The Haunting

In honor of Halloween, here is my true haunted house story:

I grew up in a haunted house in upstate New York. My family moved into the house in 1963 when I was 10 months old. They bought the house from the original owners, who had built the house a few years before, so the house wasn’t very old. It was a two story house built on a sloping lot, so the finished basement was partially below ground. There was a storage room in the basement that was maybe 10’ x 15’; there was something very, very wrong about that room. When you walked in there, the hair would stand up on the back of your neck. None of us ever actually saw a “ghost”, and frankly I don't really believe in ghosts,  but there was a bad, bad vibe in that basement.  Something was there.

There was a bedroom next to the storage room that was traditionally the bedroom of the oldest sibling in the house at the time. (In a family of six kids, having your own room was a huge privilege!) Staying in that bedroom could be a scary experience. Sometimes I would be in that bedroom and just have the strongest feeling that I had to get out right that second; the worst part was, you had to pass the door of the storage room to get from the bedroom into the main part of the basement and up the stairs to the main living area. We always kept the door to the storage room closed, but it would often be open when someone would walk by.

Lots of times I would leave my stereo on a particular radio station before I went to bed; when I got up in the morning, the radio would be on a totally different station at the other end of the dial. The living room was upstairs and there was a "rec room" in the basement, and many, many nights we would be sitting in the living room watching TV while we listened to the furniture re-arranging itself downstairs. The floor downstairs was linoleum and the furniture was wooden “camp-style”, so it would make a very distinctive sound scraping across that floor. But when we would go down to check, the furniture would always be where it was supposed to be. Other times the downstairs stereo would come blasting on in the middle of the night; as soon as you got to the top of the basement stairs, it would stop. If we were in the basement, we could hear people walking around upstairs, even when no one was up there.

After I grew up and moved out, I would house-sit for my parents when they went out of town; I always stayed upstairs and made sure the door to the basement was shut and locked; when I would get up in the morning, that door would be standing wide open. That happened a lot and almost gave me a heart attack every time.

It wasn’t just our family who experienced this; in-laws and friends were privy to these experiences as well.

It has been over twenty years since I lived there, and I still have nightmares about it. Especially the door to the storage room.

Happy Halloween!  Got any good scary stories?