when it comes to being haunted

Parker Manor

I used to live in a haunted house.  

That's what you've come here for, yes?  To hear about it?  To see if I, purveyor of all things true and not one to fabricate a story (less they be in my novels, natch), could maybe make you believe?  The lovely thing is that you don't necessarily have to take my word for it, either.  You can ask a handful of my friends what their own experiences were like, all three of them quite similar, none of the three ever having spoken to the others.  And if you don't believe in ghosts, or spirits, or anything from "beyond," well, I can't force you to.  I will say that had you experienced any of this, you'd be hard pressed not believe.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  

It is Halloween today, after all, and you want some stories.  Let's begin.

The first time I entered the Manor, it was mid April and snowy.  My realtor, Kieran, let me in the building and took a phone call outside as I entered.  In hindsight, knowing what I know now, I feel like the house itself had something to do with that.  Maybe it could sense me coming and wanted to feel me out on its own?  Maybe it was a mutual understanding between the two of us.  What I do know is that I was flooded with memories from my childhood the instant I stepped inside.  Ask my mom and sister, who I later shared these memories with, if that's true.

As I moved through the foyer of the silent house, my mind raced back to being five or so years old and visiting the extended Parker family in Indiana for Thanksgiving.  It was the smell of the Manor... it was the feeling of these distant echoes of memory I had forgotten over time rushing through my ears.  As my solo tour continued and I moved outside to the backyard, a different set of senses were flooded.  This time, by memories of my grandmother on my mom's side.  Two great familial connections within minutes of eachother?  I took it as a sign and decided this was the house for me.  It had to be.

And it was; a little over a month later and I was moved in.

Now, the weird shit didn't start happening right away.  There was the leaking bathtub and the weird wiring in the basement ceiling that I took down.  The janky green walls and mismatched outlets and switches, not to mention the faceplates for all these providing a veritable pupu platter of designs.  It was about two weeks in, mid June, when things started.

I went to bed one night around 11 and got snuggled under the sheets.  After messing around on my phone for a while, I turned out the light and closed my eyes; within seconds there was a knocking on the front door.  Three quick, concise, knocks.  My blood froze, because I still had not installed the security system and I was pretty consistently panicked someone was going to break in.  I got up and went to my office at the front of the house, trying to look to the porch below to see if there was someone there.  After a minute or so, with no one visibly leaving, I went down the stairs and opened the front door.  No one there.

A couple nights later it happened again, this time around midnight.

A few nights later, it happened again.  This time around 10.

It was never the same time, and it was very infrequent.  Sometimes it would happen a couple days in a row, other times a week would go by.  Always the same three, quick knocks.  Always coming from the front door... never anybody there.  This was also when the box fan I placed in the hallway started rattling after I'd turn the light out at night.  No loose parts... never rattled when I was awake and moving around... only when the lights were out.  

And I ignored a lot of this.

There were things that creeped me out in the house, for sure.  I didn't like going in the guest room at the top of the stairs, and in particular I didn't like being near the closet door inside the room.  It was the only room in the house not outfitted with a ceiling light, and something about that always struck me as odd.  I also avoided the root cellar in the basement.  After two years of living there I never once stepped foot inside of it.  I'd show people that were visiting, but I never went in.

Sometimes when I was outside doing things in the yard, I'd get that prickly feeling on my neck like I was being watched.  A few times I would see the curtains move inside the house, knowing it wasn't the cats because they don't typically play with 'em.  But like I said, I ignored all of this.  I didn't talk about it with people (I mentioned the knocking to a few friends), and I think that was because if I pretended it wasn't a "thing," then it just wasn't a thing.

But those things started accelerating in October.

My very old friend from high school, Sara, came to visit me so we could go and see Florence + the Machine together.  She had arrived the day before, and after an evening catching up, I went to work the next morning while she had free reign of the house.  Sara had gone for a walk, and when she came back went upstairs to lay on the guest bed.  I should say now, the door of the guest bedroom directly faces the stairwell, which itself has a landing halfway down where it then makes a right turn toward the ground level.

Sara was on the guest bed, and from the corner of her eye she saw a man walk past the bedroom door.  Heading from my bedroom hallway, on the left of the stairs, and through the office door on the right.  She called my name out, thinking I had come home during her walk, and when I didn't answer, she got up to look.  Of course no one was there... and of course I was still at work.  She shared this with me when I got home and while it creeped the absolute shit out of me, I tucked it away in my mind.  It was just a silly thing that had happened.

October 26th, 2018

Two nights later, my best friend Tina came to stay for a few nights, bringing her little ones with her.  They arrived late, past midnight, and I sat with the kids while Tina got the guest room ready for bed.  Snapping selfies with the kids, obviously.  Eventually she got them settled and tucked in, I myself doing the same because I had work the following day.  In the morning, barely light outside (and my alarm hadn't gone off yet), I was awake.  Tina knocked on my door and asked if I was up, to which I said yes.

