In honor of the Halloween holiday today, please enjoy this scary story which is, like all traditional scary stories, told from true life events. Once upon a time, in a house just like this one…
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My uncle has been telling me for years that his house is haunted. It was never anything concrete he could point to, no shadowy figures, open cabinets or oozing walls, but he was always adamant that there was something. And so it went that at every Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas since he and his family moved to the house in 2013 he would pull me aside and tell me about sinister feelings he had while making breakfast or mowing the lawn.
“I can just feel it there,” he’d always say. “Making the back of neck tingle.”
I had always politely listened and just assumed that he had a runaway imagination. Just a little too much stress with four kids and a full-time job. Over the last year, though, he’d become more and more adamant that there was something in his house. So he set out to find evidence.
During our family Christmas gathering in January he told me he was collecting EVP samples; basically leaving a digital recorder running through the night to try and hear ghostly messages in the static and ambient noise. He spent hours listening to snippets that seemed to have a hidden message, saving them to his computer before clearing the recorder for another night. At our Fourth of July cookout, he had me listen to a few of them.
Aside from some muffled snoring and occasional bits of static or the hum of the AC unit kicking on and off, I couldn’t hear a thing. He insisted there was a very quiet voice, but he admitted that he couldn’t tell what it was saying. He could just hear it like a whisper in the background of the recording. Again, I wrote it off to stress.
That was until I visited them after my sister’s baby shower in August.
He walked me to his study and cued up another sound out of nearly a hundred he’s saved so far. As convinced as he was in the past, this time he had a different look in his eyes. He was absolutely certain.
“Just listen to this one and just tell me if you hear it,” he said as he hit play, speakers all the way up.
It was the very beginning of a recording session. I could hear my uncle place the recorder down before making a note of the time and place.
“August 20th, 1:30 p.m., master bedroom,” his voice said, “Michelle and the kids are out at the movies, house is empty except for me. I’m leaving now to mow and will review this recording after I’m done.” His first daytime recording, to my knowledge.
After his note, I could hear him open and close his bedroom door, creak down the stairs and just barely make out the sound of the front door open and close. A few minutes later I could hear the lawnmower as a dull drone in the background. I thought it was going to be another burst of static or house settling, but I was wrong.
Out of the relative silence of the recording came a slow door creak. Not the bedroom door, one closer to the recorder, from the master bath. Then, slowly, there were footsteps.
Each step made a distinctive clap on the tiles in the master bath, like a hard-soled shoe, with just the hint of a scrapping drag to every other step. There were 12 footsteps, each getting closer to the recorder before they stopped.
For a few moments there was nothing, then the footsteps clapped and dragged away from the recorder, 12 paces again then silence.
“You heard it, right?” he asked.
I heard it. Definitely.
He told me that his wife had started getting freaked out when she was alone in their bedroom, so much so that she had started using the guest bathroom to shower and get ready for work. His kids had also stopped going anywhere in the house alone, dragging a sibling along whenever they had to leave the living room, especially if they had to go upstairs.
Since he wasn’t getting anything on tape at night he decided to try when the house was empty. Because the second floor seemed to be the worst, he decided to try there first. He swore to me that it wasn’t a gag or a hoax. He took me upstairs to show me where he thought the noises had come from. In the tiled bathroom, about twelve steps from the door was their carpeted walk-in closet. From the humidity caused by years of showers, the door squeaked, just like it did in the recording. And inside the closet, locked shut with brand new hardware and a padlock, was the attic access panel.
He told me that when they remodeled the house before they moved in the contractor rushed the frame for the panel, so to close it completely you had to shut it just right, otherwise the corner would get stuck. According to my uncle, when he came back upstairs on the day of the recording he didn’t find anyone in the house, but that corner wasn’t flush.
I’m still not sure what was on the tape and if the stories he tells me are true, but I know that even with the padlock, he uses the guest bathroom now, too.
The Barberry Writers 