I've moved all my responses from the thread "What was your first experience" to a thread of my own.
Very sorry to the OP for hijacking the thread.


QUOTE
What was your first experience


I'm glad you asked. (But you may not be glad you asked after this.)




I think I'll kick off my first post the "right" way.
Hope it doesn't bore anyone because it's a little long.

I also don't know whether it qualifies as a "ghost story" or not. I'm just presenting the events as they actually occurred. (And, yes, I have a phenomenal memory. None of this is made up or fabricated in any way.)

What happened to me was not a single experience but a whole series of sporadic experiences that occurred to me when I moved, along with my parents, into a rented house just down the street from our original home. The time frame of these occurrences would have been between the years 1969 and 1973.

I had always been a skeptic and pretty much remain so. I'm a little quick to raise the BS flag on quite a few things: Roswell, the "mothman", overly dramatic ghost stories, etc. I think ghost stories in general are rather entertaining, but that's about all.

The first incident that I recall occurred a few weeks after we had just settled into our new home. The front two rooms of that smallish house were my bedroom and the living room, where the main entrance was. The main entrance had a screen door and a large, heavy wooden door with a rubber strip on the bottom for insulation. Whenever that door was opened, there was a characteristic and very distinctive scraping sound on the carpet. Naturally, you could hear it perfectly from my room, just on the other side of the wall. Even after so short a time, I had already grown accustomed to that sound.

One day in the early afternoon, just after I'd got home from school, I decided to get some homework out of the way. My dad was on day shift at his job at U.S. Steel on that occasion, which mean that he generally got home about 3:45. (Sometimes he would be late, but never earlier than that time.) I had just opened a book and began reading when I heard the screen open, a key go into the lock, and the distinctive whoosh of the door against the carpet. I don't remember the exact time, but this would have been quite a few minutes before my dad should have come home. Also strange to me was the fact that the door seemed to have been only partially opened. Puzzled, I got up from the bed in my room and walked the few steps into the living room.

The front door was closed.

Now even more puzzled, I went to the door, which was still locked, and looked outside. My dad's car wasn't in its customary spot on the street across from the house. There was absolutely no way that my dad, who seldom got in a hurry, could have closed the door, relocked it, walked back to his car and driven away within the couple of seconds it took me to get to the living room.
I remember that I wasn't particularly scared, just somewhat perplexed. But being the skeptic I was, I didn't put a lot of stock in what I'd heard--or thought I'd heard. Still, it puzzled me because never before had my own mind so successfully played such an effective trick on me.

When my dad finally came home, I asked him if he'd previously come home and then left. He looked at me as if I were crazy and shook his head no. So I mentioned nothing further about the occurrence to him, or my mom, when she came home from work about an hour and a half later. After all, I didn't want them to have me committed for "hearing things!" So I concluded that it must have been imagination or expectation. Logic had prevailed that time.

But logic didn't fare so well when the same thing happened a couple of weeks later. The same thing. Identically. This time, I was in my room playing solitaire on the bed, as I recall. Again, the time would have been too early for my dad to be home, but I knew what I heard. Thinking that something must be wrong, I got up from the bed and went to the living room.

The door was closed. And locked. No car across the street. My father simply wasn't home, period.

I was fairly rattled this time. I went outside to see if anything out there could have accounted for that noise. The block was quiet. Nobody stirred. Our immediate neighbors, who ran a photography shop, were still gone, but they never got home before six o'clock anyway. I moved to the far side of the yard, which was bordered by a gravel alleyway, and looked around. No sign of anything moving down the alley, either. I could see nothing, inside or outside, to explain what I had just heard. How could there have been anthing outside, when the noise seemed to be coming from only a few feet away from me just on the other side of a wall?

I was more than a little puzzled, but not exactly scared or panicked. So I went back in the house and returned to my room. I didn't hear anything until a short while later. I heard the screen door give its light squeak as it opened, the key inserted in the lock, and the door gently grate open. No mistake. It was the same sound. But my dad was home for real this time.

Nevertheless, I didn't mention a word to anyone about what I had experienced. We all knew the relatively brief history of the house and I was sure that it couldn't have been haunted by some "spirit," because, to our knowledge, no one had ever died there. I was at a real loss to explain what I'd experienced, but it never seriously occurred to me that it was supernatural. However, I also refused to believe that I was losing my mind.

But, later, the incidents continued in exactly the same way and at pretty much the same intervals, but generally when I least expected them. I would go through the same routine virtually every time: Go to the living room, see nothing, and then look outside for an explanation (of which there was none.) Still, I didn't feel so much fear or dread as puzzlement. But I was beginning to question my sanity, although I knew I had all my faculties otherwise. The general feeling was that I was being messed with, but there was obviously no one to blame it on. Despite the trouble it was causing me, I just couldn't tell anyone else. I think I just wanted to believe it wasn't happening, even though I knew that it was.

My mindset during, and after, my first experiences was this: I didn't want to believe, but the stuff happened anyway!

Even so, there's probably dozens of unanswerable questions:

If you hear a door open, it's reasonable to expect that someone is going to come through, right?
But what about when they don't come through and the door is still closed?
Now, how about when this same thing happens several times?
How can you explain something like that rationally?
How can you not question your own sanity to some degree, even though you're confident that you have all your faculties intact?

But the front door opening wasn't the only thing I experienced in that house. In many ways, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Because, over time, the problem was not so much what we'd heard, or thought we'd heard, but what we were becoming. The three of us--mom, dad, and I--were beginning to have personality changes over a short period of time. We were sometimes behaving in ways that just weren't us, when we were in that house. How can you fight against something like that? What would you call it, anyway? And why was it happening? Just too many questions that you can't have an answer for.

Sorry I've turned this thread into some kind of confessional, but I suppose a person has to express himself somehow, even about events that occurred almost 40 years ago. And now another unanswerable question arises: Why does it still seem to matter?

The personality changes were very ugly and actually the scariest part, though I didn't ascribe any of these to the unexplained events in the house until I did some research much later. According to some sources that I've read, personality changes do occur at times in such cases.

These changes are a little hard for me to talk about still, since my parents are both dead, so I want to be fair to their memory. But in all honesty there was quite a bit of domestic violence between my parents. Before our move to that house there were the occasional squabbles, but I'm referring to out-and-out blows, and brutal physical fighting. Why weren't the police called? They were! But, at that time, police generally refused to get involved in domestic disputes, saying they were "family matters." If one or both parties wanted to pursue the matter, they were instructed to come the next day to get a warrant and press charges. However, the police were always quick to respond if there was ever a domestic homicide! And, practically every week, I was afraid this was going to happen. Because that was about how often the fights occurred.

