Jaye and I spent our first three years together in a cramped little apartment in the congested, rundown city of Fall River, Massachusetts. Although accused ax murderess Lizzy Borden having lived less than a mile away back in 1892 had originally been an interesting topic for conversation, the less-than-perfect conditions of the city weighed increasingly on our annoyance level as time passed. Loud neighbors, constant traffic, and frequent police sirens all contributed to us ultimately making the decision to find a new place to live. Convinced we were destined to spend the rest of our lives together, we decided to leave Fall River behind us in pursuit of the American dream.
We began looking for a property to buy as soon as the last of the winter snow left the ground in the spring of 2010. Finding houses in our price range in nearby towns proved futile, so we decided to expand out geographical options, which eventually led us to hunt for a house on Cape Cod. There, houses were often on or near lakes and the seashore, and neighbors weren’t piled on top of one another. The houses also tended to be older—there’s very little new construction on Cape Cod except on large, private estates—and at the time we felt that a vintage home would possess more character. Little did we know just how much character.
The first few houses we looked at on Cape Cod had been on the market for a long while. More often than not, the homes were in need of too many repairs for our liking. One house, which was located on Fearing Street (no joke!), had some charm but felt extremely “heavy” inside. There were crucifixes placed throughout the house, and the basement made us feel claustrophobic and trapped. Very old furniture was all still in place, although it was obvious no one had lived in the house for a long time. I walked into one room in particular and immediately needed to leave the house. I cannot explain fully what I felt, but it was as if someone was still there, as if I had walked into a place where I was positively not welcome. Jaye had the same impression. Even our real estate agent, a sensible guy who didn’t seem at all the type to believe in woo-woo stuff, admitted to experiencing an odd sense of “presence” and expressed relief once we exited the house.
Purely by accident, after taking a random drive down a winding road, we found a cute little house on a corner lot at the crossroads of two dirt roads, well within the view of a huge, beautiful lake. The interior of the house turned out to be every bit as charming as the outside, and after only one visit, we decided to make a move on the place. Other people were clearly interested in the property (we visited during an open house), so we wasted no time in making our best offer. The house came “as is,” but the issues were all cosmetic things Jaye and I felt we could manage ourselves over time. Unlike most of the other homes in the area, this one had only been on the market for six day when we made our offer. The seller accepted our offer the next day, the speed of which might have been our first clue regarding what we were in for later. With the number of people expressing extreme interest at the open house, there could have easily been a bidding war for the place. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that the seller wanted to get out fast.
We moved into our new home on October 1, 2010.
For the first few weeks, everything seemed normal. We were so busy unpacking boxes and cleaning, I think a freight train could have gone through the house and we wouldn’t have noticed. The first odd occurrence I can remember is the night I came up the stairs from the main living level toward the bedrooms and smelled a distinct odor of cigarette smoke. Neither Jaye nor I were smoking tobacco at that point. I hadn’t smoked anything for years save the occasional clove cigarette, and Jaye had quit smoking regular cigarettes two years earlier. The closest thing to a cigarette we’d smoked after that were electronic (vapor) cigarettes, which don’t leave any smell in the air or clinging to fabric, and even those we’d packed up several weeks before moving. Even so, I didn’t think too much about it. The new house had been closed up for over a month when we’d moved in, so maybe the scent had been locked up inside from the previous occupants.
Excited about our new place at Halloween and finally having a large property to decorate, we went all out: a graveyard on the lawn, purple and orange lights in the windows, cobwebs on the back porch, and a huge bowl of candy for trick-or-treaters. We didn’t realize at that time that the majority of the neighborhood kids were as seasonal as the boaters and beach-goers.
By eight o’clock on that first Halloween night, we still hadn’t had a single knock at the brightly lit, overly decorated door. Disappointed, we settled into watching a movie. Not long afterward, we heard at least two sets of feet running up our wooden steps outside. We’d left the porch light on and figured that we had attracted some stragglers, so I grabbed the candy bowl and opened the door. No one was there. I stepped out onto the porch and looked around. Nothing. No one had actually knocked at the door and we don’t have a doorbell, but we’d clearly heard footsteps approach yet none retreat. Strange, like the smell of cigarette smoke in the house, but not something either of us fretted over too much.
