#paranormal stories

Hell House: The Red Room Part 1

Hell House had three bedrooms; the master bedroom that faced the street, the back bedroom, and the little bedroom, both of which faced the woods. The front room was where my grandparents slept, the back bedroom was my mother’s, and the little bedroom, or the red room as it would come to be called, was my aunt’s. She was around 2 years old when this started.

As my Papa tells it, my little aunt started waking up in the middle of the night very regularly. She would complain that ‘the red lights’ woke her up. As I have stated before, my grandfather was a fire captain and an ex marine, so after a week or so of this he decided to sleep in the room to solve the mystery of what was waking his daughter up. She was too young to articulate what she was seeing to him other than a ‘bright red light would wake her up.’

He laid down on the floor and waited while she when to sleep. At about 1:20a (which was always the most active time in Hell House) he was woken from brief slumber by a small, bright, red orb that he said flitted in from the window that faced the woods and started darting in circles around the room.

They never denied my aunt when she wanted to sleep in their room for fear of the light in the red room. I would become all too familiar with the red room myself… But that’s for another time.

Hell House: Mom’s Radio

As my mom tells it, she was alone one night in her room at Hell House when she began to hear a muffled voice. It scared her really bad until she discovered it was a little radio in her dresser drawer that had accidentally turned on. So she turned it off and put it back. Son she heard the voice again so she decided to pull the batteries. An hour or so later the radio turned back on for a third time, despite having no batteries. She took the radio to the garage and never slept with it in there again.

Hell House: The Doors

After moving into Hell House in 1968, they very quickly began to realize there was something not quite right with the house. Around Christmas time that year, they began to wake up every night with the house extremely cold. Without fail they would find the front door wide open. At first my grandfather (who I have called ‘Papa’ all my life) thought it was my mom sleep walking. After about a week of this, and being unable to catch the door opener in the act, my Papa decided he needed to do something. Being a fire captain and an ex-marine, he was a practical, get it done type who wanted to solve the mystery.

He decided that he would sleep in the entryway. The house was built with a divider that separated the entryway from the rest of the living room that was only wide enough for the door. He slept with his head facing the door and his feet sticking out into the living room. When laying this way, it would be impossible to open the door without bonking him in the head.

He woke up freezing in the morning. The door was open against his back. The wind blew on his head. Once he admitted that he had no clue what was happening, it stopped.

Hell House: Nails in the Door

The summer of 2002 my grandma died, my parents moved us into her house and began making repairs, gutting it of her things, and redecorating. One day during this process my dad pulled me and my mom down into the basement to show us what our grandma had done to the back door. It was nailed shut all the way around the 3 sides that weren’t hinged, with at least 50 nails. After some discussion, Dad decided to remove the nails.

A few months later he got tired of waking up to find the back door wide open and the dog barking out at the forest, so he got a deadbolt lock for the door… It didn’t work. He ended up needing three deadbolts and a bracer to keep that door from opening on its own. To this day I still have nightmares of walking into the basement to find the back door open and the forest’s vines and branches reaching in with a deep breathing and drumming sound. I have this nightmare at least once a week.

Hell House: Ticking Clocks

As I mentioned in Red Rom Part 3, I had chosen to take my grandma’s room when my parents decided to move into her house less than a week after she died. The first night we slept in her house, it was still filled to the brim with her food, her things, and her scent. Her room was really creepy, but was the only room that didn’t have any scary stories about it, so that was the room I took. That first night I slept surrounded by her wig heads with faces painted on them and boxes filled with reeking perfume bottles.

But the worst thing was the fact that she had at least ten ticking clocks in her room, on the wall, on shelves, on the floor, and in boxes. These clocks did not tick in unison, so the room was filed with a constant uneven clicking nightmare. The next morning I puled all her things out of the room and found all the clocks. I thought my grandma was mad to sleep with so many clocks, and it was so nice to sit in the room without the ticking… At first.

