A Haunted House for Halloween!

This was the most haunted place I ever lived. And the most vicious. You wouldn’t recognize it today, though. It’s now surrounded by trees. And across three-quarters of a century, owners after us added a third floor, peaked roof and living-room expansion onto the back patio.

When our family moved here in 1954, I was 6 years old. Dad took this article’s photos with his Polaroid Model 95 camera. And while my younger brother and sisters are in the photo, I have no idea where I was at the time.

Over the years, I lost track of his pack-film prints, but finally found and “digitized” them with my iPhone. (More about that later!)

A Brief Tour

Built in 1937, the house was a minimalist, flat-roofed, concrete block. In the above photo, the front second-floor window was its only bathroom. (There was a primitive toilet stall in the basement… we’ll get to that later too.)

Those French Doors above the garage opened out from our parents’ bedroom onto an asphalt roof deck that we never used. To the left of the garage, a small walled-in patio garden led to the kitchen door. And a short interior staircase at the back of the garage led up to a landing where one could turn left and climb to the kitchen, or right to descend into the basement. Into a place I would eventually regret going.

This was the back of the house:

The living room stretched across the ground floor. Its French Doors opened out onto a full-width concrete patio. A long straight staircase climbed from the left end of the living room to a small landing in the center of the second floor.

Those rear second-floor windows were the kids’ bedrooms. And my bed was beside the middle window, which I’d also soon regret.

A Strange “Welcome”

As with many hauntings, things remained quiet for a while. But the house “awoke” when dad bought our first TV and dragged it into the living room. He wrestled the big black-and-white box up against (in the above view) the living room’s right-interior wall. Then he ran cable out through the corner windows and up to a man-sized roof antenna that looked like a metal tree.

I’ve described what happened next in another 35mmc article, but will repeat it here. When dad turned the TV on for the very first time, none of us understood what we saw. Every channel showed horizontal gray bars with two round black smudges at the screen’s bottom corners.

Dad seemed to have a theory that made him angry. “Stay here… watch,” he barked. Dashing outside, he quickly ran right into the TV picture and danced around like a clown. We were seeing live coverage of the building’s exterior wall behind the television! The picture’s horizontal gray bars were the house siding, and the two round smudges were bushes that mom had planted.

Of course, there were no TV cameras outside, beaming images to an orbiting satellite. Heck… there weren’t even satellites then! And what we were seeing probably angered dad because his scientific mind couldn’t explain it.

On returning to the living room, he quickly switched the TV off… then on again… and it reverted to normal programming. I believe the house had just said “Hi folks… We’re going to have some fun!”

First Apparitions

Our father was a chemical metallurgist at Battelle Memorial Institute. He would often come home from his lab very late, eat whatever dinner mom left for him before the rest of us went to bed, and then read the daily newspaper alone in his living-room chair. With his scientific leanings, it still surprises me that dad would experience our first “apparition”! (I put that word in quotes because his was an aural and physical, rather than a visual, encounter.)

One night, after opening the paper, he heard someone walking downstairs. He headed over, turned on the overhead light, looked up the stairs, and saw nothing. But he could watch the location of the footfalls as they descended toward him and passed right by him in a cold breeze.

When the rest of us woke in the morning, dad wasn’t in bed. We found him sitting in his living room chair, white as a sheet, and nearly catatonic. Fortunately, as far as we know, it was his last unusual “experience” in the place. And based on how it affected him, that was good.

The next apparitions were mine. The window I mentioned earlier was beside my bed. And on some full-moon nights, I’d be brought to a chilled standstill by what I saw through it, out in the back yard. The blue ghost of a young woman would float above the grass, from right to left, across the yard, and stream blue, water-like “drops” in her wake. I lived in terror that she might stop and look up at me. Thankfully, she never did.

Different apparitions then appeared when my second sister was perhaps around 2 years old. On a couple occasions, the girls’ screams roused the rest of us. They said two columns of light had “danced around each other” in the small upstairs hall… and then spiraled back into their bedroom before disappearing. I don’t believe anyone else saw that.

I also don’t believe that mom or my younger brother Byron ever experienced anything out-of-the-ordinary here (other than what we all saw when dad bought the TV).

But the place then turned its full attentions on me. And they weren’t friendly.

Physical Attacks

The word “poltergeist” is German for “noisy spirit.” So-called poltergeists like to move things around and make noisy trouble. For several months, every time I walked near any interior door that was slightly ajar, it would… on its own… swing wide open and then violently slam shut. Those days, my heart spent a lot of time in my throat! It got so bad that I literally resorted to crawling around and over sofas, beds, desks and dressers, just to avoid going anywhere near doors.

Until, for some reason, I thought that rapping my knuckle three times on door frames as I approached would stop the slamming. Strangely, it did. And that made me wonder if I was causing the house’s haunts. Teens, especially, have been credited with causing poltergeist activities. But I was only around 7 or 8.

The next incidents, though, did NOT come from me. As you might imagine, I often had trouble sleeping. And around 3 am one night, my pillow started sliding out from under my head. Something was pulling it down through the gap between my headboard and mattress. I gently pulled the pillow back under my head… and it slid again. Now facing the headboard on my hands and knees, I pulled it back a little harder… and it once more started creeping. That did it. I was pissed, and yanked it back.

