We moved into an old two story brick house not long after my dad remarried. Dad, step-mom, step-sister, and I rattling around in a few thousand square feet of house, trying to work out how to function as a family. Sis was fourteen, and I was thirteen, both only children before The Marriage, and holy Moses, we hated each other. Looking back, I think the uneasiness we all felt with each other masked the peculiar feeling the house supplied in later years. I still can't look you in the eye and say "I believe in ghosts." But if this structure we called home for 10 years didn't house spirits, it certainly contained something.
It all started out small, random items in the house would go missing for days only to turn up in a different place in the house. The first thing I remember missing was my comb. No big deal, really, I normally used my brush, but I noticed it gone. I asked Sis, who yelled her reply, and thus began a new routine in the house. Something gone from one of our rooms followed by yelling. Most things turned back up eventually, and as things in other rooms started to go missing, we slowly stopped yelling, and started laughingly blaming "the forgetful ghost".
The forgetful ghost probably borrowed, moved, or lost hundreds of things over the next few years. As we became more of a family, the odd appearance of personal items in unusual places became commonplace and eventually, ignored. Then we started digging.
The side yard ended abruptly in a sharp slope toward the rail road tracks. The plan was to re-grade the yard, add flower beds, make things nicer. The digging resulted in a number of treasures. Geodes, Mason Jars, marbles, old metal toys, the crank for a Model-T Ford, an entire clothesline pole, bricks and more bricks, and twenty-three meat hooks. Twenty-three meat hooks that dad lined up on the deck. The meat hooks were a favorite of our teenaged friends, kind of creepy, kind of macabre, and they sparked an endless supply of horror stories and pranks.
Turns out the twenty-three meat hooks were, along with the oldest part of the house, the only thing left of the butcher's shop. Soon, the historical society became a new obsession for Sis and me. We loved researching our house and the area around it. Over the years the house had been a butcher's shop, a tavern, and briefly a funeral home, before being turned into a residential home. Every incarnation of the house included a new addition that eventually ended in the huge space we were living in.
We loved scaring our friends with stories of the house, its past, we even spooked up the invisible ghost for effect, but after the digging things really weren't the same. The lights in the front hall would switch on and off randomly. You would be headed down the stairs to answer the door, or be walking into the dining room and hear "click" followed by lights on or lights out. One night Sis and I were home alone, and she headed down to pay for the pizza, she laughingly asked the ghost to "turn the damn lights on" and "click" on they came. We were staring at each other when in happened, although dad never believed that one of us wasn't just trying to scare the other. Sis slept in my room for a while after that, afraid to walk through the hall to her own room.
There were your typical cold spots and things seen out of the corner of your eye. Things that you see on TV as "evidence" of the supernatural. I don't really know what we were experiencing, but we were all experiencing something. The formal living room was a space that no one spent much time in, and not just because it was butt ugly. Blue carpet, wallpaper with blue roses, furniture that almost screamed "don't sit on me." It was ridiculously cold in there all the time, and at some point everyone in our household had heard a group of murmuring voices coming from the room. As if there was a gathering of people trying to be very quiet. It was the only room of the house that we never got around to repainting.
The upstairs family room was another source of weird. I was alone one night when I heard the floorboards creaking as if someone was crossing the family room that was outside my bedroom door. I flung the door open to find no one. On a couple of occasions the creaky crossing of the empty room was followed by my bedroom door swinging open. Always to reveal no one. Never failing to scare me.
Two things happened a few weeks before graduation that prompted me to permanently move from my dad's to my mom's. The first, I don't even remember. I was in the upstairs family room with the guy I was dating at the time, and we were on the couch working our way towards loosing our clothes. According to him, my eyes snapped open and I was looking sideways at the doorway. He said he asked me what was wrong, but I didn't respond, just stared, not blinking, for what he said seemed like forever. Then I smiled and my eyes moved across the room, as if I was watching someone walk across it. He doesn't remember hearing the floorboards. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I was fine. I don't remember any of it happening, but even as an adult he has sworn to me that it did.
The second thing happened two nights later. I was headed for my room after taking a shower. My body and hair were both wrapped in towels. I walked through the family room and opened my bedroom door. Opposite the door was a six foot window in which you could see your reflection at night, if the lights were on. I flicked on the light glancing up at my reflection, and at the man standing directly behind me. I screamed, spun, no one there, spun back toward the window and there he stood. If he were real he would have been no more than an arms length behind me. He appeared to be close to my age, sad and almost beautiful, and suddenly gone.
We heard later that the son of a previous owner killed himself in the house, and Sis and I tracked down his picture in old yearbooks. It wasn't the same boy. I will probably always wonder who he was.
Creepiest place I've ever lived, hands down. Is it possible that what happened there was a product of ghost stories and coincidences? Sure thing, but that last week in dad's house didn't feel like a story or a coincidence.
rating: 6
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