These door springs that make that weird noise:
Try hearing that when you're the only one in the house and had no pets at the time.
After weeks of my mom claiming to hear something that sounds like it now and then, sometimes when I was home, but did not hear it myself. She heard it now and then for a while after we'd lost a cat young. A cat who used to reach under my sister's bedroom door and play with one of those. (Sister regarded it as his doorbell.)
All those times my mom had asked me if I'd heard it too... nope. She thought maybe something in basement was making a noise. Then one day she was down there by the basement steps and heard it come from upstairs, near the top of the steps. And what is near the basement door? The other door that had that spring the cat used to play with...
She continued to be the only one hearing it. EXCEPT... for that one afternoon I'd come home from college classes and no one else was home. I hit the bathroom after putting my stuff away, and be damned if when I came out of that bathroom, the second I stepped foot into the hell, I heard that sound from my sister's room and froze.
Her room was a former den with two doors on opposite sides (and is in fact now the computer room I'm sitting in) and I was standing next to the opposite door which had been left open a little. So I wasn't next to the door in question, but it's a small room so it was still near enough and sounded exactly like that spring.
The cat only taught himself that trick in the later part of his young life, and I didn't/don't really have much recollection of seeing or hearing him do that since it wasn't my room. I saw him maybe only once from the kitchen side reaching under the door. So it pretty much rules out some 'residual' memory mind trick... But it's one of those couple of experiences that has always made me wonder.
I wasn't really freaked out or anything, maybe just a little weirded out. I mean it was harmless, but just very strange to hear, esp after my mom had kept hearing it... I waited in the living room for her to get home and tell her that I finally heard it and that it definitely came from my sister's room.
And no, it wasn't my sister playing tricks of any kind. She wasn't home, nor was or is she any kind of practical joker. Not now, and not back then as a middle schooler. She oddly never heard it herself, or at least never said so. I imagine she'd have freaked and we'd have known about it. She largely just
did not want to hear about it from my mom and I.
I only ever heard it that one time, and it didn't really go on all that long, just a few months maybe.
Although at some point that spring ended up bent and would no longer make that noise. I don't know if it was just accidental or if maybe my sister did it on purpose.
She did hear the same "meow" the rest of us individually heard as well. I'd heard it two or three times at the pantry/cupboard door when I was standing there looking for something. The cat food had been kept in there... Just a single meow, nothing more. Eventually I mentioned it at the dinner table and they looked at me with big eyes, because they'd had the exact thing happen standing at the same cupboard.
That kind of makes me a little sad though if there was really something to it, but they don't know they're dead and don't understand their family no longer interacting with them anymore.