#true ghost 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: 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.

My parents live in a haunted house
(Picture grabbed from Google street view.)

My mom moved in with her new husband in 2014, and I came along after living with s friend for a year or so. I affectionately call Hot House. My bedroom was a small room on the second floor with an angled roof, and it was constantly swelteringly hot in there, even in the winter. I moved out of Hot House twice, first in 2015 to live with my now husband and our mutual friend in our first ever apartment, and second in late 2016 after having to return home for a few months when we fell on hard times financially.

With a sordid past involving poisoned soil from a massive oil spill, arson on the property, theft, violence, and possibly even murder, Hot House is not a place I like to be. Negative energy clouds the place like a dark, warm blanket, and the ever present feeling of violence seeps into the heavy air. I tolerate it to visit my family a few times a year, but I much prefer they visit me.

I do not know the history of Hot House as well as I do Hell House, since it was not in our family until 2014. I have heard stories from my father-in-law though, since he had owned the house for many many years before we moved in. I know for a few years he allowed his brother to live there. His brother is a known hoarder and destroyed the home, a choice the home still has not recovered or been fully cleaned of. He took the house back in order to take care of us, his new family, and we have done our best to return the home to a comfortable place to live, but with rotting boards, crumbling foundations, and years of neglect piled in the dark corners, it just isn’t there.

Anyway, there is the intro for Hot House. This house is still owned by my mom and step-father.

I was raised in a Haunted House
(Picture grabbed from Google street view.)

I affectionately like to call my childhood home ‘Hell House.’ My family was the first people to own the house right after it was built in 1968. My mother, her sister, my grandmother, and grandfather moved into the three bedroom, one bathroom house not expecting to have inherited a nightmare. There are many stories about this house that predate my birth, told to me by the relatives they happened to, as well as stories from when I lived there. 

There were several entities inside Hell House that presented themselves to many people. I will make a post for each one, but the ones that come to mind right now are the children in the bathroom, the man in the bowler hat, the red light, and the stair creeper. Worse than what lived in the house was the entity that resided in the many miles of woods that loomed behind our home. We didn’t have a fun little nickname for the thing in the woods. All the families on our dead end street knew about the thing in the woods, and discussed its activities openly and often. It was unanimously understood that the thing in the woods was a threat.

I feel I should mention that the people in my life did not all start out as believers, but everyone who spent any time in the houses on that dead end came out with a new perspective and could no longer be skeptical of our claims. There were even people (like my uncle who married into the family and wasn’t used to the horror like we were) who refused to spend even one night in Hell House due to the constant activity that made the paranormal impossible to ignore. 

Hell House was lost to our family in 2009, but the 41 years we owned it, or rather it owned us, still offered me a wealth of knowledge, experience, stories, and a lifelong obsession with honing my gifts to better understand the realm of the unknown. What once filled me with fear now excites me to my core. I will be forever grateful.

Hell House: Kids in the Tub

Demons are known to take the form of children to gain people’s trust. I believe this waa the case for the kids in our bathtub, seeing as no one ever died in the house and no one ever owned it before my family.  But demons are drawn to negativity, and I had some of my darkest times alone in the shower at that house. Though I will say, the kids never harmed me.

The kids appeared to be a young boy and girl, about kindergarten age, in overalls. The girl wore pigtails. Both were starkly blond. They only ever showed up in the bathroom, and could usually be seen playing on the floor together through the sliding glass door. They were never there if you looked out the crack or opened the door. You could also hear them talking to each other, though I believe they were one entity because they moved at the same time and were never seen apart.

The only way I got them to stay silent was for me to sing. They tended to knock mp3 players off the sink, but if I sang, they sat silent and still, listening to me. I sang to them in every shower once I figured this out, and even tried to step up my game with new songs and better quality for them. But my favorite story of the kids was a day I was terribly sick. I silently started my shower and heard them say in unison “why aren’t you singing?” I explained that I was very sick and couldn’t sing.

I shit you not, those kids started singing to me! They repeated some of my favorite songs. I cried int the tub, overwhelmed by their kindness. When I got out my mom asked me if that had been the kids she heard singing (Everyone who showered there heard and saw the kids, they weren’t a secret or doubted by anyone) and said they sounded nice.

Hell House: Radio Ghost

There were many individual spirits in Hell House that I got to know over time. At first it confused me why there were ghosts in a house that had never had any residents other than our family. No deaths. I have come to learn now that all the spirits of the house were inhuman in some manner. Some kind, some not so much. The first of these spirits that I met, I lovingly named Radio Ghost.

Radio Ghost was a poltergeist who enjoyed making his presence known by turning on radios or the TV very loudly. At first he haunted my mother, and later, me. The first time I was aware of him was a night in 2003. It was a school night in the spring. For my birthday my parents got me a nice stereo. Just as I fell asleep, it turned on full blast. Scared the shit out of me. Had to always keep any noise making electronic unplugged at night in that house.

Radio Ghost had a very specific vibration. He felt playful in a way. I noticed, when I felt sick or sad there would always be a butt print in the bed like someone was sitting there. I once asked him to stand up if he was Radio Ghost. The print lifted.

Radio Ghost ended up being my friend through the whole time I lived there. He assisted me in keeping my room a safe space from the other less kind spirits of the house. I allowed him to view the room as his in the spiritual plane while sharing physical space with me, in turn for him keeping the others out. In 2009 when we lost the house I had a tearful goodbye with Radio Ghost that ended with my phone randomly playing a song. I can’t remember what song it was, but it was a sappy love song about two lover’s parting. I cried super hard. Radio Ghost never stepped out of the house, I never felt his vibrations anywhere but inside, so I sadly feel he is a friend of the past. I would love the chance, however, to visit with him again.

Hell House: Drums in the Deep

Hell House had a curious habit that even our guests would notice. It could happen in the day, but was almost assured to happen at night, starting around 10pm and ending at 1.30am. My family called it the Drums in the Deep cuz we are all nerds who love LotR. To be honest though, it was more like the Jumanji drums. Rhythmic, deep drums from the basement.

It always started really quiet, like the house had a heart beat barely audible over the TV or conversation, but come midnight it was sometimes so loud it was impossible to sleep through. I wish I could tell you that I went into the basement while the drums beat to see what it was. I wish I had even one story of me being brave enough to look. But I don’t. The drums scared me to death. Usually when they started I would retreat to my room with headphones and loud music, or a friend’s house out of fear.

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: 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.