A few nights later, a banging noise in the parlor woke me up from a deep sleep. A little disoriented, I rolled over and tried to open my eyes as I forced myself to wake up. I poked my mother in the back, trying to wake her up as well, but we were both so exhausted it was hard to get moving. Then, in the softest of voices, I heard a woman softly whisper, “Just let them sleep.”
Well, that made me sit up straight. I turned on the lamp closest to me and looked around the room. Nobody was there. Mom was also up on her feet, looking around. “You heard that, right?” I asked her anxiously.
She nodded.
We slept with the lights on for the rest of the night.
Over the course of the next few weeks we heard sounds that could sometimes be explained and sometimes not. It would often sound as though more than one person was walking through the rooms in our house, only stopping to look in on us while we pretended to sleep. Sometimes, we heard whispers. We couldn’t always make out what they were saying, but it was evident whoever “they” were knew we were there and were watching us.
On our way to school in the mornings, we’d talk about what we’d heard the night before.
One morning I cried all the way to school. “I’m scared. I don’t want to sleep there anymore. Can I go stay with Betty?”
“Maybe we can sleep in Jackie’s room,” Mom suggested. “We can move a mattress in there.”
And so we did. While Mom began her hunt for the next house, the three of us shared a bedroom as Mom and I slept on a mattress in the floor every night. Jackie must have questioned why we wanted to move into his room, but I don’t remember the conversation at the time. Maybe Mom told him it was for the heat. Or maybe she told him the truth.
Because he was scared, too.
Moving Again
My worst fear at the time was that we’d continue to stay on in the house, despite the fact that I was afraid to use the bathroom, afraid to play in my bedroom, and now afraid to sleep. I was afraid things weren’t bad enough yet and that we’d stay there until something horrible happened and there wasn’t a way out at all.
I couldn’t even listen to the “Drinking Champagne” song anymore without breaking out into a cold sweat, just remembering the rocking chair and the way it moved back and forth without another person around it. Sometimes, when it came on, I was afraid other furniture would start moving as well, as though it might have been the song that caused it.
Luckily, the tides changed and a new house was soon on the horizon. Before Thanksgiving rolled around Mom found us a house in the next county over, not far from our school. It didn’t even take us long to pack. Since we’d barely unpacked in the first place, there wasn’t a lot left to do. I threw most of my stuffed animals in garbage bags. My cousin April came over and helped me. We did it in the middle of the day, with the radio blasting. I think it was the fastest either one of us had ever moved. We weren’t going to stay upstairs any longer than we needed to.
I was particularly happy about moving because it meant our cat might start staying inside with us again. It refused to come into our house and would hiss when I tried to bring him. After the first few weeks, I’d given up and let him live outside. I missed him, though. As soon as we got him to the new place he darted in and found a sunny corner in my new bedroom to wrap himself up in.
All moves are long, painful, and tedious but this one was as painless as possible. Jackie had made friends with the manager and co-manager of the local Subway restaurant, just because he went there a lot, and they helped him move the heaviest furniture. We put a lot of things in storage, including most of my toys and summer clothes. It was 1990 and we figured we’d get them out in a few months when the weather warmed up. We didn’t get them out until almost twenty years later. I think it was difficult for us to face some of those belongings once they were out of sight. Even as an adult they were a painful reminder of those four months.
I wasn’t sorry to say goodbye to the house. Once all the rooms were cleared, however, I did take another walk through it. I was angry now, angry that we hadn’t been able to live there and be happy. I wanted to love it. I had been prepared to love it. And now, it looked so innocent when it was bare and devoid of our belongings. Maybe the paint was cracking in a few places and the wallpaper was peeling, but it was an old house with character. I wanted to be happy there. I kept repeating that as I walked through the rooms, touching the walls and opening doors.
“Why did you do it?” I asked it as I stood in the middle of the parlor floor. “What did you want from us?”
In answer, my bedroom door upstairs banged shut in finality. I took that as my sign to leave.
Several months later, after we were settled into the new place in Clay City, we went back to visit Betty. Unfortunately, moving away meant we didn’t get the chance to visit her as much as we had and we missed her. We were anxious to catch up with her on this visit.
“So,” she asked with a big smile once we’d hugged and all sat down. “Are you happier at the new house?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A lot. It’s peaceful.”
“I like it,” Mom agreed. “It’s different.”
“There aren’t any ghosts at this one,” I said.
Betty laughed. “So no old women on the stairs?” She directed this at Mom.
I looked up in confusion. “What do you mean?”
Both Mom and Betty had sheepish looks on their faces. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you would have told her now that you’re out of the house,” Betty apologized.
“Mom, what happened?”
Mom then went into her own story, one I hadn’t been told yet. Apparently, during the first few weeks after we moved in, she was upstairs in the guest room putting away clothes while I was outside riding my bicycle. After a little while, she got the strangest feeling someone was watching her. When she walked over to the landing and looked down through the rails on the staircase, she was surprised to see an old, gray headed woman.