"I am never going to sleep again," she said dryly.  She proceeded to tell me how Devlyn, who was not quite three, had woken her up in the middle of the night crying.  When Tina asked her what was wrong, Devlyn cried that "the man" was smiling at her in the corner.  Tina looked and saw that no one was there and assured Devlyn it was fine.  Dev then lay back and looked up at the ceiling, and Tina watched as she mimed a knocking motion at the ceiling.

I finally admitted what Sara had told me about seeing the figure walk past the guest room door, of a man, and also about the knocking I had heard from the front door of the house over the few months I had lived there.  Nothing else happened during her trip, but by this point I had decided I would talk to the house on Halloween.  Even though I felt like an idiot... even though I felt like it was maybe pointless.

But then something else happened.

An old friend, Mike, was visiting his parents here Minnesota for a few weeks, but he lives in Los Angeles.  Mike is a clairvoyant, which you can say is a little "woo-woo," and he would accept that.  But he does readings for people out in LA and cleanses houses with sage and crystals and all that good stuff.  We had tried connecting earlier in his trip to no avail, but he was able to come by the house later in the day after Tina had gone and before he had to fly back to California.

We watched a movie and chatted for a few hours, and it was nearing 1am when he said he should get going.  "But show me the rest of the house!  I want to see upstairs."  So I took him upstairs and showed him the rooms, his eyes squinting a bit at the guest room but moving on with me.  We chatted in the office for a while, but by then it was nearing 2am and he really had to go.  We started going down the stairs, me in the lead, and when I got to the bottom I turned to look back at him.  Mike was standing on the landing, looking up the second half of stairs and toward the guest room.  He looked down at me, then back up, then back down.

"Do you see things here?" He asked.  I froze.  

I'm not fucking kidding, every hair on my body was standing up.

"No," I said, because it was true.  I had not seen the figure.  Mike nodded and looked back up the stairs.

"But you hear things," he said quietly, and I nodded.  "You hear knocking."  It suddenly felt like the house was so much smaller than it had been before... the walls felt like they had closed in around me.  Mike came down the stairs slowly, looking slightly shaken.  At the bottom of the stairs he was glancing up them again and then finally looked me in the eyes.  "There is a lot of energy on this stairwell," he said gently, "and they want you to know they are here.  They aren't dangerous... they..." and he trailed off and seemed to stand up on his tiptoes, gently gesturing behind him.  "Jesus they're right here."

I had my arms crossed very tightly across my chest and just nodded.  Stiffly.  

He explained that all of the dark wood in my house (floor boards and trim) was sort of like a conduit for this energy.  He said they are happy with me but curious, and that I should introduce myself to them better.  Mike didn't seem to think any of the spirits had lived in the house, but he wasn't sure.  And then he left to go home and I was alone, and I don't think I've ever hit the lights and flown upstairs to my bed so fast in my life.

Two days later it was Halloween.  Now, you should all know by now that I take Halloween very seriously.  I take the day off from work, I have chili simmering in the crockpot all day, treats in the oven, and movies on TV.  I carve my pumpkins and decorate outside, always ready for the trick-or-treater's if and when they show up.  I woke up that day and got dressed, and on my way down the stairs, I stopped on the landing and just stood there.  

After a few moments of silence, I started to talk to the Manor.

I told it who I was.  Why I had purchased the house, what had happened in my past that led me there, and what my intent was with the building.  How I wanted to respectfully repair it, transforming it back into something of glory.  I found myself talking about my heartbreak... I even cried at one point.  It was such a strange and surreal experience but ultimately it was an uplifting one.  I felt different throughout the day, almost like I had reached a weird sort of understanding with the Manor.  And maybe it had reached it with me as well.  I literally asked the house not to scare me, and that if it was doing something that scared me, I would have to ask it to stop.

The traditional face

From that, I followed the rules of Halloween.  I didn't blow out my candles early, I left them glowing until they extinguished themselves by their own accord.  I handed out candy, I watched movies, and I kept it spooky.  And the next day was the first day that the house stopped messing with me.

There was no more knocking... no more weird noises from my box fan.  It was quiet.  I didn't see the drapes move anymore, and I didn't feel like I was being watched.  The Manor had become my home and I its keeper.  There were a couple random nights every few weeks where the fan would rattle, and I would literally call out "please don't do that," and within moments it would stop.  I promise you this is true.  A year later in the following fall when Andrew was essentially living with me, I told him about the ghost stories.  He didn't guffaw... I think he was polite and entertained it all because he knew I believed in it, even if he didn't.

He believed more when that night, after however many nights he had been staying with me, the box fan started to rattle once more.  