And, as with many domestic violence cases, there was alcohol abuse, but much worse than previously. My dad had always been the happy drunk, the life of the party. My mom would sometimes get a little tipsy, but was otherwise fine. But at the new house, they drank practically every day. Instead of being the happy drunk, my dad had turned withdrawn and morose. And if my dad wasn't there, I would be the one to catch hell from my mother when she was "that way." But it wasn't physical abuse, it was verbal. I got to hear how "sorry" I was, how I was just like my "crazy daddy." And worse. Much worse. During these times, she seemed to be intent on destroying my self-confidence and self-esteem, which she had always encouraged before. (Please be aware that I'm not speaking ill, but I'm just stating some of the facts.)

As for me, I wanted to leave. I was ready to borrow or steal some money and go somewhere, anywhere. To California maybe. Join some commune. (It was 1969, after all.) I felt anything would have been preferable to what was going on in that house. If I hadn't been able to get away periodically to go to my grandmother's house or my cousin's house, then I would have assuredly run away. But I could never bring myself to tell them what had been going on because I felt they wouldn't have believed me.

And through it all the unexplained noises continued. Where they appeared to come from depended on which part of the house I was in.

The den was the longest room in the house and was at the very back. There was a dining area just after the kitchen and the back door was directly across the room. The television was positioned right next to the back door. From the sofa on the back wall of the house, I watched TV frequently in the afternoon when school was out for the summer and I wasn't working. There were large windows in that den, which essentially made it a sunroom. The sofa sat between two of the large windows and there was another large window opposite the room from the back door, right next to the round dining table.

That particular window overlooked the alleyway beside the house and the neighbor's garage. Next to our house from the alley was a concrete area large enough to conveniently park a car in, and that is where my mom usually parked her car after coming home from work. To enter the house she used a the small door in the middle of the basement and went up the ten wooden steps on into the house. (I remember those ten steps very clearly. I think I counted them every time I went up them.) There were a couple of things very distinctive about that small door. Apparently it was a little big for the opening and you had to push hard on it. Aside from making a scraping sound against the concrete, there was also a loose windowpane in the door which rattled loudly. So if someone were coming through that door, you would be able to hear it throughout the entire house.

Directly underneath the dining area was a large garage door, but we never parked any of our vehicles in the basement. Generally, about the only time we would open the garage door was when we were either removing or returning the lawn mower.
Almost directly across the alley was the garage of our neighbor. We were never able to hear his garage door open, but the sound of our garage door was unmistakeable. Like the smaller door, the garage door was noisy, making a rumbling rattle every time it opened.

My mom usually got home from work about 5:45pm, almost like clockwork. She was almost never late, but generally never early.
I was watching the news on the TV in the den one day when I heard a car door slam and the rattling and scraping of the door to the basement, but I didn't hear it close. I glanced at the clock and noticed that it was something like 5:20. I don't recall being puzzled to any great extent, so I continued watching the news. I then noticed the sound of about two footsteps on the basement staircase, and that was all. Concerned that mom might have been having some trouble, I got up and went to the basement door to see what was wrong.

There was no one there, and the basement entrance was closed. I then descended to the basement to look out the window. No car outside at all anywhere in the vicinity.

Again, I was puzzled and perplexed, but somehow not scared. After this was repeated several times when I least expected it, I remember that I was beginning to get somewhat annoyed. I felt quite certain that someone, or something, was messing with me.

QUOTE
According to some sources that I've read, personality changes do occur at times in such cases.


QUOTE
You said "in such cases" I'm curious as to what cases you're referring to?


Later on, I considered these events were caused by so-called poltergeists, by the descriptions that I'd read in some books on the paranormal. There was simply and absolutely no rational way to explain any of what I'd experienced with the doors and the footsteps, so I suppose that I latched onto the poltergeist designation because it seemed to provide some sort of answer. It also frightened me to learn that such experiences often entail certain inexplicable mental and emotional problems, even psychoses. It frightened me because I suspected, and still suspect, that this was what had happened to myself and my family.

Certainly, my parents' alcoholism and domestic violence issues could have simply come to a head coincidentally with our occupying the house. Maybe it was the move from our original house that was a source of stress for them and it pushed them into a kind of depression. Depression was not understood very well at that time and was generally turned over to psychotherapy, which was usually not very effective, and really good antidepressants were virtually non-existent. Depression wasn't universally considered to be a chemical imbalance by the psychiatric community until several years later. But if it was clinical depression, then what would the chances of it affecting two people in the same household at about the same time?

And how likely would it be if it affected a third--such as myself? To my mind, the odds of that happening to all the members of a family would be very, very slim. But happen they did.

I met the young lady that I would later marry in early spring of 1972. (We are still married, by the way.) We fit like hand and glove and to say that we got along well was an understatement. Our relationship was almost legendary almost from the time we met. It was essentially love at first sight. The beginning of summer of that year was a wonderful time for the both of us. We dated frequently, even if it just amounted to riding around and getting to know one another. At college, I had made the dean's list and I felt on top of the world. Better yet, classes were over for me until late September. By the middle part of that summer, I realized that I wanted to marry her, and I was ecstatic.

But, once back home, my happiness was very quickly derailed. I began to consider a minor difference between my future wife that very suddenly and unexpectedly became a huge issue for me. (It's so embarrassing to me now that I can't mention it, but I assure you that it was a very minor thing.) After only a few days, this previously minor thing became huge, insurmountable. Nothing that I had ever accomplished seemed to matter to me, but this one thing that made us different. That dean's list that I'd made had become to my mind like a piece of toilet paper. I began to feel inferior. I began to feel that I wasn't good enough for her, as long as this thing remained between us. And, for the life of me, I couldn't get it out of my mind or get any relief from the negative feelings that had suddenly overwhelmed me. No relief. Period.

My appetite dropped off and I couldn't sleep well. I couldn't enjoy television. Reading was a chore, and I couldn't stand to listen to music. And the whole time was this one dreadful thought or feeling. It was like envy but was all-consuming. It seemed to sink my very soul and to sap some of the life from me. There seemed to be only a couple of courses of action for me: Either my future wife was going to give up something that she loved, but something I could inexplicably no longer stand, or else we were going to have to break up. I resolved that, somehow, I would have to talk to her about it--even though I couldn't even understand it myself.

Though it was the most difficult thing I'd ever done, I did talk to her. (She later told me that I had been uncharacteristically mean and completely unlike myself when I was talking to her about the matter.) I suppose it was a miracle that she didn't want to break up with me right then and there. I was relieved that she didn't, and I expected that everything would be okay with my mental state now that everything was pretty much out in the open.

But when I was home, that difference between us was all that mattered. It was worse than any obsession. It was a waking nightmare of self-hatred, envy, and the blackest kind of depression. Never in my life had I felt so totally overwhelmed and helpless. But I couldn't talk to anyone about it because I didn't understand it myself. (I still don't even know, after these 36 years!) All I could do was try to entertain myself as well as possible. Take drives. Walk around. Do chores. Even so, the feelings and thoughts weighed on me constantly so that I could enjoy virtually nothing. The only time I felt better, somewhat, was when I was with my future wife. And even that was coming into question because I was so embarrassed and ashamed at the way I'd acted and what I felt that I had to ask her to do.

