Tuesday Boosday: The Haunted Rental House

This is where it all began. Happy Halloween!

My family briefly lived in a haunted house when I was about 4 years old. I think I was 3 when we moved in, then turned 4 just before we moved out, but I could be wrong about the timing. (Mom was also pretty sure this was correct.)

The house didn't look gloomy or spooky from the outside. Nestled between a couple of fields of crops, it was an unassuming small white farmhouse with a big yard. (We didn't tend the farm. The house was a rental alongside the working farm property.)

The house was a slightly odd shape, as rooms had been added to the original structure over the years. It was probably 80 years old then, give or take a few years. There was only one finished room upstairs, which adjoined an unfinished attic space. As we were moving in, my dad went to poke around in the unfinished area, intending to store some flattened moving boxes there. He noticed a large picture frame on the floor in the corner. It was face down, so he picked it up and saw that it was a large, very old photograph of two little boys. He guessed it was from the mid to late 1800s from their clothing, but it wasn't dated, so he couldn't be sure. He has always said that the boys looked kind of mischievous to him, and as I mentioned in a previous story, my parents were both history buffs, so he thought it was a cool thing to find. He propped it up against the wall, intending to take it downstairs to hang it up, but in the chaos of the move, he forgot about it.

There were noises from the upstairs area from the first day we lived there. At first, my parents thought that maybe a squirrel had gotten into the attic or rats were in the walls. That wouldn't have been unusual in a rural area, but there were no droppings and no signs of animal habitation. The scratching and scraping sounds happened almost every day. Eventually, they started to hear footsteps, too -- especially going up and down the steep stairs. My mom told me recently that it always seemed like someone was upstairs. It felt like there was always a presence in the house.

The bedrooms were all downstairs. My dad used the small finished room upstairs as his leather workshop. None of our pets would go upstairs. I didn't like to go upstairs, either, and I had always loved to play in my dad's work area. Dad said it always felt like someone was watching him in that room. He just tried to listen to the radio and ignore it.

I don't have a lot of memories of that house, as I was so young, so most of this story is admittedly secondhand. But I do remember my bedroom there. I hated that room. I didn't like to play in there. It had a heaviness and a persistent gloom, even in the daytime. I remember that the closet had mushrooms growing in it -- a detail my mom recently confirmed. I had a nightlight that looked like a Victorian streetlamp, and I would see dark shadow figures passing in front of it at night. These weren't shadows being cast on the walls or the floor but shadows passing in front of the nightlight, blocking its glow. I would run out and sleep in the living room, curled up in the afghan on the sofa. It happened so often that my parents stopped putting me to bed in my actual bed and just made up a bed for me on the couch.

My bedroom was directly under the unfinished attic.

The lights flickered all the time. My dad got an electrician to come out, but they didn't find anything wrong. Sometimes, lights would turn on or off at the switch, too -- especially in my dad's workshop upstairs. He initially thought he was just being absent-minded, but it happened too frequently. He was in his mid-20s; he had no memory issues. He would sometimes notice the light was on upstairs when he passed by the stairs in the evening... when he hadn't been in the room all day.

Doors also opened and closed on their own. Neither my mom nor my dad would generally see it happen, but Dad actually saw it a few times. There was an unusual built-in pantry in the kitchen, a kind of shallow cabinet with a door that would frequently swing open the minute someone left the room. It was an old farmhouse, so my dad dismissed it at first, assuming the doors weren't hung evenly. He finally got out a level and checked both the cabinets and the doors between rooms. They were level.

The interior of the house was just gloomy. I think it weighed on my parents. There were the constant sounds, the flickering lights, the doors opening and closing. It made them feel crazy or kind of tormented. I'm sure they mentioned it to their closest friends, but it wasn't the kind of thing folks were comfortable talking about back then. People wouldn't be inclined to believe you.

Things came to a head one evening when my parents were sitting at the kitchen table. I was staying with my grandparents, and I think they were about to go to a party. They were discussing all the weird things happening in the house when they heard a huge thump upstairs, like something large being knocked over. My dad has always said it sounded like a body hitting the ground. Then they heard a grating sound like something heavy being dragged across the floor. There was nothing that substantial in the attic area, just a few small boxes and some cardboard.

My mom looked at my dad and said, "I'm not going up there. No way."

"Me, neither!" My dad replied. "Let's get the hell out of here!"

So they ran out of the house and stayed with friends that night. When they came back the next day -- in the daylight -- my dad got up the courage to check his workshop and the attic area. Nothing was out of place. Nothing had been moved or disturbed. Nothing up there could have made those sounds, and there was no sign that anyone had been inside the house.

My parents had already decided to move out, so we only lived there for a few more weeks. When they were packing up, about a week before our last day in the house, my dad went up to get the flattened moving boxes he'd left in the attic storage area. He noticed the Victorian photograph he'd forgotten about, still propped up against the wall. He took another long look at it. The boys didn't look mischievous to him anymore. He said they looked spiteful -- malevolent, even. The picture gave him the creeps. He put it face down on the floor again, just as he had found it.

Nothing else happened that final week in the house. No sounds, no flickering lights, no moving doors.

Was it a coincidence? Was it really connected to the photo in the attic? We'll never know.

Like all family folklore, some of the details of this time may have blurred or been exaggerated over the years, but both of my parents' accounts agree on the main point: Something was going on in that house that they couldn't explain. Living there made my skeptical parents into believers and set me up for a lifelong fascination with the paranormal.

That little farmhouse was where it all began.

We've come to the end of the 13 Posts of Halloween. I hope you've enjoyed this Spooky Season series! Bombastic Frippery will return to its typical schedule (and subject matter) next week. Thank you so much for reading!

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