But then there was nothing.  Nothing when he left me... nothing in the following months of quarantine and isolation.  In the summer I got busy fixing the yard up, and in early July decided I was ready to sell the Manor and move on.  There weren't any events in July, nothing worth noting at least, but then the house sold on August 3rd... and then things started happening again.

I would come home from work and the TV would be on.  I would go to bed and in the morning, lights in the kitchen would be on.  A few times I assumed that it was just me forgetting them, but the frequency was too often.  The fan started rattling every couple nights.  The dryer was running one afternoon after I got home from the grocery store, with nothing in it.  As I was packing up the house I was constantly feeling ill.  Dizzy, like a car sickness.  If I left the Manor for a while, say to go be at the pool with Jonathan?  I felt fine, and I was always fine at work.  

But then I'd go home and just be tired, and angry, and sick.

It didn't take long to start believing it was the house; I assume the Manor knew what was going on in that I, its "person," had decided to flee the coop.  I've said before that houses are living things... and if you're a living thing, why would you want to let go of something that was good for you?

On my last night in the Manor (which itself felt incredibly creepy because there was nothing on the walls anymore and any sound I made echoed throughout the place), I was trying to get to sleep.  It should be noted, I had not been sleeping well.  At all.  For weeks.

Blame the house.

I was lying on the mattress that was resting on the floor, staring at the ceiling, when this weird sort of soft but still somehow rattling boom echoed throughout the house.  Both cats came tearing into the bedroom, fully puffed out, and freaked.  Sophia leapt onto the mattress, circled around up near my head and Paolo stayed on the floor right beside me, both of them turned to face the door and motionless.  This is 100% not something they have ever done in my 10 years of raising them, and you could have heard a pin drop in that place it was so silent.

Bam.  Bam.  Bam.  Three knocks from the front door.

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my ears.  I waited, with quite literally bated breath, for some horrifying monster to come slithering around the door frame.  There was a quick snap in the hallway as the office light turned on.  I immediately got up, angrily moving through my bedroom and rounding the corner into the hall.

"Stop it," I said loudly, snapping the office light off and turning back to my bedroom.  

The office door slammed itself shut behind me, and I about flew down the hallway.  The boogeyman was real that night and it proved childhood is never really over.

My ceiling fan clicked and clacked all night, other lights turned on in the house, at one point the ceiling light in the bedroom was turned on.  Keep in mind it's a light that needs the chain pulled to turn it on... but it was on, around 4:15am.  I think I eventually fell asleep because I was just plain exhausted.  Whether it was from the stress of the move or because I was living in the house from Poltergeist, I dunno.

When morning came and the moving truck with it, I sequestered the cats to the guest room (and I felt bad because like I said before... fuck the guest room), and spent the entire day in the backyard.  I didn't want to go back inside the house, I wanted to leave.  I wanted to get the hell out and start my life somewhere else, because what had once been a good relationship had certainly turned sour.  Later in the day, Jonathan came by to help me load up the car and get to the apartment I'd be living in for a couple weeks.  We were standing in the living room, talking quietly, when there was suddenly a strange, unexplainable sound that came from somewhere inside the building.

"The house is mad at me," I said quietly.  And while anyone would and should laugh at that, even I myself, Jonathan seemed to understand.  He had heard it too.  So we left.

The final blog

A couple days later I returned to the Manor to write my goodbye blog, sitting in the silence of the living room of an empty house, and I took this picture.  Above my feet you can see a light.  Some of you will call it a sun-flare, and that's fine.  You have every right to do so.  But I call it an orb, because as I wrote that blog, I felt like I was being watched again.  The Manor was reading my words as I wrote them, and maybe it felt like my goodbye was justified?  Maybe it was ready to let go of me, and I it.  We'd both certainly changed a lot from when we first met, and in the end, not much in life lasts forever.  Or the afterlife, for that matter.

But that's the story, and now I've shared it with you.  And maybe some of you have your own stories, and maybe you don't.  This was mine as I experienced it, and some of those facts are pretty incontrovertible.  I never found proof that anyone had died on the property or in the house.  I've also got to say that writing this wasn't therapeutic, it just scared the piss out of me as I wrote it in the near dark of my new house with a bunch of Halloween decorations around me.

Why do I do this to myself?  Who fuckin' knows.

Anyway!  I am off now to start the crockpot of chili, to get a movie going, and to decide which pumpkin I want to carve first.  Even though Halloween looks very different this year than those in the past, I hope you take advantage of the full moon on this one night where the realms between the living and the dead are at their thinnest.  It's a wonderful time to connect with yourself in whatever way makes sense, and maybe get a couple scares in at the same time.  Also, say hi to your house.  It might do ya some good.

Happy Halloween gang (c: