Happy New Year!

(Haunted house courtesy of Business Week -- check out their take on it.)

A couple weeks ago the Bee had a really funny comment to an online article about the dismal state of housing in Sacramento, from a woman who insisted that she had to abandon her house, because it was haunted and was freaking out her child and nanny.

I don't know about this woman's house, which from the sound of it was in a new subdivision and was new construction, and therefore unlikely to have the built-up psychic trauma that is (as everyone knows) a key factor in a haunting. But I'm pretty sure that I lived in a haunted house for about a year. In fact, when referencing that time period, the kids (grown now) and I can always pinpoint the time frame by using that year as a reference, cited as "when we lived in that haunted house".

So, in honor of the popular conception of Halloween, here is my haunted house story:

My ex-hub and I, and our four kids, were happily barely surviving in Sebastopol when we were called back to Illinois due to a family emergency. At the time, real estate back there was in the same dire straits as it is here now, and instead of renting an apartment we "bought" a house contract for deed, since we could not get conventional financing. It was an old Victorian house that would have been way too expensive for us, except for the fact that it was in a working class neighborhood that was slowly deteriorating. It had the usual gingerbread trim, but my friend Sharon was upset about the "evil face" that was carved into the trim over the bay windows. It really wasn't an evil face; it was just a bearded male face, very stylized and surrounded by stylized leaves. Inside, there was a first floor parlor that you entered from the front door, and stairs leading up to the right. There was a room off the parlor that we used as the master bedroom, a storage room under the stairway, and a kitchen, bathroom, dining room and living room to the left. Upstairs, there was a huge open area with a large walk-in closet and a bathroom to the right, and two bedrooms to the left. The bedroom nearest the stairs had a closet with a door in the back that opened up to a stairway that led up into the attic.

Almost immediately upon moving into the house, my oldest daughter refused to sleep in the bedroom assigned to her, claiming that in the middle of the night the door in the closet sounded as if it was opening. The youngest child was sleeping in the large open area, and she complained about noise from the bathroom. We dismissed these complaints, and told the kids that the house was very old and that old houses made funny sounds and old pipes often rattled. Eventually, both the girls moved into my oldest son's room (it was the actual master bedroom, we just didn't want any of the kids sleeping downstairs, for security and safety reasons). It looked a little bit like a dorm room, but easily held all three beds and everyone's toys.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I noticed that none of the kids was using the bathroom upstairs. They even moved their toothbrushes down to the first floor bath. The first floor bath was quite a bit smaller than the second floor bath. It aggravated me, but I didn't question it. I think I had some notion that it had something to do with us using the first floor bathroom to toilet train the baby, and the other kids thinking that made it the "kid bath". Or them wanting to take their baths downstairs in the evening close to the rest of the family, because the house was much bigger than we were used to and even my ex and I agreed that there were times it felt kind of spooky. You never really felt alone in the house, even when you knew there was no one but you there. After the kids abandoned the upstairs bathroom, I was doing my very infrequent house cleaning one afternoon and decided to make sure it was clean. It was a fairly large room, and the door shut while I was cleaning the tub (which was actually dusty by that point). I didn't think too much about it, although I did have a very uneasy feeling while in there. It also had an odd odor, which I tried to attribute in my mind to just not being used. When I finished cleaning and tried to open the door, it wouldn't budge. Now, these were old doors and you needed a skeleton key to lock/unlock them. After what seemed like several minutes, but was probably just a few seconds, of me tugging frantically at the door it finally popped open and I got the heck outta there. When I closed the door to test it, it opened quite easily.

Another time, I came home from class (I was in college at the time, and chronically exhausted) and put my books and study materials on the dining room table, as was my usual habit. I changed clothes, and started dinner. No one was home except me at the time. When I went into the dining room to begin studying, my books were gone. I was really irritated, because I knew I had put them there. I demanded, "Give me back my books!". No one answered. I then began looking all over the first floor for them, to no avail, and finally became distracted by the kids coming home and finishing dinner prep. When I opened the large built-in breadbox to get the rolls for dinner, there were my books. There is no way that I put the books in that breadbox.

At that point, I was beginning to think that something was not right with the house. Things would go missing constantly, which often happens when you have kids and cats, but it was very odd things. And they would show up in very odd places. I attributed the sense of always being watched and never being alone to the cats, as I also attributed odd noises and clatters to the cats. The books-in-breadbox incident was really disturbing to me, though, especially after being locked in the bathroom. Plus, the kids were acting weirder than usual. They had enjoyed skating in the basement, which was half finished, for several weeks after we moved in. Then, they stopped that and seemed to just want to hang around with us in the living room all the time. Sometimes, when I woke up in the morning, I'd find all of them asleep on a pile of blankets on the floor at the end of our bed.

So, I gathered them all together, and told them about the book incident and the bathroom incident, and asked them if they had noticed anything strange about the house. They told me very disturbing anecdotes about a glowing green man in bib overalls who hung out in the basement, and being pinched at night. They claimed that the windows in the bedroom they were all sleeping in often opened, and that they had an absolute dread of the closet that led to the attic and the upstairs bath. It turned out that was why they periodically ended up in our room on the floor. Everyone, including my ex and I, had experienced "corner of the eye" movements that seemed like someone walking up the stairs or across a room, but when you actually turned to look there was no one there.

We all decided that the house was haunted, and then we debated how to deal with it. First, we decided that we'd just verbally acknowledge the ghost whenever something happened. We decided that no one would ever go, or be asked to go, into the basement or the upstairs first bedroom or bathroom alone. If anyone felt genuinely threatened, they were to tell me what happened. If something odd happened and it wasn't really threatening, we asked the ghost to knock it off. These measures did help a little, as did the feeling that we were all in it together and no one had to feel silly about their fears. But looking back on those days, that was an absolutely eerie house. The most beautiful house I've ever lived in, and yet there was that constant sense of foreboding that kept any of us from ever really relaxing there.

Eventually, we inherited another house from my mom and decided to let the contract house go back to the owner -- it didn't go against our credit, since he still held the deed. We hired some movers to help us move the beds and wardrobes out, and as they were going down the stairs they kept complaining about the poor ductwork and how there was a freezing cold spot on the landing. This was in July, with the front door open and the weather was humid and warm.
There was no duct opening anywhere near the landing, of course. We had a window air unit in the downstairs bedroom, but there was no central air in that house -- only a furnace in the basement. I remember exchanging knowing glances with my oldest daughter when the movers made that comment.

The Sig has a much more threatening and frightening story of living in a haunted house, but it's his story so I can't tell it. In the spirit of the season, feel free to tell us yours!

(BTW, what we call Halloween was the Celtic New Year, which they called Samhuinn. And trick-or-treaters came about due to the seasonal reflection on the deaths of members of the community and the custom of leaving food out for them, which morphed into young people dressing as shades and going from house to house begging for food. The original Jack O'lanterns were turnips, which had a skull-like quality. Any produce left in the fields after Samhuinn was considered inedible and as belonging to the local nature spirits. )