Nothing else happened until the end of November. For some reason, the events in this house always seem to occur in the latter half of the month. From November 19, 2010 to December 1, 2010, we experienced more footsteps, sometimes outside, sometimes in the kitchen. On occasion, we heard the laughter of children and small, quick footsteps running up the stairs from the living room to the bedroom level. Our cats began to act strangely spooked, seeming to see things that weren’t visible to us. Soon after, Jaye had an experience in the kitchen pantry which mirrored one I would have months later.
We have a large, walk-in pantry in our kitchen. One afternoon while Jaye prepared dinner, he opened the door and stepped into the pantry. A hand grabbed him on the left shoulder, and thinking I had come home from work early, he spun around only to find no one there. A few months later, I experienced a similar event. On the opposite side of the kitchen from the pantry is the door that leads to the basement stairs. There’s a landing at the top of those stairs and built-in shelving on the walls. We usually keep the fancy nozzle for the garden hose on one of those shelves, and I opened the basement door to fetch it. I hadn’t realized that Jaye had used the nozzle earlier in the day to water the garden, and he’d left the nozzle on the edge of the kitchen sink to drain before putting it back in its usual place. As I looked at the shelves, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and when I turned around, Jaye was standing near the kitchen door and well out of reach of me. Over my shoulder, I saw the hose nozzle on the sink, so it was almost as if an unseen visitor had tapped me to alert me to that fact.
Additional peculiar events happened throughout the winter and into the spring and summer of 2011. We kept a log of our experiences, and we did notice a continuing pattern where there seemed to be a higher level of unusual activity during the second half of each month, and in particular during the final week. Nothing outrageous, and as time wore on we became accustomed to the small disturbances. That all changed in late September 2011.
After drinking like we normally do on Friday nights and watching a movie in the living room, we headed upstairs to bed. Pretty drunk, we crashed quickly and slept through the night. In the morning, while Jaye was making coffee and breakfast, I opened the door to our sunroom, which is behind an old, wooden exterior door connecting the living room. We had three wooden dining room chairs with cushioned and upholstered seats in the sunroom. One of these chairs, which had been in the northeast corner of the room and piled with books, had moved to the south side of the room, centered perfectly in from of the three side-by-side windows. The books had been moved to the writing desk, still in a neat pile. The seat of the chair was soaked with water, and there was a puddle of water on the floor surrounding the chair. It had rained the night before, but there were no leaks anywhere in the room, and the windows were all closed. After cleaning up the mess, removing the seat from the chair to dry in the bathtub, and returning the chair to its proper place in the corner, we left the house to run some errands.
Upon our return, the chair had moved again, this time to the exact center of a small rug in the middle of the sunroom, tipped over forward and lying face down. Given the distance from the corner and the perfect, exact placement of the upended chair, there is no way that it simply fell over into that position. Thinking about the night before, it dawned on me that we had watched “The Rite” with Anthony Hopkins, a movie about exorcists. We had to wonder whether that movie had disturbed our resident guests.
The house has been inordinately quiet since that event, but we’re not assuming that was the last of it.
How about you? Have you ever experienced something in your home that you can’t explain? If you knew a house had a scary history (e.g., the awesome new TV show “American Horror Story”), would you shy away from buying the house or would that gruesome history attract you to it even more?
Happy Halloween!
–Reno MacLeod
No really, nothing at all 😮
I probably wouldn´t shy for buying it if that was what I was looking for, but how long will I last there it´s another question 😯
Thank you for your Halloween posts 😎
No one mentioned anything about the additional residents to us when we were looking to buy, but I think we would have bought it anyway. I’ve always had a touch of ghost magnetism to me.
Happy Halloween!
Fifteen years ago, I lived in the historic district of Salisbury in a house that had been converted into 4 apartments. I had one of the 2 apartments on the 2nd floor and frequently heard noises above me in the attic as well as running footsteps, like those of a child, on the stairs outside my door. The cats would frequently stare at the door, the ceiling, or the wall and start growling for no apparent reason.
There was never anybody there when I checked.
After about 6 months, I noticed several times that the dish towel or a pot holder would be on the floor in the kitchen when I got up in the morning. Weird, but I really didn’t think anything of it… until the morning I got up and the kitchen curtains were open (they were definitely closed when I went to bed, and the window was still closed and locked) and ALL of the pot holders and dish towels had been rearranged.
