Haunted House

When I was about eleven or twelve, my family moved into a new house. The house was horrible. It was as though the previous owners took a sledge hammer to the walls before being forced out of the house. That’s not a surprise as the house was foreclosed and the previous owners were in jail with drug dealing charges.


As my dad is a carpenter, he started completely stripping the house, room by room, and repairing it. There were a lot of strange occurrences in that house. Kitchen supplies would disappear. Locked doors would unlock and open on their own. You have no idea how many times we would leave the house, make sure the doors were locked, yet come home with the front door wide open and our little doggy standing in the doorway, wagging his tail.


One morning, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I woke to a phone call. My mother called me from work and told me about a strange feeling she had that morning. It was as though someone was watching her. I assumed she was slowly descending into crazyville and took her concerns with a grain of salt. Our house wasn’t haunted! Mom was crazy!


I dressed and walked downstairs, and as I sat in the living room to eat my breakfast, I heard the sound of someone walking. It was an eerie sound of slow, masculine footsteps coming from the foyer of the house. A chill ran down my back. It had to be mom’s paranoia that made me fear those footsteps. It was probably dad home early from work. I stood to go investigate, but when I ran to the foyer, no one was there. I ran to the window and looked out into the empty driveway. No one, but me, was home. Yet, I still heard the footsteps, now in the living room, walking toward the steps to the basement. Needless to say, I grabbed my purse and was out the door within seconds.


The next day, I brushed off my encounter with the unknown as a case of temporary insanity. I wasn’t ready to believe in what so many people don’t. My entire family had dinner plans and we left the house and went to my parents’ friends house. When we came home, we noticed something strange instantly. One of our cats was acting very, very strange. She wouldn’t look at us. Her face was always turned to one side, as though she didn’t want us to see her entire face. I put a few fingers under her chin and slowly moved her face to see her other side. I jumped back in horror. The entire side of her face was ripped open, and blood was seeping out. The skin was curled open, showing into the gash, all the way to the bone of her skull. And the oddest thing of all; there was a single sheet of blood-soaked paper towel right next to the cat. It was in my bedroom, on my desk. I always kept my room clean and I knew for a fact that there was no paper towel on my desk before I left the house.


It was possible that someone broke into the house and played a prank on my cat, but who and why? And why didn’t they steal anything? My mother was convinced it was the same thing that watched her the one morning and walked though the house completely unseen that one day. I didn’t argue with her about that.

Following that, a few more bizarre occurrences happened in the house, but eventually we all became used to it. So what about you guys, have you ever lived in a strange, possibly haunted house?