We tended to ignore what was happening around us, and we were never allowed to talk about it, so what little bit I know about the very early days of the house is what little my mother did say.
When they first moved, it was my grandparents and their four kids who would have been late teens-early 20's at the time.
My aunt was mentally ill; I mean, there is no sugar coating it.
Today
she'd probably be labeled a sociopath; she lied; she tortured animals;
she wet the bed; she started fights; it was always about her, and the
blunt truth is I can remember her laughing as she served us a meal that
she had poisoned; luckily all we experienced was severe vomiting, so I
think in some way she triggered whatever was on that property.
I have no timeline and no cohesive story—just bits and pieces of what my mom would say.
It is absolutely no joke: we were forbidden to acknowledge the happenings or talk about them, or we would get a switch.
We also weren't allowed to talk about my aunt and what she did, or again, we got a switch.
Hey, it was the 70s; what can you say?
I don't know how soon things started happening.
My mom said that the kitchen floors and walls would run with blood.
They would mop and clean, come back in ten minutes later, and everything was bloody again.
The basement door, which happened to be in my uncle's bedroom, would fly open, and you'd hear chains and something heavy walking up and down the steps.
My mom was ironing in the living room one day and the TV clicked off. Now this is somewhere in the 1960's, so there were no remote controls, the TV turned off, the basement door slammed open, and the footsteps/chains started walking up the hall. She abandoned ship and hauled her butt outside until her parents came home.
My mom wasn't a nervous child; she would have been in her late teens at this time, and honestly, well, she and her two sisters weren't afraid to beat a man up who was threatening a wimpy boyfriend, so she wasn't a coward.
My mom was in bed one night; her dad's bedroom was across the hall
with the bathroom tucked in a corner between the two rooms. She heard
him yell, "Well, shit, Sharpy, just don't talk to me,” so she hollers
out the closed bedroom door, "Daddy, who are you talking to?” Just as
she asked him that the thing my grandpa thought was her calmly walked
into the bathroom mirror.
He said, "Sharpy, for the last ten minutes
you've been walking up and down this hallway, and I've been calling your
name, and you've been ignoring me.”
She told him that she'd been in
bed the whole time, and then he told her, Well, whatever it was looked
just like you, and then it walked into the mirror.
That's the only story she would tell me.
The house burned in 1967, but they rebuilt using the old foundation, that is, they tore down the burned part and put the new house on top of the old basement.
I always thought that a fire cleansed a haunted house, but maybe because they did reuse the old basement, it continued.
It was not as active, but it still had activity.
This is where it becomes my story.
My mom and my aunt both divorced and moved back in with their parents along with their kids, so ultimately there were four adults and three kids living in the house.