After that incident, I was awakened several times when the overhead light in my bedroom would suddenly turn on (no way the cats could reach the switch and they were always on the bed next to me when it happened), and the pot holders would be rearranged or the kitchen chair would be shifted from one end of the table to the other.
I lived there for almost 8 years and those shenanigans persisted the entire time. I eventually got a dog and he too would stare at the door or wall occasionally and start growling for no reason.
Creepy.
It’s a strange feeling, isn’t it? You see and hear the stuff, but your brain is trying so hard to rationalize it as anything but what it is. I’ve accepted it now.
I lived in an apartment before I met Jaye where the stove burners would come on by themselves!
My husband loves American Horror Story. I think my brain would explode if I watched it though I do get a plot recap. 🙂 No ghost experiences but I do like walking through old cemeteries .
I adore old cemeteries. It’s a hobby of mine to walk through and take artistic photos of the stones. I suspect it might be where a few of my experiences might have followed me home from.
American Horror Story is great! You’re not the only one I have heard who won’t watch it though. It is very intense. 😮
I am not the one. My childhood home was haunted. Never again. NEVER. I would pay a mortgage on an empty house.
While searching for our current home we looked at some older homes. Just as you, 1 house in particular spooked me out. The realtor was reeling off the advantages to this house, and I was heading for the door and our car. I left my husband standing outside trying to explain that I wasnt really crazy.
Thanks and I always enjoy your(&Jaye’s) posts. You guys seem to have the perfect personalities for this house. 😈
Have lots of fun!
We have talked about getting the house blessed, but only if things escalated to a point we felt in danger. Most of the time I feel like the house has a guardian watching over it and us.
One place I lived was haunted and ‘it’ hated my housemate. When ‘it’ started bugging me, I got rid of it. Some positive thinking and a lot of white sage did the trick.
The house I am in now has something. It only bothers me on occasion – I have white sage at the ready.
My house growing up was haunted. Saw something and to this day I refuse to go in the back yard at night.
White sage? I’ll have to keep that in mind. Do you just burn it, or is there a ritual?
It amazes me how many people have experienced hauntings, in yet most people still don’t believe.
This is the strangest thing. I left a comment about watching Anderson today. I mentioned they were investigating haunted houses and one of the mediums recommended the use of white sage. That comment seems to have disappeared at the same time the post started acting strange. Let’s see if this one stays put.
You can buy bundled white sage in many “new age” shops, even online on eBay. They are sometimes called smudge sticks. They cleanse an area, dispelling negative energy. In all honesty, Reno, if your guests aren’t harming you or threatening in any way, I’d welcome them! They obviously love the house and seem to have a helpful side, lol. Burn the sage & invite positive energy into the space. You need to walk thru the house and cleanse each room. Hope that helps! You guys can email me if ya want and I’ll look more up for you. If you have trouble finding sage bundles, there is a shop locally that carries it. 🙂 Happy Halloween and thanks for the wonderful posts this weekend!!
seritzko at verizon dot net
Call me a scaredy cat but I don’t think I could live in a house haunted by anything more than Casper the friendly ghost. And that’s assuming I’d know about who the ghost was and that it was harmless.
Thanks for an entertaining series of posts guys 😀
Glad you liked it! Every time something happens, even though it’s usually small stuff, it does leave me jumpy for a few days!
When I was about 12, my mom had moved us into an apartment that was one of the nicer ones we had ever lived in and was also located in a nice, quiet suburban neighborhood.
My little brother and I shared a room and we had our own TV. Well, whenever it was off, sometimes out of the corner of my eye, I would catch a reflection on the TV of what looked like someone walking by. Of course, there would be nothing there when I looked at the TV straight on. At first I brushed it off, thinking I was just imagining things. But the first time my brother mentioned seeing the same thing, I got a little spooked. So I decided to move the TV to another spot in the room, thinking maybe it was a trick of light and the TV just happened to be in an unique spot. But nope, whenever I was reading or doing homework, once again my peripheral vision saw what looked like someone walking through my room. When I told my mom about it, she blew it off; told me I was just seeing things. I didn’t always see this reflection and no other spooky things ever happened, so I did my best to chalk it up to my imagination. It wasn’t until a few months later, I went into my mom’s room to borrow something, and saw that she had bunches of garlic hanging in various places in her room. Garlic!! She refused to tell me why, so I went to my grandmother about it. She said that she had told my mother to do this to keep the evil spirits out (but they never would tell me what my mom was experiencing to prompt her to put up the garlic in the first place). So I then told her about the “spirit” I occasionally saw walking through my room (and my brother backed me up on this since he saw it too). This freaked her out enough to alarm my mother because we ended up moving to another apartment complex at the end of the lease.
