Ghost in the Attic

From: 
Story type: Ghost
Location: Portland, OR
Source: Form Submission

My parents bought a really strange house. Entire rooms were painted completely in blue. Including the outlets. There were key-only deadbolts on all bedroom doors. They remodeled the house entirely. Changed the locks. Everything. The workers found a mattress, candles and beer cans in the attic. My sister and I did not learn of this until after we moved. The prior owners had divorced. The wife was missing and the house foreclosed upon. My parents separated a few months after we moved in. That's when all the bizarre stuff began. At night, I could hear heavy footsteps walking across the ceiling, coming from the attic. I became a terrible insomniac because of it and still am today. During the day, I was the first one home. Occassionally, while doing homework, the room would fill with heavy cologne. Men's cologne, Old Spice to be exact. The smell would become so overpowering that I would have to leave the house. Pins would appear in my mom's dinner plate. A rancid smell! would fill the kitchen occassionally. These things went on for the entire 4 years we lived there. The rancid smell could not have been a dead animal because it was intermittent and would reappear. We nicknamed the smell after the missing wife. My mother, sister and I never talked about what happened in that house until 3 years later. We all thought we were just going nuts. We all experienced the same things and heard the footsteps at night and the Old Spice. I still can't stand the smell of Old Spice and get the shivers when I think about that house. It was bad. That we all agreed on when we finally talked about it.