Three of my best friends rented an old house years ago. It was built by an influential judge in the late 1880's early 1890's and is located in the neighborhood known as Hyde Park. The Hyde Park area was ritzy stretch of area which many of the cities elites lived in (now overrun with gays). The house was huge for the time - 3 stories and a basement and was referred to as a mansion. The house had a servants entrance and stairwell, many large rooms, and creepy unfinished basement with mortar walls complete with a shuttered and padlocked exit to the outside. Some of the original furniture was still inside the house because it was assembled there and was too large to get through the doorways. Today the house is recognized as historical landmark by the city.
My friends had rented the place from this lawyer and the lawyer did tell them it was haunted. The lawyer had some experiences there and actually claimed to have seen a ghost of a woman. He did some research on the history of the house. It seems that back in the day the judge (the original owner) had a maid that had a torrid relationship with the gardner of the one of the rich neighbors, but the man got jealous and murdered the maid in a rage. The gardener was hung, in good old Missouri style justice.
The lawyer actually had a medium come in and check out the house, to which she claimed there were actually two ghosts - one of the gardener, an angry spirit which seemed to stay in the basement area and a freindly spirit of wife of the judge that stayed in the upstairs of the house. The lawyer joked that he believed that the ghost wife of the judge had tried to communicate to him that she did not trust his real life wife, of which he divorced years later.
Now my friends lived in the house and heard plenty of noises in their time in the house. Old houses make noises regardless, but there were lots of bumps in the night that awoke them, which was unpleasant because Hyde Park was on the edge of a really bad neighborhood by the 1990's and there were occasional break-ins in the area. My friends got the impression at times that they were not alone and one of them felt as if a woman was breathing on them and tucking them into bed one night. Occasionally items like sunglasses or other small objects would be moved.
The scariest part was the dank basement, which had unevenly cut and brick and mortar walls and the lighting was awful. The only reason anyone wanted to go down there was to do wash to retrieve a tool from the tool bench.
One frightening incident happened one night. There was a large crash which awakened everybody in the house. My friends had seriously believed that someone had broken in the house. After retrieving their guns they walked downstairs to find the basement door wide open. The door was double locked, but both were unlatched. They went into the basement to see if someone had broken through the cellar shutters (there is a specific name for those types of doors, but I can't remember it) from the outside - but the cellar doors were still padlocked and barred.
I actually winesssed something at a summer barbeque party at their place. The lights kept on coming on in the basement and my freinds had to repeatedly go down their and shut them off. Between retrieving beers, someone could have walked down their and turned on the light as a joke, but it was highly unlikely.