The second night I slept with my light on because as soon as the sun set and the room went dark, the ticking continued. One solid ticking clock still ticked. Loudly. When the light was on though, the room was silent. I showed my parents and their answer was to just leave the light on, or bring the clocks back in. I realized that grandma had all those clocks to hide the fact that the room ticked all on its own. After those two nights I always had ONE clock in there ticking to hide the fact that I had moved into a nightmare.

Childhood: Will-o-wisps

In 1997 we went camping in the boot heel of Missouri with my Papa. So you can imagine the setting, imagine dense deciduous forests, rolling hills that were once mountains, deep valleys, and tons of small wildlife like chipmunks and squirrels. The summer was hot and humid. Sticky. There were 2 scary nights there at our campsite.

The first weird night was when the raccoons came. There were hundreds of shimmering raccoon eyes in the darkness, and as they god closer and braver my Papa moved us kids to the truck. But the real freaky thing happened on the second night. We all sat around the fire as night fell, when our camp was surrounded by shimmering green lights that rose from the ground to hover and dance at about adult chest height. They were lime green balls with shimmery sparkles around them. There were hundreds of them stretching back into the forest at all sides. It reminded Papa of the Red Room, so he felt in danger and put us kids in the truck again. I was both afraid and in awe.

It triggered a childhood obsession with researching orbs, will-o-wisps, and spook lights. I felt like they appeared so often in my life, and were so beautiful and widely experienced, there had to be something going on. While I sadly don’t yet know exactly what they are for sure, I have experienced such more malevolence in my life, will-o-wisps are a kind and lovely experience that does not ever send fear through me anymore. I appreciate them, but I am not pulled to figure them out anymore. They are a welcome mystery.

Hell House: The Red Room Part 3

In June of 2002 my grandma died, and my parents decided to move into Hell House. A choice that changed my life. A little over a week after her death, I was asked which bedroom I wanted to be my room. I didn’t want the back room, since it was where I had seen the bonfires through the window, and didn’t want to sleep with the forest facing me. And I wasn’t going to spend 5 minutes in the Red Room, let alone sleep in there every night, so I finally decided to take the front room. The room my grandma had slept in until the cancer forced her to sleep at the hospital. My brother ended up  in the back room, and my parents took the already feared Red Room.

The first night I had to sleep in her bed surrounded by her things and her smells. I was 11, and was beginning to want my privacy, so I tried sleeping with the door shut. I fell asleep in my dead grandma’s bedding and woke up a few hours later. It was really dark, and the room was filled with the sound of ticking clocks (that’s another story.) From beneath the closed door a deep red glow shone bright, the only light I could see. I soon gained my courage to open the door and see what was happening.

The house was dark and silent save for the clocks. My parent’s door was propped open a few feet and the bright red light shimmered and dashed past the doorway. I looked at one of the clocks. 1.20am. I laid back in bed and stared at the doorway waiting for the red light to come down the hall and, ikd, kill me? Ever since then I never slept with the door closed, and I watched the time like a hawk. If I was still awake near 1.20am I waited the horror out until it calmed down and I no longer saw anything. I never hid under covers, somehow NOT being able to see what was behind the door or the covers was worse to me than wide eyes watching it like a hawk. Over the many years we lived there I would see my parents’ room light up red at least once every few months, but it was always more active in Hell House during August. In August the Red Room lit up almost every night. I never got used to it. The sight of that red glow always filled me with dread.

Hell House: The Red Room Part 2

One of my mother’s favorite ghost stories is the Red Room, partially because of what her sister experienced, but mostly because of what I experienced when I was two years old, so this must have been in 1993. She was pregnant with my brother, and decided to spend the night with grandma, who had lived alone in Hell House for years. At that time, the red room had been repurposed as a nursery for me, and my soon to be brother. This was where I was laid down to sleep in a baby bed while my mom and grandma had coffee and chitchat at the kitchen table.

To mom’s surprise, I toddled into the kitchen at around 1:30a and asked her to tellthe bright lights in the room to leave me alone. Mom and grandma shared a terrified look and piled all of us into my mom’s van and we all spent the night in our first house, which had no paranormal activity at all, instead.