It was fortunate for me that my future wife loved me so unconditionally and was so forgiving. Her eventual answer to me was fairly simple: She thought she understood how I felt, but we shouldn't talk about it. But she assured me that she'd work on that difference between us and asked me to try not to worry about it. Come that August, I began feeling some relief. So relieved, in fact, that I proposed to her. Happily, she accepted. Things were looking up.

Unless I was back home, and then sometimes the dark thoughts started pouring over me once again. "Why is this happening?" I would ask myself. "I should be happy. Why can't I be happy?" But answers wouldn't come.

But the noises of doors opening and footsteps on the stairs continued.

As I think about it now, it was like I was being taunted.


[To be continued]

Now I want to focus on the history of the house, which I had just briefly touched on earlier. The history itself was remarkable because the house had only been built some twenty years prior to when we moved in. So this isn't some classic "old haunted house story" at all.

That house was built by some friends of the family around the year 1949. My parents had moved into their original house, just up the street, in the same year. If I remember my local history correctly, the lot that the grey house now sits on had been previously owned by an older couple across the street, and they had long used it as a garden spot. But eventually they put the lot up for sale because the husband had to become too ill to maintain the garden. From what I've learned, there had never been a house on that particular lot until the year 1949. This would have been about three years before I was born, in 1952. So when we moved in 1969, it was still a relatively new house. (Think of a house being built in 1988 compared to today.)

As to why we moved from our original house just up the street. My grandfather lived with his second wife in a small apartment several blocks away. He had been retired for some time, being 84 years old, and had a rather small pension to live on. When his lease was up, my grandmother offered to move Grandaddy and my step-grandmother (whom I called "Mimi") into our old house. This would naturally entail some sacrifice on our part, but we were all willing, and even glad, to do this. There was no question that Grandaddy was perfectly capable of independent living, even at so advanced an age. His mind was as sharp as anyone half his age and he was still quite active. He died in March 1978 at the age of 93.

I'll call the original owners of the grey house "the Vyers."

I don't remember why the Vyers moved away, but I assume it was because Mr. Vyers had taken another job somewhere. It was known, however, that the Vyers had a daughter, an only child, who was not "quite right" to put it mildly. I don't remember all of the problems that she had but my mom had very firmly told me to avoid being around her period. I took it to heart and only saw her briefly and only a few times in my earlier years. I remember "Katie" as being a very pretty, quite normal-looking girl with black hair and I recall that she was about five years older than me. Somehow I do remember that she had a very sweet-sounding, high pitched voice. But I do know of one story about Katie that might put some things into perspective about her.

This was a story my dad told. I have no reason to doubt its accuracy.

Shortly before I was born, my mom and dad were having a cookout in our back yard--just a traditional Southern barbecue. They had quite a few friends over and they had to borrow extra tables to be able to seat them all. Beside our original house, there was a long driveway which led to a small garage beside the house. One of the guests had parked their car there.
During the meal, my dad had noticed Katie walking around carrying a small kitten that she apparently had just received. At that time, she would have been no older than five years old. She had finally wandered up to the neighbors back yard and my mom greeted her.

The car that was parked in front of the garage was a 1940s car that had the rear tag attached to a metal bracket with a spring that caused it to swing away from the gas-filler cap. Carrying the kitten, Katie strolled over to the car and sat on the bumper. Some of the guests had already noticed her and had greeted her likewise. But my dad told me that she didn't respond to anyone.

Everybody continued eating and paid Katie no attention until she said, "Look! This is funny!"

The little girl had pulled back the tag bracket of the car and placed the kittens head on the gas filler cap. She released the tag several times until the kitten was killed, its head crushed.

While several of the guests cried out in disgust, Katie laughed and walked away, proudly carrying her dead kitten with her.

So now you understand why I was not allowed to play with the Vyers girl. And now you have some idea of at least one of the people who lived there.


[to be continued]

thank you for sharing...looking forward to the rest of it.

Great story! I enjoyed reading it..Aanica

I firmly believe when there are negative energies at play, whether human, or non, there will be personality changes as a result.

I know what your saying to be a fact have lived it my self. A negitive energy home will influence every vulnrable person in the residence, Vulnrable means some one experiancing greif or upset in any way these energys feed on this and the longer it has been there the stronger it become ,arguments sadness and especially violence create a vortex of negativity that draws other dark spirits to the dwelling, my own home growing up is infested with negitive spirits and shadow people yes I believe shadow people are bad very bad no matter what the general concincious of some members. This is a great story with a lot of relivence in several respects to the behaviors of polterguists and dark spirits, and in a way it does resemble a novel....Aanica

I believe that as well. It makes perfect sense to me.

I look at it like this: It's pretty much common knowledge that what is called clinical depression, as an example, is caused by faulty brain chemistry. Chemistry, being ultimately electric in nature anyway, can be altered by the application of energy. So why would it not be possible for clinical depression to be triggered in a person through the application of some outside energy, like an electromagnetic field?

But let's look a little further. What function of the brain is not the result brain chemistry or nerve stimulation? (What is nerve stimulation, if not a small electric charge firing in the nerve?) So it seems that any function of the brain you can think of could, in theory, be altered by a strong enough external energy.

As for me, I don't think I want to volunteer for any experiments, thank you very much.



It'll probably be tomorrow before I get back to the story. I have to verify a few things first.

Thanks, aanica.

Vulnerable is exactly the word that describes how it was. I didn't know this at the time, but it seems now as though whatever force operating in that house was taking advantage of our vulnerabilities. And it seemed to start with the somewhat annoying noises we'd heard. (I'm getting ahead of myself, but I wasn't the only one who heard noises and had unexplained occurrences in that house. It was all of us.)


More tomorrow, I hope.

Tonight, I want to watch a movie and, later, will probably have to chase some guests out of the house who'll drink up all my soda and eat all my potato chips.

In our case, for example, it found us vulnerable because of our grief. A weak point in all of us. What we had in our home(s) was demonic in nature. We believe its' entry point was at the death of my mother. We witnessed something in Hospice ( few hours before she died) that was remarkable, sigh. We ALL witnessed it, including 3 nurses. The events we experienced started to take place immediately after this incident, and with a bang!

SOG, I agree about how the energies can effect the chemistry of the brain. It makes absolute sense for it to work that way.

I still think I'm a skeptic, but I admit that I must be a poor skeptic if I've researched this entire thing in the way that I have.
But it's not so much a product of wanting to believe, but forced to believe because I can see no other possible explanations. I certainly wasn't hallucinating, wasn't dreaming, and wasn't imagining things. I've heard strange noises before and since, but I've always been able to get to the bottom of them quickly. But in this case, there was just no way to do so rationally.

In my case I felt that holding onto skepticism may have been helpful to me in some respects, but I must admit that it must have succeded in getting to me in other ways. And I realize that makes me sound paranoid, in just the same way it did all those years ago when I questioned my sanity. But why, then, was I not paranoid in other places and on other occasions? And do paranoid people ever think of themselves as paranoid?

No, there was nothing wrong with me. Of this I am sure. But there was something wrong with that house.

