Ghost Named Joe

We live in a small house in a small town in northern Minnesota called Lengby. My girlfriend Lynda bought the house in 1984 from her sister-in law who had owned the house for a few years (she owns many rental houses in the area). A few months prior to Lynda purchasing the house, an old man lived there. He was known in the community as the town drunk. The kitchen floor of the house was actually filled with empty whiskey bottles and beer cans. He actually lived in the house rent free because he had been found living in an ice fishing house during the previous winter.

When I moved in with Lynda in 2004, she had added on three bedrooms and a living room and she had explained to me that any strange noises in the house could be contributed to her ghost whom she called Joe. Apparently, Joe (the old man) was living in the tiny house during the winter of 1983 and had staggered home from the local bar. Something had happened to the oil burning furnace during the night, causing black soot to fill the house. Joe was found dead just inside the front door with soot covering his nose and mouth. As a local deputy, I took it upon myself to do some research and found out that a friend of mine who was currently working as a police officer in a neighboring town had been the officer who found Joe dead. He described the situation to me as follows. I was called to do a welfare check on Joe because nobody had seen him for a few days. I went to the door and knocked, but did not get an answer. I tried the knob and found the door to be unlocked. I tried to push the door open and realized it was being blocked by something. Pushing hard, I managed to open the door enough to find Joe dead lying just inside the door and frozen stiff. The winters are very harsh here and it seems that when the furnace went on the blink and filled the house with smoke and soot, Joe tried to get to the door, but was overcome and died. The faulty furnace went out and allowed the temprature to drop to sub-zero.

On numerous occasions, noises can be heard throughout the house. Lynda's son and daughter have asked if she had been messing with their stereos, because they both reported their music had been turned down during the night. We like to recycle our aluminum cans and were keeping them in a garbage can in the kitchen. One morning, Brady asked us why we were rummaging through the cans the night before. We explained to him that we had been sleeping through the night and had not touched the cans. Brady went on to explain that during the night, he was awaken by the sound of cans rattling and it sounded like they had been dumped on the floor.

I have myself heard cans being moved around in the middle of the night and got up to find them in their place.

One night, while sitting in my recliner in the livingroom, just outside what was once the original front door watching TV with Lynda, I clearly heard what sounded like someone falling on a cement floor just behind my chair. I looked at Lynda and asked if she had heard the same thing. We had both heard the sound and had looked at the floor in front of the door and found nothing there.