The One With The Ghost, Part One

One of the questions I get asked repeatedly is if I’ve ever been in a “haunted house”. The short answer is yes, but it’s more complicated than that. I believe that spirits can reside in a house but that doesn’t make it “haunted”. Your grandma or mom or great uncle who loved you to pieces might stop by a lot and watch over you. That’s the good kind of “haunting”. Unfortunately I have experienced the other kind on three separate occasions over the 10+ years I’ve been doing this job. I don’t know why I feel it, but I do and in the story I’m about to tell my clients also felt the same exact thing without any of us saying a word. It was an extreme case of what felt like bad bad bad something pushing us out out out of the house.

First of all, this house had a “morning room”, which lets just face it, made it creepy from the jump. But when I walked in it was like someone had sucked all the joy out of me. A dark pressure on my shoulders. A feeling of dread and seriously bad anxiety. I was standing there in the morning room feeling all kinds of awful when my clients walked in. Didn’t want to sound like a lunatic so I said nothing. We walked around the first floor and even though the house was super pretty and actually quite magnificent we found ourselves all standing in the kitchen looking at the door to the basement and NO ONE would open it. Not one of us would touch the doorknob to even open the door but it was inexplicable. We decided to move on but we’re collectively pretty damn freaked. One of the points of realization came when stepped into the addition “wing” on the West side of the house. As soon as I crossed the threshold into it it was like someone flipped a figurative light on. The heaviness disappeared. There was a back staircase from the addition that led to the original second floor story. Walked up the steps, stepped into the hallway and BOOM. Dread, awfulness, heaviness, sadness, anger, ANXIETY. It was so overwhelming. Walked around upstairs, down these weird short hallways and came to the door of one of the bedrooms and holy crapola you couldn’t have paid any of us to step into that room. It was like neon flashing lights screaming GET OUT. So we sure as hell did. Left quickly right then.

Standing outside in the driveway looking up at the house. We find ourselves all looking at one window. I looked at my clients and they looked at me and we both basically at the same time said “I feel like someone is going appear at the window”. We both left in our separate cars. It took me until I got to a red light about 3 blocks away before I felt the heaviness and dread leave me. To this day I won’t drive on that street because I’m scared that spirit will remember me and follow me. Seriously.

So was I crazy? Wanted to find out. I went home and googled the address. The man who had spent his entire life there had died in the upstairs bedroom. He was somewhat well known for some business he owned so there was an article about him when he passed. A young boy had an accident in the 1930’s in the basement playing with ropes. He strangled and died and the mother apparently went crazy. So yeah, the two areas we couldn’t bring ourselves to enter were where both of them died.

So are there such things as haunted houses? After that experience you can’t convince me otherwise.