I found myself questioning my sanity over and over. I even found myself questioning my beliefs. You put it out of your mind, then it happens again.. then another member of your family starts to confess to you in secret... confirming your doubts unknowing.

Well, I still have half a bag of potato chips, a can of Mountain Dew, and I have insomnia again, so I guess I'm good to go.


I want to do a little more prior history of that house before I finish with some of my last experiences there. Then I'd like to get into what others have heard in the grey house.

The Vyers family moved out of that house during the summer of 1958. I remember the year because that was the time I started first grade. The Vyers began renting that house instead of selling it, and there had been quite a few renters over the years, including our family. I only know of one family (or couple, in that case) who renewed their lease past one or two years. (And that reminds me: "Mr. Vyers" was connected with real estate somehow.)

The first couple who rented the house after the Vyers had a daughter named Cathi who had been horribly burned in a house fire.
Half of her blonde hair was burned off, from the front of her head to nearly the back, and her face was horribly disfigured. She had no ears. Moreover, several of the fingers on one hand were missing from the severe burns. But Cathi was a trooper. She seemed to be almost oblivious of her disfigurement and carried on as any normal child. I became friends with her almost immediately and we played together quite a few times. I remember that seeing her was often very painful for me, but I tried to never let it show. I seemed to realize, even at six years old, that treating Cathi as normal was helpful for her. Because, otherwise, Cathi was a delightful kid.

I'm fairly certain that the school year of 1958-1959 was not quite over before Cathi and her family moved out. I remember being somewhat sad, but somehow I felt relieved because of the pain that I felt when I saw her. (I remember that made me feel somewhat ashamed of myself, but I couldn't help it.) I didn't realize it at the time, but I'm now aware that Cathi's family must have broken their lease. For some reason, none of the "neighborhood news people" had any idea why they had left so suddenly, so it perplexed us all. I have never since learned of their whereabouts.

The next family that moved in had two boys, and they were from "up North" somewhere. Though one of the boys was about the same age as me, he never really fit in with the rest of us neighborhood kids. About the only thing that I recall about him was that his mother served him fish for breakfast, which was about the most peculiar thing that this Southern-bred youngster had ever heard of. The parents of the two boys were never friendly with me, or any of the other neighborhood kids, so we all just stayed away.

And that family didn't stay long in the grey house either. We did get the general idea that, perhaps, the father of the household had gotten a really good job opportunity elsewhere and moved the family away.

I don't recall how many people lived in that house afterward, but the ones who stayed the longest, beside my family, moved in around 1964 or 1965 and occupied the place until we moved in in 1969. By all accounts, this childless couple were some of the oddest, most unfriendly people that had ever lived in our neighborhood. Even the immediate neighbors, the middle aged-couple who ran the photography shop, didn't take very kindly to them either, and they were some of the most delightful and friendly people on the block, besides my parents. I don't remember their names, but I know they were a fairly young couple, perhaps in their late twenties or early thirties. To my knowledge, they remained childless the entire length of their stay in the grey house. (For this account, I'll call them "Mr. and Mrs. Anderson.")

All I knew of Mrs. Anderson was that she worked in an office somewhere, was very shy, and didn't exhibit a great deal of personality. Mr. Anderson was likewise, but was apparently overtly grumpy, withdrawn, and morose. One of the more alienating things about them, for the rest of us neighbors, was that they kept two or three vicious dogs (Pit Bulls, I think) in a smallish pen in the corner of the back yard next to the alleyway. Why Mr. Anderson didn't allow the dogs have the entire back yard, which was rather spacious, I'll never know. (Now, however, I believe that those were fighting dogs, and that Mr. Anderson kept them in that pen to increase their viciousness.)

We learned of a few of their antics through "Mrs. Lee", the closest neighbor to those who lived in the grey house. One day, she spotted my dad and I walking to the car and waved us down. Apparently, she just wanted to unload her problems on some sympathetic ears. To my dad, she said, "Melvin, I wish you'd have heard those two idiots in that house last night! They kept me and Herbert up most all night screaming and fighting! It was like they both went crazy or something! I've never heard the like!"

The end of the Anderson's stay brought our otherwise quiet neighborhood some high drama. This would have occurred in the latter part of 1968 or the early part of 1969. Mrs. Lee, one of the "neighborhood newsbearers" had affirmed on several occasions that the Andersons still fought fairly often. But, all of a sudden, it had stopped. On seeing Mr. Anderson in his back yard one day, Mrs. Lee greeted him and enquired about his wife. His grumpy, short answer was something like, "What wife? Hell, she's gone."
A matter of a few weeks later, much of the neighborhood heard a commotion in the early morning hours which brought several people from their houses to see what had happened. (I had been visiting some relatives, so I missed all the fun.)

Mr. Anderson had got in his car, which was parked in the basement directly underneath the dining area, threw it in reverse and crashed through the garage door. He sped away and was not seen for several days, when he returned to collect his things, cage his dogs and load them into a pickup, and left without a word to anyone, never to be seen again. In the meantime, Mr. Vyers was the most upset that anyone had ever seen him when he was called back to the house, according to my dad. However, he did affirm that Mr. Anderson had paid him for the damage to the garage door, which had to be entirely replaced.

To this day, no one I know has ever learned what caused Mr. Anderson to leave that house in such a dramatic fashion, or where he and the former Mrs. Anderson ended up.

[to be continued]

Somoldguy, I was just curious, but have you thought about writing about your experiences, and publishing them?

I have considered it, but I have doubts whether it would make it in today's market. Books are expensive and publishers don't want to take many chances on new writers, especially some flash-in-the-pan who has a ghost story. My chances of getting published are realistically very slim.

So I just chose to make it public in some forum like this. To get my story out to a few people who would care to read it, with the indulgence of the board administrators. Even if someone decided to steal the whole story, this wouldn't be very wise. The dates that I posted them aren't going to go away, unless the administrators delete the thread, and the posting dates can't be faked that I'm aware of.

I just wanted to share my story with anyone who's interested, and at no cost. Even if they do think it's fiction, which it is not. Who knows what the future holds? I might kick the bucket soon and few others would ever know. (Not that I have any good reason to think that I'm about to die, but nobody's future is ever really certain. People 30 years younger than I probably die every day.)

Besides, my as-yet unpublished works of fiction are much better than my "humdrum" true story. I would love to get those published!



I was as busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest today, so I couldn't write much on my story.
Perhaps tomorrow.

I'd now like to describe what the grey house looked like shortly after Mr. Anderson left and before we moved in during the early spring of 1969. That, in itself, is an unexplained mystery!

The interior of the house looked and smelled like a veritable pigsty. The grey tiling on the floor was literally brown with dirt and crud. There was a large hole in the wall in the middle room which looked as though someone had put their fist through it or had hit it with a baseball bat. (If it was a fist, then whoever threw that blow was very powerful because the wall was sheetrock, which is tough!) The walls were streaked in places as if someone had wiped their dirty hands on them. (By their location this would have been done by an adult, not a child. Furthermore, the Andersons had no children.) The odor,in some parts of the house, smelled like dog feces.

