Phantom Door Knocking?!

[Fallingfrogs]

Hi there, I would like your opinion on the following slightly strange occurences. Over the last six months I have been awoken at least three times by loud knocking on my front door. These usually occur between 4.30 and 5.30am. There is always three rapid knocks then silence. I live on a row of terraced houses so I naturally assumed that the knocking may have come from one of the other properties or that someone was being collected for an early work get-up from a neighbouring property. However, on every occasion I have always been pretty rapid at looking outside my front bedroom window and quickly go downstairs, open my front door and have a look outside. Only to find no-one around. No cars running down my street, no passers by and certainly no sign of any children playing practical jokes at that time in the morning. Also, there are never any follow up noises such as doors opening, repeated knocks etc. These knocks are certainly coming from the front door of either mine, or possibly my neighbours door. They are not the noises of settling wooden floorboards or the groans of any loud neighbourly love-making (!).
Could these noises be coming from some dream? If so, how is it that the noises have been strong enough for me to rush downstairs thinking there might be a courier on my doorstep? Has there ever been other cases where such knockings occur in the early hours for no apparent reason? Any ideas would be very welcome...Thanks

 

[SHAYBARSABE]

Pranks or pipes.

There have been many discussions of knocking here, but, apparently, not all in one place.

 

[Ringo]

Here's a thread I started about my own experience of knocking - I called it The Knock.

There were no astonishing revelations or discoveries from my inquiries, just a few similar accounts. I'd suggest reading threads on banshees as they seem to be connected or associated with phantom knocking.

Funnily enough I raised this very subject with my mother over the Christmas break - she remembers this and other stuff happening at the same time including seeing a strange vision at the bottom of her bed. She also recalled a disembodied face of a child appearing in her wallpaper but did add that she was stressed and tired when she saw this.

Edited to fix link.

 

[Vardoger]

Try to be awake the next time and see if it still happens. Open the door immediately to see what it is. Then report back to us.

 

[gattino]

This is something I'm very familiar with....and is remarkably common if you do a search on the net.

I'm a carer so share a house with my disabled mum, and she has heard non existent knocking at the door for years, practically every morning...which inevitably involves shouting me awake to answer it. When it first started I immediately..if silently..played with the banshee/approaching death symbolism of it, but as its been going on the best part of 10 years that was quickly laid to rest, pardon the pun. You dismiss it..tell her its not real, she dreamt it, it must be someone down the street knocking on a different door.

On one occassion however about 5 years or more ago she was in hospital for a few weeks and I happened to wake up about 6am a few moments before hearing a squeak at the gate followed by a distinct knock at the front door. It was real, I declared! I'd been convincing the poor woman she was senile and there I'd heard it myself.

Well that didn't last long as I've never ever heard it since. More strikingly the internet based conclusion that its a hypnagogic illusion, dream and reality blurring at the point just before or after sleeping, is confirmed for me by the fact of witnessing it a number of times when she has dozed off in the living room, I'm sitting just behind her wide awake, when she suddenly wakes and shouts my name to answer the door or the phone... Clearly, real as it seems to her, it is tied to the falling asleep/awake state and is not happening externally at all.

A minor twist... She has been seriously ill for the last month or so, at times enough to anticipate the worst. She's no longer hearing anything and in the last few days is sleeping constantly. But the other night my sister stayed and triumphantly announced to me the next day that she's solved the mystery knocking conundrum, as she'd heard it herself.. it was the central heating pipes! Well, if you say so.. except, as I pointed out, she hears it when dozing in the day and I'm there to notice there is no sound at all. And then...

This morning, for the first time, I too heard it, twice, around 6 and 7...each time a single distinct rap coming unmistakably from the front door.. as there have been night time visits from nurses I do expect them and am ready to answer, but was confused as they'd already been. And, of course, there was no one there. I couldn't swear that I was awake when I heard it each time...it just felt like I was.

What this adds to the mystery - or solution - I don't know.

 

[jeff544]

This happened to me a few times after my Dad died. I put it down to a dream each time as Mrs 544 was never awoken.

