House For Sale

The alarm system just woke us up . Please God, don’t let that thing follow us here!

I never believed in spirits or ghosties or any of that stuff before. In fact, I was practically a card carrying atheist/materialist ever since my college days when I undertook the study of philosophy. 

Reading the works of the logical empiricists set me on a path of hard headed, scientific rationalism where science and logic defined what does and does not exist in the universe. I was proud of this heritage and would scoff at any Christian who prayed to his make-believe God.

But as it happened, that whole edifice upon which I based my life was toppled when the paranormal events began. I’m getting ahead of myself, so I’ll start from the beginning.

My youngest girl, Judy, had a few of her friends sleep over one Saturday night, about two months ago. I saw Judy smuggle a ouija board into her room, as she and her friends began their night of teenage hijinks . Knowing my negative views on the spirit world, Judy tried to hide the board from me–as though it was contraband–but I assured her that I didn’t mind. 

It was all in good fun, I thought, and what would be the harm if the girls scared themselves by letting their imaginations run wild? It’s not like that ghost crap was real, right?

The first bit of trouble started at about 12:30. I was sitting in the living room chuckling at Jim Carrey’s antics, while the wife had already signed off for the night and was fast asleep in la-la land upstairs. 

Suddenly, there were high pitched screams coming from Judy’s room. I immediately thought that something must really be wrong, for Judy had typically been considerate about not making a lot of noise during sleepovers. The next thing I knew, Judy and her two friends came bursting out of her room, scrambling down the stairs, and stood next to me, shaking and near hysteria. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked, perplexed. 

I was more annoyed than anything, but had to give Judy the benefit of a doubt. Like I said, she has been an exceptionally well behaved kid, especially for a fifteen year old. My wife, bleary eyed, descended down the stairs to join us, equally puzzled as I was about this unpleasant wake up call.

“Dad, there’s something in my room,” Judy managed to squeak out with her emerging tears. She was clearly terrified. 

“What do you mean ‘something,’?” I responded. I was thrown for a loop that she had used that word. “Do you mean a spider or an animal of some sort?”

“No, Dad,” Judy stated. “Something rose out of the floor. Like a ghost or a spirit.”

I could only laugh condescendingly. Stupid teenagers in their bid to freak each other out during a sleepover. Everybody knows there ain’t no such things as ghosts!

I remember offering a few words of reassurance and then telling the girls to watch something funny or at least not scary. Come to the church of Jim Carrey like me–he’ll scare away all the ghosts with the laughter produced by his comic genius. Boy, was I wrong.

Anyway, my words of encouragement accomplished nothing that night, and I had no other choice but to take Judy’s friends home to their annoyed parents at that late hour. The visiting girls refused to stay in our house any longer, from fear of what they had witnessed. Even Judy ended up sleeping with her mother, whom I always felt coddled the girls a bit too much. I slept on the couch, thankful that there was plenty to watch on the boob tube.

The next day, my wife, Patricia, and I chalked it up to overactive imaginations on the part of Judy and her friends. We decided that we wouldn’t allow any more sleepovers for the next little while, as punishment for the unpleasantness the girls had put us through. Since it was the weekend, I set out on my usual morning jog through the park, and Patricia tackled the dirty laundry that was beginning to pile up in the hampers.

I ran for nearly an hour and was quite proud of myself when I returned home. But I was startled as I entered the kitchen and saw Patricia sitting at the table, ashen faced and visibly shaken. 

“What’s wrong? Did somebody die?” I inquired.

“Oh, Bill,” she replied. “I saw something down the basement.” There was that word again–’something’. I hated the vagueness of it. 

Patricia continued, “I was putting clothes into the washer, and when I turned around, I saw the most hideous face on the wall.” She spoke with terror and dread in her voice. 

“It looked like one of those demons I’ve seen in books, but its eyes, Bill, its eyes followed me as though it wasn’t a picture, but a real live thing.” My wife burst into tears and I put my arms around her to comfort her.

After she settled down a few minutes later, I pretended to take her seriously and went down the basement to find out what she might have seen. Of course I thought she had been deceived somehow, and that she really hadn’t seen a demon. 

I took a long look around the basement, but found nothing unusual. The walls looked like they always did–light gray with a few puzzles affixed here and there as rudimentary decorations. But if I was honest with myself, I did feel a bit unnerved. There was a sensation that I was being watched, although my rational mind dismissed the notion as balderdash, of course. I had better sense than the women in this house.

At this point, then, my household had complained of two peculiar and terrifying incidents. Like the proverbial ostrich with its head stuck in a hole to avoid seeing its surroundings, I was sure that ignoring these reports would allow them to eventually dissipate. Little did I know that these were merely hints of what was to come. 

