Moving from one house to another is stressful even when all goes well, but when folks discover they're sharing their new home with a malicious spirit, the strain can be almost unbearable. In May 1987, Tamara and Jim Fuller (not their real names) and their two young sons Chayce and Travis moved into a 1930s-era log house in the northwest part of Miles City, Montana. They were looking forward to settling down peacefully in their new residence, but strange things began happening even before they could unpack their belongings.

"From the day we moved in, everybody in the family would often hear what sounded like someone in heavy boots jogging up the stairs," Tamara remembered. "And we hadn't been here more than two months when something even more frightening happened. It was about eleven o'clock one night and I was upstairs in our bedroom. We had just turned the lights out when I saw this old man with very long hair and a beard. He didn't look like anyone I had ever seen before and he seemed to be wearing leather. I've never seen him since then and as far as I know no one else has either."

Tamara believes that a possible clue to the apparition's identity was an old sheepherder's cane found in one of the bedrooms. "We took it out of there to hang it in the living room and that was when all our bad luck seemed to begin," she said.

"First, Jim shattered his leg and fractured his skull in a wood cutting accident and was laid up for over a year and a half, unable to work. The only good thing was that the doctor was able to save his leg. Next, three of our animals died, two of them mysteriously. Our doberman suddenly became ill and within a few weeks he could no longer control his bladder or bowels. He just dwindled away to skin and bones and we had to put him to sleep. Then one of our cats got run over and another one developed the same strange illness that the dog had had. This one also had fits of terror and would run up and down the stairs yowling, with his hair standing on end. He got to the point where he was attacking people, so we had to put him to sleep too. We never knew what was wrong with him, but it wasn't rabies or distemper.

"After all this happened," Tamara continued, "a guy who had grown up in the house across the street told us that none of the families who had ever lived in our place had been able to keep an animal alive and healthy."

Other disturbances have continued to baffle the family. Once after Jim went off to work and Tamara had just gotten out of the shower, the smoke detector in the hallway went off for no apparent reason.

"I climbed up on a chair to pull the cover off and stop the loud noise, but I didn't know how these things work. My son told me to push the flashing red electronic sensor button, so I did, and after a few minutes the noise finally stopped. I left the cover off and later that night when Jim got home he asked me why it was like that. I told him what had happened and he got a funny look on his face. Then he said, 'That's weird. There haven't been any batteries in this thing for at least six months.'

"Another strange thing that happens at least two or three times a month is that the bathroom water faucet turns itself on full force, so that somebody has to go turn it off. I know the kids aren't doing it, because it's happened when all of us have been sitting in the living room together."

Living in a spooky house would be enough to give anybody bad dreams and both Tamara and her son Chayce have complained of them recently. "I've woken up screaming," she said, "and Chayce has been having a lot of nightmares about bones coming up out of the ground in the garden outside. I don't know if that means anything or not, but I have wondered whether we're built on an old Indian burial ground, or maybe some soldiers died here. We're very close to both the Tongue and the Yellowstone rivers, so who knows? I do know that lots of the strange feelings emanating from this house seem to come from underneath that bedroom where we found the sheepherder's cane. And somehow I just knew intuitively that there had been an archway at one time going into that same room. You couldn't see it anymore, but when we did some remodeling we found it. It had been paneled over and the inside of the arch had been blocked up with wood. When we finally did open it up again, Jim and I both experienced a strange feeling as if a spirit were moving through our bodies."