This Haunted Life: An Anonymous Reader’s Story

I have a special Halloween treat to share with you today! An anonymous newsletter reader sent me an account of his family’s ghostly encounters, mainly centering on an older home where he and his wife lived. Names and places have been altered or redacted to preserve the family’s anonymity, but the accounts are all true. Enjoy!

In the early 1990s, before we were married and had kids, my wife Veronica and I lived in a Civil War-era house in [redacted], NY, near the Genesee River. Veronica and her family had lived there for a time when she was in high school, and her father later rented the house as a location for his repair business. We rented the back part of the house.

Veronica was no stranger to the paranormal. She had moved around a lot as a child and had lived in several haunted locations. She warned me this house was haunted when we moved in, but I was skeptical. She insisted it was, though she wasn’t frightened. In fact, she looked forward to moving back into the house.

The first thing I noticed was a series of odd smells. Sometimes, I smelled cigar smoke or rose perfume with no explanation. I shook it off… until the sounds started.

The only working bathroom was in the oldest part of the house on the first floor, across the hall from what was originally the parlor. In the bathroom with the door partly open, I heard the muffled sounds of china clinking, the murmur of conversation, and tinny music from an old radio or phonograph. It sounded like a tea party, but by the time I exited the bathroom and opened the parlor door, the sound had disappeared.

I told Veronica what I had heard, and she said it happened a lot. This phenomenon was more like a “residual haunting” — a replaying of past events — and always originated in the old parlor. The room had a wide-planked wood floor covered in layers of enamel paint that caused the room to echo. Faint sounds always seemed louder in that room, but oddly, the phantom sounds didn’t echo the same way.

The central part of the house predated the Civil War, but many additions had been built onto it over the years, and the layout was unusual. The second floor had “railroad rooms” with no central hallway. You would enter the first room, which had a door to the next room, and that room had a door to another. You had a clear shot from room to room if all the doors were open. (If memory serves, there were four rooms like this.) The first floor had finished interior walls, but the upstairs had bare rafters with names carved on them and dates written in very old cursive script. When Veronica lived in the house as a teenager, she met an older woman who had also lived there. This woman remembered her own grandmother telling her that the upstairs had been used as a hospital ward during the Civil War. Her grandmother recalled hauling water from the Genesee River for the soldiers housed there.

Given what I had already experienced there and what we had learned, I was starting to understand the house’s activity, but I wasn’t prepared for the kids.

There were child spirits in the house, a boy and a girl, that we could sometimes hear running and laughing upstairs. The clatter would move straight through the railroad rooms, sounding exactly like barefoot children running on a wooden floor. Sometimes, when it got too distracting, we would tell them to go play somewhere else, and it would stop.

Veronica warned me to reprimand the spirit kids if things disappeared. They sometimes took small objects like hair barrettes, but they really liked keys. Again, I was initially skeptical. One day, Veronica was running late and frantically looking for her keys. I tried to help look, but we couldn’t find them anywhere. She swore she had just put them down in the kitchen and was really frustrated. We had a large table in the kitchen with nothing but a butter dish on it. She said in exasperation, “The kids must have taken them,” and asked me to go to the other room. I went and stood in the doorway of the office, just off the kitchen. She turned her back to the kitchen table, between the table and me, and shouted like she was scolding a child, “I’m late, and I don’t have time for this! Put the keys back NOW!” She waited about two seconds and then turned around to see that her keys had suddenly appeared on the table. She grabbed them and said, “I gotta go. Love you!” I just stood there in shock. The keys had NOT been on the table, and nothing had moved in the room. Those keys had appeared out of thin air.

I don’t think we heard them for a few weeks after that.

I realized that we were never really alone in that house. The longer we were there, the more comfortable the spirits became with us. I was working part-time and taking
college classes then, and studying was difficult because there was a constant presence in the room, along with noises and creaks and unseen entities walking across the floor.