Mr. Vyers was said to be beside himself when he saw the shape that his house was in. Apparently the floors hadn't been swept or mopped since the Andersons had moved in and the carpets never vacuumed. The bathroom was so bad that it was hard to go in there because the floor smelled like urine. Those people apparently lived like animals.

My dad, being the generous person he was, told Mr. Vyers that he would clean the house himself, since we were moving in, and that he shouldn't worry about it. My dad and I had been very good painters, and my dad said that we'd take care of that also, if Mr. Vyers wished. My dad would also repair the damaged sheetrock in the middle room. Needless to say, Mr. Vyers gratefully accepted his offer.

This meant that the spare time and weekends of the entire family was going to be spent cleaning up the house to make it livable. Hooray.

All the cleaning and painting took us about a month. The only thing we didn't touch was the bathroom floor. Mr. Vyers himself had some contractors come in and replace the tiling, while my dad repainted the walls. After much scrubbing, mopping, and waxing, the floors looked like brand new and the carpeting, which was only in the front part of the house, was clean once more. (I should know because I was the one whose job that was.) Finally the place was livable, and Mr. Vyers was so happy that he almost cried, according to my dad.

But I remember thinking, when it was all over, that I still didn't like that place. I couldn't explain why, I just didn't like it.


[to be continued]

Much of the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1971 was a nightmare.

My dad had begun drinking almost daily. Instead of being the happy, outgoing person that we had all known, he was now withdrawn and morose. I'd never seen him like that and it frankly scared the hell out of me. Instead of going to work, he holed himself up in my parents' bedroom and locked the door, only to emerge to go to the bathroom. He refused food for the better part of an entire week. We were worried sick about him, but he very seldom spoke to either of us. Most uncharacteristically, he missed about two weeks of work, and he had seldom taken so much as a sick day beforehand. During that time I really thought he was going to die, so I checked on him often--even if it amounted to knocking on the door and asking if he was all right. If he hadn't answered me, I was fully prepared to kick the door down.

One night during that time, I witnessed one of the few visual anomalies that I had ever experienced in that house. My mom was present also.

Only about an hour before that occurred, my mom and I had been watching a movie on TV in the den. Afterward, I continued to watch television while my mom went to the kitchen to wash a few dishes. From where I was seated on the sofa, I could see into the kitchen as far as the sink. Just before the sink was a set of solid wooden cabinets, and these were in full view as well.

Very suddenly, one of the cabinet doors swung open. Even though there was no mistake it was open, I couldn't believe my own eyes. My mom stopped washing dishes and stared at the open cabinet. On the opposite wall there were two wooden cabinets on either side of the stove. Though it was out of my sight, one of those doors opened a few seconds later. When my mom stared in that direction, I was on my feet. The door to the cabinet closest to the den was wide open. As I was standing there the cabinet door just past the stove half-opened. Then one of the lower cabinet doors opened right beside me, on the same side of the room as the sink.

The first thing that popped into my mind was a sudden draft, but I felt no draft, at any time. The only way there could have been a draft anywhere in the area was if the back door was open, which it wasn't.

"Mom," I muttered, "what's happening?"

Her response was as startling to me as what I'd just seen.

"Get the hell out of here!" she yelled at me, sounding furious. "Get to your *** to your room and don't come out, you hear me? Just get in there!"

Hesitantly, I complied.

At first, I thought she was taking her anger and frustration out on me, which frankly happened quite often in those days. But I realized later that she wanted me out of the room quickly so that she could protect me from whatever was going on. She admitted as much when I questioned her about the incident years later.

About two weeks before Christmas, my mom had what was then called a nervous breakdown during a fight with my dad, who was still drinking daily. It appeared that she had been trying to curse dad into sobriety, but it obviously wasn't working. She then fell to the floor and began pounding it with her fists as she screamed and ranted incoherently. I tried to comfort her but she pushed me away several times. I realized that I had to get some intervention, so I called my aunt who lived about twenty miles away. When I was on the phone, she could hear my mom ranting in the background. My dad had regained enough of his composure to try, very feebly, to help her, but she struck him several times, forcing him away as well. "Don't worry, little buddy," my aunt said to me reassuringly. "Your uncle and I will be right there."

My mom had finally quit hitting the floor and just lay in a heap sobbing. My dad stood awkwardly in the door to his bedroom, mumbling and smoking one cigarette after another. I finally managed to coax mom from the floor and got her to lie on my bed, just as my aunt and uncle arrived. I remember feeling a great deal of relief when they came, because my aunt, my mom's older sister, seemed to know exactly what to do to help calm her down.

Meanwhile my uncle spoke to my dad, who was still rather incoherent. He, likewise, felt that he wasn't getting anywhere. All my dad seemed to be able to do was to pace the floor, saying, "What have I done? What have I done?"

Later when I was able to get with my aunt and uncle, we decided on a course of action. They would spend the night to help make sure things remained calm. Meanwhile, we would call my half-sister, Gwen, who would know how to deal with my dad. (Gwen was fifteen years older than I and had been raised by her birth mother, so she had never lived with us. However, she did maintain close contact with our family.) It wouldn't be hard to convince her that dad needed to go to the hospital to get "dried out" after weeks of constant alcohol abuse. Mom, herself, might fare better with a hospital stay.

Once Gwen entered the scene the next day and we all spoke to her about what had been going on, she succeded in persuading dad to go to the hospital.
But she was also peeved at me: "Guy, why the hell didn't you call me beforehand? He's my dad, too." Gwen had two kids of her own to worry about, a husband who caused problems of his own, so we didn't see the need to bother her. This is exactly what I told her, because Gwen and I were enough alike that we shared a frank, sometimes blunt way of speaking. (We sometimes manage to offend people without meaning to do so.) Gwen and I never stayed mad, so she forgave me and thanked me for thinking about her.

So my mom and I went to my aunt's house to stay for a while, and my dad entered the hospital voluntarily.

In the matter of just two or three days, the transformation of those two was, I would say, a miracle. My dad had returned to his old self, jolly, friendly, warm. My mom, who didn't go to the hospital, was likewise just fine and was back to being the warm, cheerful, talkative person she'd been before. And that was the point where I had begun to realize that being away from that house did us a great deal of good. But I was at a loss to explain why, exactly. And when my mom came to visit my dad, it was like everything was back to normal. It was so normal that mom began half-complaining, half-joking about dad's legendary hard-headedness, like she had done before. Laughing, she would say, "Melvin, your head is as hard as that floor! You know that?"

Christmas of 1971 was actually one of the best times our family had ever experienced. Dad, freshly out of the hospital, was cold sober instead of holiday-tipsy, and so was mom. The house was full of visitors: Aunts, uncles, cousins. My grandmother and her second husband came to visit from New York, which was a treat in itself. For my family, it was the best Christmas ever.

[to be continued]

I beg the reader's pardon that I've been skipping around chronologically, but I've been trying to present the events to fit some of the conclusions that I came to later. First and foremost, I consider it to be a "bad house." While everything that happened there was not always bad--there was still laughter and affection and pleasant times, just like always--but some things just naturally stick out as being totally uncharacteristic for us. And on top of that was the unexplained noises and occurrences that we went through frequently.

I can't emphasize enough that, to my knowledge, there had never been a death in that house to explain it as a "haunted house" story. But I could later find no other conclusion about that place. It's only a belief, but I now think that, at some point, there actually was a death in that house. That someone either died or was killed there and that whoever did it disposed of the body and got away with the killing. Such things do happen. Justice is not always served in this world, because it's never been quite an orderly place.

One thing that I had neglected to mention previously during the "cleaning up" narrative of the house was that I found, scattered throughout the house, a number of fired .38 Special revolver cases. I couldn't say exactly that they belonged to the people I call "the Andersons" or that they were somehow involved in my hypothetical "killing", but where I found them was generally quite peculiar and unexplainable. I found some on the windowsill, some in the closet in my room, some in the closet in the so-called "middle room", and (I think) quite a few in the basement when I was down there sweeping up. In fact, I kept finding occasionally a fired .38 case or two in several places practically the entire length of my stay in that house, always in the strangest of places.

Now, I need to get into my belief system a little before I continue.

About all I know is that I believe in God. The One God, merciful and compassionate. I've never believed that God has become a man, or a woman, or creatures, etc. so I realize that the conventional American religions don't really fit my belief system. Some have suggested that I must be Muslim. Others, such as some of the Jews that I've known, think that I'm a Noachide or a "righteous gentile." But I've never been comfortable with either designation, to be honest, after learning about them. (All due respect to both religions.)

All I believe about demons and devils (including the "Devil" himself) is that these are allegorical stories, as is most of what is in the Bible. (Sorry if this offends.) What has impressed itself in my mind is that "Satan" is an allegory for humanity--a very powerful, godlike entity (which we are) which is a "fallen angel" (a spiritual being which has also descended almost to the level of an animal. Sometimes humans are even worse than animals IMO.) So "Satan" is us, because none of us is perfect or moral all the time. Therefore, I don't believe that what was occurring in that house is the product of a supernatural entity like a demon or a devil. However, I'm also reminded of a line in that brilliant movie, The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil has ever pulled is making the world think that he doesn't exist."

That may well be so. Especially in my case.

[to be continued]

Interesting thoughts, SOG. I think anymore that there is a lot of truth in your view of evil as being allegorical for Mankind, but maybe not all the truth. I am still left with a lot of things which infer also a separate agency, personally, so I stand in a sort of no man's land of believing I can thank myself for most of my own wrongs and wrong doing, and I know I don't need any help to be wicked. However, there is help, IME, from outside. Both to do evil and to do good. What that is, though.... dunno. I am convinced of God, as you say. I am also convinced of absolutes as living things in some sense. I just have mixed views as to what degree they actually get directly involved with us in our puny little lives. Yet, I have experienced a few things which force me to have to know that there are ... angels? I have seen and experienced intervention undeniably, which is why I say so. I can't deny it.

But, I don't much blame a devil or a demon for my worst problems. Beyond the occasional shove headfirst down a staircase, figuratively speaking, I think that is all me and maybe very rarely mad chance . I have a choice every moment of every day. I think we all do.

But, that is just my opinion today . Anyway, just thoughts, and your fault for inspiring them. SOG made me do it LOL.

NS

Yeah...instead of "The Devil made me do it" I would say "I'm the Devil and I did it!"



If anyone remembered Flip Wilson, it would be a hell of a joke.

I want to get into a few experiences of mine which I can't fit into any particular time frame, but which I think are relevant still.

The first occurred, I think, in 1972 but I'm not quite sure.
One morning about nine or ten o'clock, I was preparing to get myself ready to go somewhere. (Job interview? Maybe.) It was springtime or early summer and the front door was open, but the screen door was locked. In the bathroom, I was shaving and I heard a scratching at the screen door and then a female voice, which sounded like our neighbor, Mrs. Lee. Very clearly and loudly I heard her call out my dad's name. The bathroom was directly next to my room and just a few paces from the living room, so I called back to her, sure that she could hear me.
"Lorraine, dad went to work this morning," I said. "Is there something I can do?"
There was no answer.
I didn't think much about it until after I'd finished shaving, so I went to the screen to see if Mrs. Lee was still outside and what she may have wanted. But she wasn't out there at all.
That wasn't such a big deal itself because Mrs. Lee had generally acted as though she were in some kind of rush, so I think I chuckled to myself and went back to getting ready. I figured that Mrs. Lee had simply realized that dad wasn't home and went back to her house.
When I went to my car, I noticed that the Lees car was gone. I didn't put much stock in this either because there had been a few days that Mrs. Lee stayed home and Mr. Lee went to their photography shop alone. (Apparently, he hired a younger relative to work at the shop in Mrs. Lee's stead every so often.)
Later that afternoon, I was sitting on the back steps when I saw the Lees' car pull into their carport and both Mr. and Mrs. Lee got out. They both greeted me and I went to the edge of the yard to chat with them. I eventually got around to earlier that morning, when I thought that Mrs. Lee had called for my dad.
"No, honey, it wasn't me," she said, looking rather puzzled. "I've been at the shop all day. Maybe it was Dina."
(Dina was our next-door neighbor when we lived in our original house, a few doors up the street.)
But I was sure it wasn't Dina because those two women's voices were distinctly different. Dina's voice was a bit raspy, where Mrs. Lee's was high-pitched and girlish.
Because Mrs. Lee looked so perplexed, I assured her that what she told me was probably the case, even though I was certain that it wasn't. Just another weird occurrence in an increasing string of weird occurrences, I figured.

This would prove to be the only time, that I can recall, that I had ever heard any kind of unexplained voice in that house.

Another incident occurred in the winter, and I'm not sure of the time frame, but I do know that I experienced pretty much the same thing on several different occasions.
Some nights, when dad was working the 3pm to 11pm shift, I would be in my room watching my TV, listening to music, or reading, and mom would be in the den watching TV and knitting. Quite often, she would fall asleep, and I would sometimes find her in a very comical position with her head nodded practically onto her chest but still holding her knitting up in front of her. That was the case one night, but the thing that dampened the humor was the fact that the back door was open and cold air was pouring into the room.
I woke up mom and asked her why the back door was open, as cold as it was that night.
"The back door is open?" she asked groggily. "What--"
She stared at it in clear puzzlement, and I could tell that her chuckle was forced when she added, "Oh, it must've been when I let one of the cats inside."
(We had two cats at the time.)
What bothered me was that I was certain that both cats had been inside all night. One, in fact, had been sleeping on my bed, while the other was sleeping on a love seat in the middle room. I had just passed her when I came into the den.

