When I was a child, we lived in a very old house that my family believed was haunted. My paternal grandparents lived in this home first with my father and his brother.

This is a picture of the actual house.

When we lived in the house, I was very young. I can’t remember how many years we lived there, but I believe we lived there from the time I was born until I was five, and that’s when we moved. I was a typical scared little kid, scared of shadows and the dark, but even as a little kid I somehow sensed that our house was unusually creepy. It didn’t help that I had overheard grown-ups saying that a man had hung himself in the attic. The attic, by the way, had a door that was right by my parent’s bedroom.

Ironically, the house was really lovely inside. It had all the glorious woodwork, pocket doors, and hardwood floors that an 1800’s home possessed plus a beautiful fireplace in the living room. The downstairs consisted of the living room, dining room, kitchen and back room. The bedrooms were upstairs. I shared a room with my sister, Cindy, who was 2 years younger than me. Our room was at the top of the stairs to the left. The stairs began by the front door and went up and back towards the back of the house. At the top of the stairs to the right was an L shaped room with the largest part at the front of the house. This had been a sitting room or sewing room. It had large windows and window seats across the front. Then my parent’s room was to the side of that room. When our sister, Sharon, was born the sitting room became her nursery and our toy room.

Sometimes, in the evenings around the time my father would come home from work, we would hear the front door open and close, and footsteps into the living room. My mother would call out, “Honey?” and Cindy and I would run to greet our dad, but there was no one in the room. We would look around, look at each other, and my mother would always say, “Oh, that was just the house making noises.” She would go back to the kitchen where dinner was being prepared, and we would follow. But Cindy and I knew it was something other than house noises. This happened so often that my poor father was rarely greeted when he came home.

At night, I would often wake up to the sound of the stairs creaking loudly, which they did, as though someone was coming upstairs. I would tremble in fear, thinking that the ghost of the hanged man was coming to get me. I was too afraid to go to the door to see him, and instead pulled the covers over my head. I would listen very carefully to hear where his footsteps would go when he got to the top of the stairs, but there was always silence. One night I really had to pee, so after I heard the creaking, I got up and stood by my door. I thought, when it gets quiet I’ll run to the bathroom. When the noise stopped, I carefully edged out into the hallway, looking down the stairs, holding my breath, holding my pee. All I saw was blackness and the blackness held substance and I felt frozen in fear and I didn’t know if I could take a single step. Then I heard a very deep voice, “What are you doing up, Squirt?” It was my father on the stairs. He scared me so badly I can’t say for sure if I made it to the bathroom in time.

So, when we lived there, weird things happened. Often, many of our belongings got moved around. Sometimes we would hear loud noises coming from a room and cautiously walk into that room only to see that nothing had happened and things were right where they were supposed to be.

Years later, my grandmother chose to tell me some stories about things that happened at the house when she lived there. I can only remember a couple of stories she told. She said one night, in the middle of the night, she heard a loud clanging. She said it sounded like someone had thrown a metal wash tub down the stairs. Grandpa was gone, but my dad was there and so was his brother and they were teenagers and strong young men. Grandma said that my dad grabbed the poker from the fireplace and they stood in the living room, waiting for whatever it was to come out and show itself. But it never did show itself. The other story she told me was about a time when they were in the living room and they all heard a horrible crash in the kitchen. It sounded like a cabinet had fallen from the wall. They ran into the kitchen to see what happened, but could not see a single thing out of place. Grandma told me that the ghost loved to make loud noises, to make his presence known. She had never been afraid of him. In fact, they called him George. Just thinking of that name still gives me the shivers to this day. When we moved, my sister Cindy, who was 3 at the time, told me that she told George he could come with us to our new house. I just about fainted. And there were some weird things that happened at our new home, too, but lets not get into that right now.

I suppose some might not think our haunted house was much of a big deal. But there were supernatural occurrences that happened regularly when we lived there. Things happened that could not be explained, and there were many witnesses to corroborate stories. And these events went on for many, many years. I’m an older woman now, and if you asked me if I believe in ghosts, I would tell you no. I think it’s just too frightening to think about the spirits of the dead engaging with those of us who are alive. If someone is going to interact with me, by golly I want them to have a body I can see. And it doesn’t go along with my beliefs, either. I believe that when you die, you meet God and He determines where your next home will be. But I can’t deny what happened at our house. None of us did. Except my mother, that is. She always brushed off the events and tried to come up with an explanation.

I haven’t thought about George in a very long time. I can’t say that has been a bad thing. I don’t ever want to meet up with him again.

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