slowly open when I was alone. When I was in third grade, we remodeled the house, so we went to live somewhere else for a while. When we came back, the voices stopped, though I still heard noises inside the walls.
By the way, this house is old. Like 80-90 years old. My mom is also pretty religious, so we have some Christian items lying around.
Well, that brings us to the real event I’d like to talk about. About a month ago, I was lying in my bed when suddenly a noise woke me up. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper, so this was unusual. It was my modern typewriter. It had just pressed several buttons, and it did this a few more times.
At around that time, my dad was woken up by a dream in which there was a figure at the end of his bed that yelled something like “boom” or “bang.” When I woke up, both my mom and my brother commented on how my room smelled like burnt metal. After a couple days, the smell persisted, and had migrated over to a room next to mine. The smell has since dissipated, and there’s been nothing overly unusual since.
We threw out the typewriter.

In a later email, the witness added that the typewriter had been “brand new.”

Investigator Tobias Wayland replied with a series of questions regarding the reported phenomena but received no further response.

This isn’t the first report received by the Singular Fortean Society describing seemingly paranormal phenomena surrounding a typewriter.

Early last year, Wayland spoke with a woman from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who recounted a peculiar event that occurred in the summer of 2002 involving an electric typewriter.

According to the woman, who agreed to the use of her first name, Jane:

My then husband had an office in the basement, and one day when I was home alone, I heard this noise. I went down into the basement, and here it was his electric typewriter going nuts. It was just typing over and over. It was weird.
I thought, "Well, something’s wrong with it. Why is it on and typing away? There’s no paper in it."
Then I looked at the on/off switch and it was in the off position. It was plugged in, but it was off.
When my husband came home, I said, "You’re never going to believe what happened. That typewriter of yours just started typing by itself."
He asked, "Wow, was there paper in it?"
I said, "No, there’s no paper in it."
He said, "Put some paper in it."
I said, "It’s not going to happen again. It was an electronic glitch. It’s not going to happen again."
He insisted, "Put some paper in it."
I put some paper in it.
Within the week—he was home the second time—I heard it going off again. We both ran downstairs, and it was typing away. I wish I was making this up, because I’m shaking now thinking about it, but at the time I wasn’t afraid. I just thought it was a glitch.
It was typing letters in a sequence, and when it stopped, because he unplugged it, again, it was in the off position. I pulled the paper out, and he’s trying to make a pattern out of the letters to figure out if it says anything. It didn’t have any vowels. He was trying to see if it would make any sense if you put vowels in it. He thought it was saying ‘leviathan’ over and over again.
I said, "I don’t know, it could be."

Jane said that the sequence of letters was LVTNC.

The repeating sequence was in an italic font, something Jane's husband at the time said was impossible.

"I could say that there was something wrong with the typewriter, I could easily accept that, but then again, it happened two times and I’ve always felt this protective spirit in the house," she said. "[My ex-husband] told me that the script it was written in wasn’t in that typewriter. It was a plain, one-script typewriter from the 1970s. It only had one font, and this was a scripted font. I said, ‘It can’t be. You have to have two fonts in here. One italic and one normal.’ But he claimed there was no italic font in the typewriter. I thought maybe he just didn’t know that he had it."

Jane reported several nighttime visitations similar to that of the above witness’s father, but none which included the same level of communication.

These phenomena were part of a lifetime of paranormal experiences reported by Jane, something the witness’s email would seem to indicate is also the case for them.

Reports from the Void is a repository to share those stories for which we do not have enough information to make a full report. This is usually because of little or no communication from the witness following their initial submission. The Singular Fortean Society will always provide as much information as possible regarding any correspondence during our attempts to speak with those involved.

This series is meant only to present you with the full breadth of the information sent to us, and makes no judgments towards the veracity of any stories shared within it.

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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