The next group of woes over the next few weeks took the form of appliance and electrical malfunctions. I’m talking about the usual poltergeist activity that’s reported in the paranormal literature: the TV shutting on and off on its own, phone calls with no discernible origin (only an interminable silence when answered), and the lights flickering in various rooms of the house, even though I had an electrician in to find a reason for it (he couldn’t discover one). 

All these goings-on were not frightening as such; more annoying than anything. Being the champion of science that I was, I had to keep the faith that the occurrences were ultimately explicable through natural means, only it would take time and further research. 

The naive optimism that I maintained vanished on the night of April 23rd. 

This time, all the family was gathered together in the living room to watch a movie on Netflix. It was some sort of drama, I think, but that is neither here nor there. 

So, a little past eight o’clock that night, as we were watching the film, we noticed our cat suddenly rise up on his legs and get into a classic defensive position with all his fur standing out. Staring into a corner of the room that contained no visible object, he hissed and made guttural sounds as though he was about to be attacked by a predator. 

I remember that the room had gotten quite cold, and that a smell reminiscent of rotting meat permeated the air. These observations only came to me later because I was understandably preoccupied with the cat’s odd behavior. 

“What’s going on with the cat?” Patricia asked in alarm. 

No sooner had she posed the question when the cat darted out of the room with lightning speed. We were going to find out the cause of the cat’s behavior. For in the corner of the room that had affected the cat so much, we saw a black shadow begin to manifest.

The shadow grew taller–to the point of standing over seven feet tall–and then morphed into a grotesque creature that resembled some of the depictions of demons given in mediaeval literature. The monster had horns like a ram, and baleful eyes that made me know it despised us with utter malice. Its scaly body was repulsive, and the stench it emitted was nausea inducing.

“Get out!” the creature hissed.

I was astonished! Could this really be happening?

“I believe in the periodic table of elements,” I intoned to myself. “I believe in the law of the conservation of energy. I believe in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. I believe in the theory of general relativity. I believe in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.” 

I said these things to myself as a scientific incantation that might somehow ward off whatever imagined abomination had set foot in my living room. I could believe in the achievements of scientific discovery, but not in this! 

The creature leaned forward slightly, as if to step towards us, and the terror we all felt came to a boil. I grabbed my wife and children, and as a single unit, we bolted out of the room and outdoors. We ran to our beloved neighbors’ house as though our very lives depended on it. Then we did what people normally do who witness such traumatizing displays as we had seen, namely, we all cried out of fright and clung onto each other for dear life. 

The police were called in to investigate, but of course they found nothing. They and the neighbors all thought we were crazy or else making the stuff up. It didn’t help that the demon had had such a stereotypical appearance, or that the accompanying phenomena were commonly reported among obvious crackpots. In fact, I wouldn’t have believed any of the supernatural happenings, had I not witnessed them myself.

A truth occurs to me now. It is to the Devil’s advantage that his existence is denied, mocked, or else parodied. After all, we are more easily defeated by an adversary whom we underestimate or believe is simply not there.

After that terrible night in April, Patricia and I went to a realtor to sell the house that had suddenly turned into a place not fit to live in. It had been our home for eight years, and I was sure that we would eventually retire in it and live out our last years there, too. 

We did struggle with the ethical dilemma about whether or not to sell a house that we knew was haunted, but in the end, practicality won out. We were not going to stay there for the sake of what we had witnessed, and we needed money to uproot and move somewhere else. 

Additionally, I know there is a real estate law of disclosure relating to murders or suicides that have occurred on a property, but hauntings? As it happens, most people–including our realtor–are much too ‘sophisticated’ to grant such realities as ghosts and demons.

Our house was well kept and quite the pearl in our neighborhood, so we sold it in record time. (We convinced my dear mother, who lived a few miles down the road, to board with her in the meantime.) I made a great deal of profit from the sale and we deliberately chose a residence on the other side of the city, far away from the old house and its awful memories.

However, a little over two months after we moved, Patricia and I decided to do a quick drive-by of our former home. I hoped to catch sight of the new owners and discern if they were displaying signs of unrest. 

Our jaws dropped as we approached the house. All that remained were charred embers and rubble that once constituted an impressive looking domain. I later came to find out that the house had burned down the previous day. I wondered if the demon had had anything to do with the disaster. I never found out. 

I usually hate reading Shakespeare, but as Patricia and I drove away from the scene of devastation, a quote of his came to mind:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Who cares what the larger scientific community believes about the spirit world? I had the evidence I needed, and so my outlook on the world had been widened considerably.

END