And, as I said, that wouldn't be the only time that I would see the back door open under unusual circumstances while mom was asleep in the den. One night, there had been a cold, blowing rain which had come through back screen door and soaked the doormat. If the door had been open any wider, the rain would have assuredly blown in onto the television! After closing the door, I woke mom and pointed out the rain on the floor.
"But how could that have happened unless the door was open?" she asked groggily.
"The door was open, Mom. I just have closed it."
I think she gave some kind of answer about letting one of the cats in earlier, but I recall that her answer just didn't ring true with me.
Besides, it was uncommon for us to have to let the cats inside anyway. In the basement, there were about three or four bricks missing on the far wall which the cats had long been using as an entry/exit to the house. Since neither of the cats seldom ventured out in inclement weather, they were both generally inside except during mild or warm weather.

The reader will recall the garage door in the basement, which rumbled and rattled when it opened.
I don't remember how many times I heard that door open and there would be no explanation for it. That may have been the door that I heard open with the most frequency, come to think of it. I had almost gotten to the point where I didn't believe that the door had opened unless I heard some other accompanying noise.
But one day I did hear an accompanying noise, as if someone had set something metal onto the concrete basement floor just inside the garage door. So I went down to look.
The garage door was closed and locked, and there was no metal object anywhere near the garage door.
I had been fooled again.
On a few other occasions, I would hear the garage door only partially open, as if someone were having troubles getting it open. But when I would go to investigate, there would be no sign of anyone having opened that door. In fact, it would still be bolted.
This was all getting tiring to me, really.

[to be continued, but close to the end--I assure you ]

Our wedding on May 26. 1973 was a very happy affair, even though it had been mostly a very stormy day. There appeared to be a break in the weather just for our wedding, and then all hell broke loose. The next day, there were tornado warnings, and one tornado had done a great deal of damage in a small community just west of the city where we lived. Sadly, several lives had been lost.

My new bride lived with me in my old room in the grey house until such time as I was able to get on my feet. It wasn't long before my wife began to hear noises in the house. For her, it was always the garage door that she heard. Like me, she would also go investigate but would see nothing. She told me about it and admitted that it frankly scared her. So we would often go visit her parents and spend the weekend at their house, some forty miles away. (I used to "commute" in order to date her previously.) She also told me quite recently that she experienced something abnormal (for her) quite regularly in the grey house. After I would go to work or to school in the early morning, she would go back to bed and go into a very deep sleep and stated that she would feel as though she were drugged afterward. (And she never has taken drugs of any kind, unless in a case of absolute necessity.) We have no explanation for this either.

Fortunately, ever since the latter part of 1971, my parents had remained generally sober and things remained relatively peaceful. Dad would still drink a few beers, but these generally made him drowsy, and Mom may have had a few nips at Dina's house. However, that peace would be short-lived.

By the end of the summer, mom began picking verbal fights with me. I tried to dodge her tirades, for the sake of my new wife, but was sometimes unsuccessful. I didn't want Lynn involved at all and generally told her to stay in her room when she heard us fighting. She knew that mom sometimes had a bad temper and was scared of her for that reason. She has always admitted to me that she'd never felt at ease around her, and I've always understood. It seemed that mom had returned to trying to destroy my self-confidence and self-esteem again, but this time when she had not been drinking (that I could tell, and I usually could.) And it was like she was blaming me for everything that had ever happened to her in her life.

One day I had had enough and I had a come-apart of my own. I don't know what all I said, but remember that I told my mom to lay the hell off me, that I was sick of her meanness and her running me down at every opportunity. I was so passionate that I was shaking my fists in front of me. Immediately, my mom ran for the broom to hit me with it.
"Don't you dare hit me with that, damnit!" I said as I grabbed the broom to keep her from hitting me with it. "Don't you dare! I'm getting the hell out of here right now, so you'll never have to worry about me screwing up your life for you again! I'm done!"
Within minutes, Lynn and I were both out the door, very rattled and on our way to her parent's house.

It was about a week later that mom called my wife's parents house and asked to speak to me. Expecting more trouble, I answered hesitantly. But mom was very warm and cheerful, just like her usual self.
"Hey, fella," she said. "I'm getting hungry to see you. How've you two been?"
I know that my answers were rather terse to her questions because I was still smarting from our fight from the previous week. Finally, she said, "Your dad and I have found you two an apartment, if you're interested."
That apartment was owned by the husband of Dina's daughter, Gloria. The rate that they were going to give me was excellent. After some thought, I agreed. The apartment was several miles from the grey house and in a very convenient location. The supermarket was only a few blocks away and there was a nearby shopping center and movie theater. In addition, it was only about two blocks from the state fairgrounds. So I just couldn't turn it down.
Back home, mom and I had an earnest chat and we both apologized for our fight and for what we'd said to each other. The fights that we had thereafter were fortunately few.

I felt like a different person once I was out of that house. I felt alive and unburdened. The strange, intense depression which had hit me about a year and a half earlier was then just an ugly memory.
But strange things still happened at the grey house. Not to me, but to my parents.
In the early summer of 1974, large vines began inexplicably growing in the back yard of the house. My dad had generally maintained a small garden and I asked him if he'd perhaps planted some cantaloupe or watermelon, for that was what the vines looked like. He said that he hadn't planted any of them, that they had just appeared. They were scattered throughout the whole lawn, in as many as eight clumps, and they grew very quickly and to an enormous length. These vines bore an odd-looking, ugly acorn-shaped "fruit" which looked like an acorn squash but was solid dark green. Both my mom and dad were at a loss to explain where they had come from or what they were, and neither did the neighbors. (I even carried one for my in-laws to see, and they said they'd never seen anything like it. One person told me it may have been a gourd, but he recanted when I told him the enormous size of the vines and leaves.) My mom tried to cook one as if it were a regular squash, but she said it tasted terrible and threw it away. Before long, my dad cut every one of the mysterious vines down. They never grew back.

My dad had remained sober for a very encouraging length of time and seemed to be healthier. His normal good nature had returned and he was staying active. He was also nearing retirement and was very happy about that.
But one day my mom called me at my apartment and told me, to my great surprise, that she had been staying at my aunt's house for the previous several days. When I asked her what had happened, she hesitantly told me that dad had, very suddenly, attacked her and tried to bash her head against a doorjamb. I expressed my shock and asked if he had been drinking again, which she denied vehemently. She also said that she was back home and everything was "fine now" and asked us to come over.
Things somewhat appeared normal, but dad seemed odd. He seemed nervous and his laughter seemed forced. He just wasn't the same, but he was cold sober. It scared me to think that he might be developing some sort of mental illness. I also learned that something was the matter with one of our cats, Sugar. She remained holed up in the basement was was refusing to come out for even food or water. Mom asked me to go see if I could coax her out from her hiding place, since Sugar generally took up with me the most.
I found Sugar huddled behind the freezer in the basement. She didn't appear so much sick as she did scared. Whenever I tried to move her out, she would hiss and struggle and bolt back behind the freezer. Getting tired of the scratches on my arms and hands, I finally had to give up.
A few days later, mom called to tell me that Sugar had to be put to sleep. Inwardly, I questioned this because I knew how she'd inexplicably put up such a fight with me earlier, but I said nothing. Peace was sometimes a very fragile thing in the family at that time. I was sad about the loss of Sugar, but somehow I felt it was for the best. I remember how scared she'd seemed and couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what had happened.

