Many of my family's personal encounters with the paranormal have been auditory in nature rather than visual. We've heard a knock upon the door when no one was there, the occasional sounds of keys jingling and the doorknob jiggling, and once my wife and I both heard a woman's gleeful laughter coming from an empty room. However, one of the most charming episodes may be that of the marble-playing spirit.

Shortly after we moved into our former home, a two-story house approximately eighty-years old at the time, we began to hear a sound similar to marbles skittering across the floor and down the south wall of the dining room. There seemed to be no real pattern to the sounds, they could be heard winter and summer, night and day. We just chalked it up to the peculiar creaks and rattles of an old house, until I made an interesting discovery.

One day I decided to clear out the intake vents of the old heating system, an ancient gas furnace. As I pulled out clods of dust, I found a number of marbles sitting in a gap between boards. Once I pulled them out, cleaned them up, and kept them in a small glass, the sounds ceased. We never heard them again.

Before you so easily debunk the story as merely the marbles rolling around in the vent, keep in mind that the furnace worked by gravity alone. It did not work by forced air; the rather weak currents would have had a very difficult time moving marbles around in that vent through the decades-old layers of dust. Times that we lost little balls from various games, the balls would be firmly trapped in dust and cracks. The noises sounded like an actual game of marbles, not just a occasional clink or two. And consider this - the spectral marble game would be played regardless of season, whether the furnace was on or not. Finally, how would the sounds be in the wall as well? No vent went up that particular wall.

Is there a mundane explanation? Perhaps, but certain details make me believe otherwise. And since other clearly paranormal activity occurred there, a supernatural marble-player would not be out-of-place in our former home.