A Haunted House

A Haunted House
Oct 9,2013



Haunted houses are supposed to be old, dark, perhaps unkempt.  They are not supposed to be modern brick ranches with a finished basement and white painted walls. The aren't supposed to be in suburbia either. 

The House Itself

This house is, however. It's light and airy inside with tall ceilings and lots of skylights. It was an unassuming little house with a two car garage in a nice neighborhood. It was owned by my husband's grandmother who willed it to her son and my husband jointly.  She purchased the house when it was newly built in the 1980's.  Nothing particularly bad had ever happened there - no deaths in the house that we knew of. 

Whenever we visited the uncle we would stay in the basement. Then finally our circumstances changed for the worse and the uncle allowed us to stay full time.  We moved our things into the basement and tried to make it home.  
In spite of our best efforts the basement was dreary and dark (although the walls were white - it actually made it MORE dreary!), but still not the stuff of haunted houses. In fact, the general appearance of the house led one to believe it was a safe and happy place. Even after we began to notice things it was still difficult to believe that we were living with ghosts.  

The kitchen upstairs

The upstairs living room

I can't remember what happened first, or even when. It might have been before we officially moved in, when we were staying for just the weekend.  I remember seeing glimpses of someone out of the corner of my eye.  The kind of glimpse that you question and think that the sun or your aging eyes are tricking you. When you turn to look full on at the corner or spot where you thought you saw something there is no one there.  

Other little things happened as well.  Lights would turn off or on and again it made you question yourself. Did I do that? There were times I know I hadn't touched the lights... but they were on.  

One day I was telling my husband about the ghost that would sit on my bed when I was a child.  He got a bit pale and said, "That happened to me too - in this house!"  He described waking up one night and seeing someone enter the bedroom and then come around and sit on his side of the bed. It had scared the hell out of him and still made him uneasy as he told the story. 

Both of his kids had also seen or felt things in the house at various times. I don't know exactly what they saw or felt, but they told my husband they knew there was a ghost.

I was working the graveyard shift but was not exempt from ghostly events even though I slept during the day.  I was rudely awakened around noon one day when a very loud male voice shouted my name.  No one was home at the time except me!

The entity seemed to live in the basement and particularly haunted the basement stairs.  My husband and I would occasionally talk about the ghost but not where we had seen it.  One day he mentioned that he always thought someone was walking around the foot of the stairway to go down the hall.  "You're kidding!" I said, "I've seen the same thing too!"  
We moved in to the house full time in the spring of 2012. We had a difficult summer for various reasons that only got worse that winter.  Even now I have a hard time explaining why, but all of us felt so down.  I would sit in the basement living room and look at the drab white walls and feel so depressed.  Things weren't going well for us, but at the same time they weren't horrendous.  Living there with my husband's uncle was difficult as he was elderly and taciturn, but it shouldn't have been enough to cause the incredibly negative feelings I had that winter.  

The basement stairway.  The spot behind the black chair is
where we used to see the ghost

We also had some of the worst arguments ever in that house.  In retrospect many of the people who lived there or visited ended up getting in an argument with someone else in the house.  Of course this is all conjecture, but my gut tells me that the thing in that house affected everyone in it.  

That winter I read books about protecting yourself from spirits and took certain steps which helped my mental state considerably.  I often burned incense in the basement and kept the curtains open as much as possible.  I turned on more lights than necessary because light supposedly makes them weak as does smoke or incense.  I meditated and wrote in my journal.  I took great care to monitor my thoughts and not let them get away from me.  When the uncle went on vacation in Hawaii we painted the basement a sunny yellow color, which helped the mood quite a bit.  

When summer came we were still experiencing difficulties but were able to go outside and take weekend trips away. The more we left the house the better we felt.  Still, I never connected things to the house, but more to the challenge of living with Doug's uncle.  

We moved out this fall with little advance warning (that's another story!). The circumstances around this move weren't good and I fully anticipated another dreary and depressing winter.  We moved in to our travel trailer, which is much smaller and made more for short trips than living in. By rights it should have been depressing....but it wasn't.  

Every morning I get off work at 7 am and drive an hour to our little trailer. The sun is rising and I am happy to arrive there each day.  Certainly some of that happiness comes from not living with the uncle, but we both soon realized it was more than that.  There was a deeper happiness and a sense of hope that I hadn't felt in a long time.  My husband feels it too... I attribute this feeling to not being in that house anymore.  The spirit, ghost, demon, whatever you want to call it, affected us negatively for a long time.  I can't imagine what would've happened if we'd lived there longer. It was more than seeing shapes, though, it was a negative energy that infiltrated our thoughts day after day.  

While it may seem fantastic or unrealistic, I know what I saw and felt and experienced.  I know how I felt then and how I felt after we moved out.  Perhaps the spirit affected the uncle more than we know and is responsible for some of his nastiness, too.  Either way, I would never live there again and I'm thankful that we found a way out!  

Our new and very happy  home!