It would be about 4 o clock in the morning and I would be woken up by the front door knocker. My first thought is "there must be bad news from the hospital about Dad" moments after being fully awake I would realise that Dad had died some time ago - indeed I was with him at the time.
This was horrible because for just a few seconds while I awoke he could still have been with us before I had to remind myself he was not. All these thoughts & feelings occur in a split second.

I never remember what I was deaming about before the door knocker thing,
and it has not happened for a couple of years now. My Dad died in May 2008

 

[OneWingedBird]

Try to be awake the next time and see if it still happens. Open the door immediately to see what it is. Then report back to us.

Perhaps the OP was successful in that endeavor, and that is why we never heard from them again? :lol:

 

[gattino]

As usual Dame Fortean (see what I did there?) sullies a mystery by providing an unsatisfactory but annoyingly plausible mundane option for what I heard this morning. Several wheelie bins, including mine, had their lids blown up (they can swing right back and bang against the back of the bin) by hte wind in the night, I noticed this morning. What I recall hearing didn't sound like that...but it COULD have done.

 

[special_farces]

In the late 80s I lived, with my then GF, in a upstairs flat in Rodley (UK). The street level door leads to a small lobby, with the door to a business on one side and the flats 'front door' ahead, leading to stairs going up to the flat. Its an old building, but nothing out of the ordinary happened there apart from one week in early summer 1989. Over several nights, between 2 and 3am, we were both woken by very loud banging on the door to our flat. The first time I remember both of us being scared, and it took me a while to investigate. Subsequent times it just became an annoying chore.
Every time I went down to look, the flat and street doors were locked, and the business was empty and locked up. We never heard anyone enter or leave the building, and no sound in the street.
We had a cat, and every time we heard the banging, the cat became distressed, meowing and and whining, usually coming into the bedroom. On one of the nights, the cat was in the room and we heard a sound like an animal the size of a cat or dog running up the stairs and around the living room - and of course when I went to look I could see no sign of anything.
One other odd event happened that week. One morning around 8.15 I was stood at the local bus stop, when a piece of gravel dropped from above and hit me on the shoulder. Surprised, I looked up but couldn't figure out where it had come from, the stop is not overlooked by tall buildings, and there were no convenient passing birds which could have dropped it.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Sounds pretty scary.
Just a thought about the grit, special_farces - there is a distinct possibility that was a small meteorite. By the time small meteorites like that reach the ground, they have lost most of their impetus and are usually freezing cold.
I can't explain the other events.


On this thread's topic, some years ago I got to know a couple who were renting a cottage in Whittlesford. When we were sitting in the lounge, I asked why they didn't appear to use the front door that opened onto the lounge.

They explained that although the cottage was 18th or 19th century (I think - that detail I can't remember), the front door was from the 14th century. It certainly did look that old, and they didn't wish to use it because of its age and for another reason...

In early evening as it was turning dark one summer, they heard a very loud, insistent knock on this door. They looked out of the window and went out of the kitchen door to look. Nobody was there, and as the entire driveway was covered in gravel, they would have easily heard anybody coming to the door.
This happened again on one or two other occasions.
This made them very wary of going near the door, in case they should meet someone from the 14th century... :shock:

 

[special_farces]

Just a thought about the grit, special_farces - there is a distinct possibility that was a small meteorite.

Fantastic idea! Never occurred to me - and astronomy is a major interest of mine. I didn't mention that I kept the gravel for a while... no idea where it is now.

 

[Cochise]

Sounds pretty scary.

On this thread's topic, some years ago I got to know a couple who were renting a cottage in Whittlesford. When we were sitting in the lounge, I asked why they didn't appear to use the front door that opened onto the lounge.

They explained that although the cottage was 18th or 19th century (I think - that detail I can't remember), the front door was from the 14th century. It certainly did look that old, and they didn't wish to use it because of its age and for another reason...

In early evening as it was turning dark one summer, they heard a very loud, insistent knock on this door. They looked out of the window and went out of the kitchen door to look. Nobody was there, and as the entire driveway was covered in gravel, they would have easily heard anybody coming to the door.
This happened again on one or two other occasions.
This made them very wary of going near the door, in case they should meet someone from the 14th century... :shock:

I think I mentioned somewhere else a friends cottage that outwardly was 18th (ish) century but had been built around and including an ancient cruck cottage. (The crucks were still there). That had a front door that apparently had special properties as well.