What’s funny is that until this day whenever I happen to bring it up, my mother rolls her eyes, insists I was just seeing things but also refuses to discuss the garlic she had in her room. :afraid:
Maybe the garlic was a little dose of “just in case”? That is a creepy experience though! I see shadows out the corner of my eye, but like you’ve said, when you look right at them they vanish. Tricky things. Happy Halloween!
I live in an old house, but I don’t think it’s haunted, it’s just old. Do you and Jaye like your house? Are you planning on staying there?
Not all old houses have souls attached, which is good for those who don’t like ghosts! A friend of mine blesses people’s homes and says a high number of them are new owners just taking a precaution. We’re going to stay. We love the house, and so far we don’t feel in any danger. Thanks for stopping by!
I don’t know if I could live in a house that was haunted. When in New Orleans we did ghost/vamp tours and at the beginning of the tour I felt a heavy presense–it was tense and just–hard to explain. I wasn’t the only one who felt it. The hotel we stayed in is supposed to be one of the most haunted I do believe. The only experience I had IN the hotel was hearing a cat meow. I heard it very clearly in the upstairs of the room and someone heard it just as clear downstairs. Now–there were workers there so it might be able to be explained away. The same with the elevators that skipped my floor. lol It went from two to four and the numbers kept flickering. 😮
I’ve not experienced something obviously ghostly, but I believe that buildings absorb the emotions and energy of the people who’ve lived in it, even to the point of developing a personality. I’ve been in homes and buildings that just felt evil and others that, for no reason that I could discern, felt happy, good, comfortable, welcoming. Perhaps it’s feng shui or architectural dimensions or something, but it really feels like a personality. Or perhaps I’m just nuts, anything is possible LOL.
Your post just went strange and I had to do a couple of fixes. I wonder if someone is trying to tell you something Reno? 😮
You guys are very brave. I could never live in a house I knew was haunted.
BTW Reno and Jaye, I really appreciate all the hard work that went into these Halloween posts. I know how much time it must have taken and how tough it is to set aside your “writing time” to do something like this. Thank you SO much. All the regulars on the site appreciate you too. 😎
Our pleasure, Wave. 🙂 Today is the third anniversary of our first published collaboration (StarCrossed 1: Demon Tailz), so it was fun for us to share our celebration. :skoal:
Congrats! that is so cool! :):D
Here’s hoping you found a fun way to celebrate since those trick-or-treaters aren’t around to keep you occupied. :evilgrin:
Thanks for the post Reno, I have to say I am glad I’ve never experienced anything like you guys have!
I think most things can be explained away by natural phenom, and I think cats & dogs just act weird sometimes (I know mine have!)
That being said, I have friends who have experienced “weird” things w/o any good explanation.
One friend used to visit his buddies at an older movie house and told of strange things happening after hours. Kind of like some others have posted about kids laughter and footsteps.
Yikes! Very scary! I’ve never experienced anything paranormal but would be very leery of buying a house with a scary history.
Never had a haunting at a house, but my place of work, a go kart track, has had it’s moments. Sometimes one of the karts in the pit just starts rolling backwards for no reason. We always joke it’s the previous owner of the track trying to tell us the kart needs to be looked at by a mechanic. ^_^
We were the first tenants in our apartment, so obviously there are no ghost to haunt us. Otherwise, I would like one like yours – friendly and benevolent. 🙂
When my grandfather died, I could have sworn I heard his footsteps in his flat or saw him in my peripheral vision. Though that can also be explain by the profound loss I felt at the time. Still, while I’m generally quite cynical, I try to never forget that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. 😉
Thanks Reno and Jaye for the great posts!!
I don’t have any haunting stories myself. Sounds a bit like having an extra roomate- mess, movie tastes and all.
One more opinion to be heard from, along with the cats’!