Mom’s first thought was that a neighbor had wandered in. She heard we had an elderly neighbor next door who wasn’t well. “Are you okay?” Mom asked. “May I help you?”
And with that, the woman disappeared.
Mom had sat down on her bed for almost fifteen minutes, trying to get her bearings and wrap her head around what had just happened. On our next visit to Betty, she’d told her about the experience. She didn’t want to tell me because she didn’t want me to be scared.
Of course, I had told Betty about the rocking chair, footsteps, and other things I was hearing in the house but hadn’t talked about everything with Mom.
If we’d shared tales, we might have moved just a little bit sooner.
The House Today
Fifteen years after moving out, we went back to the house to see how it looked, if it was even still standing. It was. It’s currently empty, in fact, and was up for sale recently.
When we first went back and saw it, however, we were amazed at what we encountered. It was in total disrepair. We knew someone moved in when we moved out but they only stayed a short while. After that, it must have been empty for a long time.
The front door was off its frame and the windows were bashed in. My friends Jim and Ashley were with us and while they hadn’t heard any of our stories about the house, they were believers in the paranormal (and loved a good old house).
It was difficult to move about the rooms. The floors had rotted through in some places and the ceiling was caving in in others. The claw foot tub where I’d taken many baths was pulled away from the wall and cracked. There was a sink on its side in Mom’s old room. The kitchen was in shambles. With so much debris it was hard to even tell what the room had once been. Only the staircase remained untouched. We couldn’t go down to the cellar at all, thanks to the weeds that were almost over our heads.
Although it wasn’t always a happy place to live, I hated seeing it in that condition. Surely it must have been loved once. But, for whatever reason, nobody wanted to keep it up.
Once we were safely back in the car I asked the others if they’d felt anything in the house. “Oh yeah,” Jim answered. “Especially in Becky’s room. There’s something dark in there and it wasn’t happy to see us.”
Pulling away, I tried to see it as I had the first time we’d pulled up in the driveway, but it was difficult. It really did look like the scary, haunted house on the block now.
Today, the house has been renovated. It doesn’t even look like the same place. Although I haven’t been inside, I’ve seen pictures of it. Someone put in a back deck with a hot tub. New cedar siding covers the front. It appears as though the house has been gutted and new rooms made from the old ones.
Sometimes, I play around with the idea of making an appointment and touring it. But then I’m afraid of taking the chance. What if whatever was there follows me back?
Betty’s son Brian passed away a few years after we moved out of the house. He died in the hospital and at his time of death the hospital immediately suffered a power failure. Apparently, nurses on the different floors knew right away Brian had died because of the power situation. They had expected something like that to occur with his passing.
This wouldn’t be the last time I saw something or felt something from another realm. But it would be the last time I took those sightings casually. In the past, hearing a noise or seeing something out of the corner of my eye was a good thing; it meant Nana might be nearby. But after living in the Mount Sterling house, I became cautious. I don’t know that whatever was there wanted to hurt us, but it felt sinister. I did not feel welcomed in the house. I think it wanted us out. I also think there was more than one spirit in the house. At times I felt a friendliness, a playfulness. Other times, I felt sheer terror and the distinct feeling that whatever was there wanted us gone.
Some people have asked us why we didn’t move sooner, why we stayed even as long as we did. The fact is, although a lot of the events happened one right after the other, there were lulls in which nothing happened at all. Much like the body forgets pain, I believe the body also forgets terror. In the clear light of day, when we were away from the house and at school or at Betty’s or even just out for a drive it was easy to think about our home with a fondness and without any terror at all. Things aren’t so bad, I’d tell myself. It’s not as scary as I’m making it out to be. Several days might go by without anything happening at all and I know I’d be lulled into a false sense of security. I’m not sure how my mother felt, but I imagine it was similar for her. Then, something else would happen and it would be like a slap in the face–a stern reminder that there was something going on within our walls that we just couldn’t explain.
Many people have asked me what I thought happened in the house to make it “haunted.” The fact is, I don’t know. These days, we’re accustomed to having closure when it comes to hauntings. On TV shows and in movies there’s almost always a “reason” for a place to house ghosts or spirits: someone died there, the house was built atop an ancient Indian burial ground, it was once the site of a Satanic cult’s rituals…Unfortunately, in real life, there isn’t always a resolution or good explanation for what went on. This leaves us feeling dissatisfied, exhausted, and more than a little frustrated.
I’ve been asked what the “story” is behind the house, what I think happened there. The truth is, I don’t know. I contacted the historical society there in the county but they couldn’t point me in any particular direction. No major events occurred in it, at least not any that were documented through the newspaper or other publications that are on file. The town itself is an old one and dates to before the Civil War. The house and grounds, located downtown, have seen many decades and more than a couple of centuries pass by. There’s a possibility that it’s not the house that’s haunted at all, but the grounds around it. I did seek out a few of the neighbors, but they’re all new and nobody knows the history of the place. If I could turn back time I’d love to talk to the young man whose grandmother lived in it. I’d like to go back and ask him a ton of questions. But I can’t. And I don’t even know his name. His grandmother didn’t own the house; she was merely a renter.