[to be continued...final chapter ahead]

It was some time before I talked to mom frankly about the events in the house. I tried to do so with dad, but he would remain oddly silent and acted as if he didn't want to hear any more. At first mom tried to dismiss it with a joke, but I could tell that her humor was forced. So I eventually stopped.

It was several years after dad's death in 1989 that mom finally spoke to me candidly about what she had experienced in the house.

While we were living in the grey house, Dad and I would take a mini-vacation to our cabin on the river where we could fish, hunt, and just basically "cut loose." Mom would sometimes stay at home, other times go to visit her other sisters. But when Mom was home, she confided to me that she would hear footsteps on the basement stairway all night long. She told me that she thought that Dad and I had returned home late in the night and that something was terribly wrong, so she woke up to investigate. But no one would be there.
I asked about the back door being open, and she affirmed that, sometimes, she left the door open on purpose.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I was scared to death in that house, Guy. Scared to death."
I also mentioned about the arguments and the fights.
"I don't know what came over me, Guy. I don't know what came over any of us. It was like we were all different somehow. I don't know, maybe it was stress, but there seemed to be something more. But I hope you know that, even through all that, we loved you very much."
"I know," I said reassuringly. "I wouldn't have hung around if I'd thought otherwise." But then I had to turn it into a joke, "But it's nice to know that you left the back door open so you could bail yourself out, and then leave us two in the house for the spooks to get!"
She laughed heartily and told me that I was never too old for her to "bust my butt."

The last incident involving the grey house occurred some thirteen years after I'd last set foot in the place. It was during one of the most vivid dreams that has ever occurred to me.

I was in the house, and it was totally dark, and I was moving away from the bathroom towards the rectangular hall which seperated both bedrooms and the entrance to the living room. For some reason, I was compelled towards the stairway to the basement, but my movements were very slow. I finally managed to open the door and turn on a light.
At the bottom of the staircase, I saw a man lying on his stomach on the floor, with his head turned away. His hair was in a very greasy style such as worn in the 1950's or 1960's and he had a red and blue flannel shirt and jeans. I could tell that his eyes were open, but underneath his head was a growing pool of blood. I tried to scream but all that game out was a loud groan.

Then, desperately, my wife shook me awake. I woke up with my heart pounding and sat up in bed as I told her about my dream. There hadn't been even so much as a word spoken about that place in several years.

After all this time, I still struggle with some of the effects from my life in that house. These vivid memories seem like part of a curse from that old house, but I've learned to manage them and maybe turn them into something positive, hopefully for others to be warned about the potential dangers of toying with the supernatural.

After all, what is a curse but merely the opposite of a blessing? Couldn't a curse, likewise, go the other way?


Mom died in November, 2000 from the devastating effects of a stroke. I miss her every day.


[THE END]

I read the whole thing with interest. Thanks so much for taking the time to tell us all about it.

Like you, I'm inclined to think of things like "evil spirits" in symbolic or allegorical terms that point at a primary reality that is physical and more or less mechanistic. But in shamanic traditions the world over, people don't think this way. To them, illnesses and foul temperament are primarily spiritual, and according to this view, there is literally a nasty dark thing inside the afflicted person, and it needs to be cast out. They would say that the physical is an outward manifestation or sign of spirit, which comes first, and not the other way around. The influence of an evil spirit, in this view, is not a stylized way of understanding a mainly physical reality. Instead, it's a literal truth.

To them, healing is a matter of dragging a dark blob out of somebody and making it stay out.

That point of view is pretty disorienting to me, but I'm in no position to say it's false. It did hold sway for the vast majority of human history, and it would explain some things in your experience as well as mine that are rather awkward from a materialistic perspective.

Spiritists seem to put it in terms of vibrations, resonances, harmonies, and so on. I suppose that some might say that the grey house was "imprinted" with certain "vibrations" by previous occupants and events, and it continued to resonate at those frequencies when your family moved in, so that you all "vibrated" in sympathy, like tuning forks.

Of course, as a person schooled in contemporary psychology, I'd look for more prosaic causes. It's just that, if what you're saying is true, I might be hard-pressed to find them.

You talk about a "curse" on the place. Back to shamanism-- in that tradition, a curse is also a literally existing thing, or rather, it's an instruction carried out by low spirits that really do exist. It is therefore a thing that can be turned back on its sender. All you have to do is convince the spirit(s) that they'd be better off inflicting harm on the one who sent them.

Anyway, those are just some things that sprang to mind on reading your story. It's very interesting, and thanks again.

Thanks for your comments, Hamlyn.
I'm hoping that my story is worth at least what you all paid for it.


I've also looked into the psychological/psychiatric side of the story, but I keep coming up empty to try to explain all of it.

And I'll confess something else here:

I went to a psychiatrist, with years of experience and one of the best in his field, for clinical depression and described to him exactly what my depression was like back in '72. He just shook his head and said that he'd never heard of anything like that.
Of course, he did affirm the depression part and its cyclical nature (bipolar disorder), but he did state that he'd never before seen or heard of an obsession being so bad. (Of course, I didn't tell him about the possibility of my old house being "haunted.") Needless to say, having a unique obsession like that didn't make me feel too much better. I didn't go "Gee, look what I've got!"

And I don't really believe in curses but I think that my vivid memories of that house is somewhat of a "curse." In fact, my wife and mom both had vivid recollections of their own experiences. So it may be like you say: Something has sort of "imprinted" itself on us. Whether it's physical or spiritual, I don't know.

But maybe there's ulitmately no difference.

I suppose the only difference is, which comes first? Or do they arise mutually?

In any case, it's said that the way to remove a troubling obsession or an afflicting spirit or what have you is to humbly ask God to remove it. (I use the term "God" because you seem comfortable speaking that way. I don't pretend to know what It is.) Belief is not necessary, just sincerity and earnestness. As you've seen, our human power often isn't up to a given spiritual task, and so it makes sense to ask for intervention.

The fact that I've seen it bring relief in cases that appeared hopeless makes me think, hey, maybe there's something to the idea that some afflictions really are spiritual. I've been forced to admit that I really don't have a better answer.

Thanks. I also don't think there are any definite answers, but it never hurts to keep looking. Maybe that's what faith is about.

And here's another possibility about the vivid memories, at least for me: Maybe, deep down, I don't want to let go of the memory. Mind you, it's not because I really enjoy remembering or thinking about any of those incidents, but I hold on to the memories to say: "Look here! This is what I've been through, and I made it out all right! You can too!"
This is, I think, what I mean to say about changing a curse to a blessing. It's like the saying (which is not always true): "What doesn't kill me just makes me stronger." (Sometimes, however, it doesn't work that way.)