One evening, we were watching TV when something in the dark hallway caught our eyes. Whatever it was, it seemed to reflect the light from the living room. Looking more closely into the hallway, we both saw a balding man of medium build wearing round wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a light-colored, long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up and pleated old-fashioned work pants with a belt. After the initial shock, when we refocused on the area, he had disappeared. Veronica said that her family had seen him from time to time in the past and called the spirit “John.” He always carried an air of sadness about him that we both felt when we saw him that night.

The laundry room was larger than most and had probably been the kitchen of the original house. We decided to paint it bright white. I was alone in the house while I was painting, but it felt like I had several people watching who seemed happy about the change. I mentioned this to Veronica, who recounted that, as a kid, everyone in her family felt the same way at Christmas. When they had the tree up and all the lights on and played Christmas music, she said the house felt cozy, like it was lit up inside, but you couldn’t see any visible difference. You just felt it.

Again, we never felt alone in the house. Sometimes, that was fine; other times, the feeling would set our nerves on edge. Overall, the entities there were just people and not that bad. At least they would leave you alone when you asked. I worked part-time as a consultant, and sometimes, when working in the office off the kitchen, I felt like I was being watched by several curious people who were trying to see what I was doing. It got so distracting that I finally said aloud, “I know you’re curious, but I really need to focus. Can you give me some space for a bit?” In an instant, the feeling in the room changed, and I felt alone and better able to continue my work.

There were only a few “darker” areas in the house where we would feel uncomfortable. The upstairs bedroom had a small closet that was just deep enough to hang clothes in. When opening its door, I would get a chill down my spine for no particular reason. Even stranger, Veronica’s dog (a Siberian Husky) would sit in front of that closet, cock his head and whine, then eventually walk away. That dog never barked or made much sound unless there was a person with bad vibes or he sensed a threat. He would low-growl then and put himself between you and the “threat.” He would do this with that closet door. When we first moved into the house, we used this room as a bedroom, but we never used the closet.

Across the hall from the bedroom was a disused bathroom. It had an old clawfoot tub, an old-fashioned sink with separate spigots for hot and cold water, and a torn-up floor with cracked linoleum. You really felt like you wanted to leave if you spent even a few minutes in that room. We only ever used the toilet there, and only if it was absolutely necessary.

In the front of the house, sharing a wall with the bathroom, was a tiny room without a door. I had initially used it to study, but after feeling like I was being watched (and not in the familiar, benign way of the rest of the house), I finally moved elsewhere. Veronica’s family had tried to use it as a small TV room for the kids when she was growing up, but they never felt relaxed there.

A company eventually bought all the farmland attached to the house and the surrounding barns. The house sat empty for a time, but more outbuildings were taken down each year, probably for liability issues. The house was finally demolished after all the barns were gone. I’ve been back there with my oldest son, who loves archaeology and has helped out on several digs. There was a large cistern under the kitchen that we used that had been filled with house debris and other in-fill. I pointed out the outline of the house and where specific rooms had been amidst the waist-high weeds. We found many small fragments of cut-glass vases and transferware plates, as well as fragments I recognized as parts of the wood siding and interior walls. It was strange to walk around the empty site of a place we once lived, especially a place with so much history.

The question I still have: Now that the house is gone, where do all the spirits that once lived there go?

A huge thank you to Anonymous Reader!

We’ve almost reached the end of our Spooky Season celebration, but I have one last post coming on Halloween. OKAY, BYE! 🖤

2 responses to “This Haunted Life: An Anonymous Reader’s Story”

  1. Tanz Avatar
    Tanz

    That was such an amazing tale!
    Such an active location 👻
    Thank you for the treat🎃
    Where do the spirits go indeed?🤔
    I’ve always found it interesting that such a small space in a house can feel so incredibly different than other spaces in the same house.

    1. Sarah L. Crowder Avatar

      I’m so glad you enjoyed it, Tanz! I think sometimes small places in homes with active hauntings can become a kind of bucket, like a pooling-up area for energy, but I don’t have any proof. Just a theory.

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