As a child, I had no interest in the history of the place or the “whys.” I only knew that I was scared and wanted out of there. It’s important to keep in mind that two decades have passed since we lived in it. It’s only been recently that I’ve become re-interested in the house as a place and not just as a memory from my childhood. My intent with writing these memories down was to try and remember everything that occurred, to have a documentation of sorts, before my memory becomes cloudier and it’s more difficult to recall the events that took place there.
Someone told us the house had been used on the Underground Railroad. Historians would say that part of Kentucky wasn’t on the route. Others say it was. I have no history on the house but while I believe it to be at least 100 years old, I’m not sure it predates the Civil War. In the end, I have no explanation for what we saw, felt, or heard there. But the house still stands. And it’s still waiting for someone.
2015 Post-Publication Update
Just when I think the story can’t get any stranger, it takes another turn. About six months after the publication of the book, I received a message from a regional paranormal investigator. The team had been working with a family who was experiencing a haunting. In attempting to do research on the house, they came across an old blog entry of mine talking about the house in this story. “I think it’s the same house we’re researching,” the investigator wrote to me.
Intrigued, I wrote him back. In my message I introduced myself and asked him if he could share the contact information for the family he was working with. He did and I sent the lady a message. In it, I introduced myself and explained that I thought we might have experienced something in the same house. I didn’t tell her about the book.
To my delight, she replied almost immediately and over the course of several emails we shared stories of the house which, indeed, was the same one. Although she, herself, had not lived there her daughter and grandchild did–and fairly recently at that.
Despite the fact that she’d never been on my blog, read my book, or even heard of me, our stories were eerily similar. Her family had also been attacked by serious illnesses. They’d heard noises in the upstairs bedroom, family room, and what she described as terrifying “growling” in the kitchen. The growling eventually became so bad they could hear it from other parts of the house. The family’s pets wouldn’t even enter my mother’s old bedroom and she described the way the dogs would sit at the doorway and refuse to go in and how they would go around in circles. It also appeared that something was pushing them flat on the floor so that they were unable to move. In my old bedroom, the one with the moving rocking chair, the air was always cold, “colder than ice” she explained, and refused to warm no matter what they did to it. The family pictures were full of orbs, with the most intimidating image being a large white vapor arising from the kitchen.
Like us, the family experienced strange illnesses. Her husband began suffering heart issues while their daughter lived there and when he would enter the house and stay for a little while he’d come home, pale, in pain, and drained from his time there. She feared for her grandson who was also becoming ill from various ailments.
“Something evil lives in that house,” she declared and it was strangely satisfying to have my own family’s stories validated by someone who’d experienced similar things.
Like me, she and her family were unable to gather any history about the house. As a teenager, however, she’d lived across the street from it and had experienced strange things there as well. I am now convinced that it might not be that house in particular, but the land around it causing so many disturbances.
A Summer of Fear
Rebecca Patrick-Howard
Disclaimer:
The following events are true. However, names, place names, and identifying factors have been changed.
Arrival
I pulled up to the resort feeling beaten, battered, and cold. It was a sixteen hour drive and I’d gone from the unseasonably sweltering spring heat of Kentucky to the foggy, murky chill of New England. Somewhere along the way I’d managed to pick up a sinus infection; my nose was running, my head throbbed, and my throat was raw.
The resort, nearly five miles off the main road, was isolated and secluded from the rest of the world. The gravel road threw up a spray of white dust on my decrepit navy blue Buick as I slowly wound through the trees that towered above me, going deep into a tunnel of brown and green. I wasn’t due for another day but I wanted to find my destination first. I was shocked MapQuest had brought me this far without getting me lost.
The long, rambling road was eerily quiet. There wouldn’t have been room for another car to drive past me, but the length of the road coupled with the slow speed I had to take it with only amplified my solitude. I was completely alone in the dim tunnel, wisps of fog reaching out to me through the thick clusters of trees and curling around my tires and even slithering in through the vents. I turned Emmylou Harris and John Denver up on the CD player in an attempt to lighten the mood, but not even “Wild Montana Skies” helped; the tune sounded hollow and distant.
The Minnetonka Resort (not its real name) in the small New Hampshire mountain town had hired me over the phone to be its office manager for the summer. I was twenty-five years old and had the choice of two other jobs (Colorado and Texas) but settled on this one because it paid the best and was close to Boston. The hiring director also promised me weekends off which meant I could explore the surrounding area. I planned on making the most of that. In September I’d be moving to Wales to start graduate school. This might be the last time I’d have to freely roam in this capacity and I was looking forward to it.
Three True Tales of Terror: A True Hauntings' Collection Page 5