And what looked like a glittering blue death mask– a man’s face with eyes and mouth closed– rose up through the gap behind my mattress and hovered right in front of my nose. I froze for around 15 seconds, until the apparition floated back down through the gap. Never to appear again.

But the house wasn’t finished with me. Not by a long shot.

Final Straws

Subsequent events convinced our parents that we had to get out of there. The first of these occurred in the aforementioned basement. Dad had a severe OCD fear of environmental dust and dirt. And because the basement was dusty, we were forbidden to go down there. So naturally, any time I found myself alone in the place, I did!

For a while, those adventures were fun. I loved poking through dad’s boxes of Scientific American magazines, and exploring his cool scientific gizmos– like slide rules and magnets. But the basement also gave me the creeps:

• I always felt like I was being watched.
• An old, locked, wooden armoire was down there when we moved in… and still sat in its corner when we left. I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think our parents ever had a key or knew what was inside. (And I was never able to get in.)
• The furnace room also had an old, poorly built, toilet stall that was wider and deeper than necessary. One day, I noticed that the stall’s side wall hid the fact that the wood panels behind the toilet stood almost three feet away from the house foundation. Poking around, I discovered a secret panel big enough to squeeze through. Sadly, no treasure lurked behind it. Just a single small chair, in what may have been someone’s personal “escape room!”

AND, there was a horrible spot in the basement floor! The stairs to the basement ended at an alcove containing our washer and dryer. Turning left there to enter the basement proper, one had to walk under a clothes line with metal hangers strung across it. And every time I did, I walked through a spot in the floor that generated instant fear. Fear that turned on when I entered the spot and vanished the instant I left.

Apparently, my earlier death-mask encounter hadn’t taught me to control my temper around the paranormal. And one day, the spot in the floor made me so mad that I decided to stand in it and fight the fear. Bad move! Fear grew into terror, I froze in place, my body started shaking, and the metal clothes hangers above me banged violently against each other. I instantly unfroze, ran up the stairs, and never again ventured down there.

In fact, it would be decades before I could visit any basement. I got over that, though. Which was a good thing, as described in this 35mmc article.

But the final not-too-subtle hint that our family should leave came one night when I again flipped onto my stomach in bed. Almost immediately, invisible fists hammered my back. Again, I froze. But I could turn my head… and saw nothing anywhere near me. The beating, however, continued for a while. And by dawn, my back was badly bruised. That place seemed to hate me.

Seeking Reasons

Our family lived there for nearly seven years. These were my first encounters with the paranormal and my most concentrated ones. I’ve had many paranormal experiences since– though separated by longer, more random intervals.

My reaction to it all has been to ask why? I’ve come to believe that– with enough life in our rear-view mirrors– we can begin to intuit the unique personal reasons our souls chose to come here in the first place. And the answers to just four questions may help illuminate these “purposes”:

• • At what skills or activities has one been very successful, without much effort? These may be tools or activities that support the soul’s missions. [My activities seem to be writing and teaching.]
  • Conversely, what situations or activities have felt important, but unusually difficult— especially over extended periods? In many cases, these may be the very things one’s soul came to experience or deal with. [Mine may have come to understand and have compassion for those– like my father and brother– who suffered mental illness.]
  • Has one always wanted something that’s been denied? Such things may be unimportant to one’s earthly purposes. [For instance, I’ve always wanted to see a UFO, but never have. So they probably aren’t crucial to my soul’s mission this time around.]
  • And conversely, has the universe REPEATEDLY thrown something unwanted in one’s path? These things could be important enough to deserve special attention. [I’ve actually never wanted or sought paranormal experiences! But based on my answers to these four questions, I think my soul may have come here to have them, to think about them (a lot), to write about them (as I’m doing now), and to help others understand them (along with our spiritual lives in general).]

Shortly after we evacuated to a different part of town, our former neighbors visited us (as described here). We asked them how the people who bought the old place were doing. And they’d apparently bolted after only six months. But public records indicate that the people who bought the house from them stayed for 10 years. One wonders, then, whether those new owners were immune to the place’s shenanigans… or if its haunts simply ceased.

They may have. Especially if the house had completed its role in my life– to make me believe in the paranormal and eventually write about it. If that’s the case, then job well done! As a result of what I experienced there (plus this event in college), none my many other paranormal encounters have scared me in the slightest.

But What’s Behind the Window?

Strangely, as I write this, the house may have reached out to me one final time. After 70+ years!

To digitize these photos, I took several shots of each with my iPhone and posted the sharpest. But every time I shot the following print, my phone’s face-detection frame popped up around the window on the upper right (and never on any other window). As you see, its curtains were open (unlike the window at the upper left). And I saw no obvious face there:

But I used my Olympus C-8080 WZ camera’s super-macro mode to magnify the window, and slightly solarized the result to enhance the separation between light and dark areas:

Frankly, I still don’t see a face. But a small, smoky, “stick figure with dark feet” seems to be standing behind the two lower-right panes. And interestingly, if you look at the same window in this article’s second photo, nothing appears to be behind them. The panes on the middle and left above also look a bit odd.

So did our father actually capture the tormentor(s) that would eventually drive us out? Hard to say.

But don’t let our family’s long-ago experiences in the rooms behind these dark windows prevent you from having a fun– and not too spooky– Halloween!

–Dave Powell is a Westford, Mass., writer and avid amateur photographer.

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