My Haunted Life, pt. 2

Last June, I wrote the first in what I intended to be a series of articles detailing my own experiences with the paranormal. As often happens, life got in the way and I forgot about my planned series of articles until recently. At long last, I present the second part (to get caught up, check out My Haunted Life, pt. 1).

In the Spring of 2002, I lived in a house in Rock Island, Illinois with two friends. The house was in a quiet neighborhood, just down the street from a grade school. Plain and unassuming, when I moved in at the beginning of April, I had no reason to suspect that anything was different about the place at all. I had spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends that lived there in the months before my own occupancy. I’d crashed on one of the couches in the basement many times instead of choosing to drive the half hour back out to the country in the dead of night. In all that time leading up to moving in, nothing had even hinted at any oddities.

The first instance came almost a month after my arrival. It was the end of April and I was home alone in the early afternoon. Both of my roommates were at work and I didn’t have to go to work at the television station where I was a studio camera operator until later on in the afternoon. I was watching TV in the basement (it was preferable over the 13” television in my small bedroom) and it got to be about the time when I needed to start getting ready for work. I got up, turned the TV off, and began walking up the stairs when I heard it.

The unmistakable giggle of children playing was coming from behind me in the basement.

Immediately, I turned around. At this point I wasn’t scared and thought that perhaps I had left the television on unintentionally. So, I went back downstairs only to find the TV was in fact turned off. Finding that odd, and not yet willing to admit that maybe something was going on, I quickly went upstairs to take a look outside.

Now, on the north side of the house, which I was closest to when I heard the giggling, our neighbors were other college-aged guys. The neighbors on the other side were older people and we didn’t actually have any children directly on either side of the house. This didn’t stop me from taking a look to see if there were any kids outside, and so I walked out the front door.

No children were anywhere to be seen on the school day, during school hours. In fact, no one was outside at all. I went back inside and thought to myself, “Well, isn’t that weird?” but didn’t consider it paranormal at that point. At that point in my life, I didn’t yet believe in paranormal activity. It was a bunch of nonsense and my religious beliefs didn’t seem to allow for it, though it did leave room for angels and demons. And surely, there weren’t demons in a house with three, devoutly Christian guys living in it. I was stumped.

Had that been the only instance, I’d have forgotten about it, or at least, filed it under “random oddities” and moved on. Yet, over the next couple months, other weird things would happen. Foot steps would be heard going down the hall or up the stairs when no one was around. What sounded like a cupboard or two opening and closing could be heard from other rooms, but when investigated, nothing would be out of place. Still, I went about my life. There were weird things and I was beginning to think that maybe there might be something going on, but what that could be, I wasn’t sure of yet.

One of the weirdest things to me was that we always got a ton of mail for the house with the correct address but with different residents’ names. At least a half dozen people had called that place home before my friend had bought that house. I always found that odd and occasionally wonder if the weirdness had anything to do with a rotating cast of tenants – whether the cause of their leaving or caused by it.

A couple months after first hearing the giggling in the basement, I heard it again. I was in the kitchen on an afternoon much like the previous, and heard the children from the staircase that branched off of the room. Instead of going downstairs first, I took a look outside. There weren’t any kids that I could see. I decided to go and check the television. As before, it was definitely off. I started to feel eerie at that point and promptly got out of the basement.

Something was going on. I’d heard the giggling twice while myself and others had heard the footsteps and cupboards. For the first time, I thought, “Maybe this place is haunted.”

At some point shortly after that, I finally told some of my friends what I was beginning to suspect. A few of them actually spoke up and said that they would occasionally get really uneasy in the basement; that at times it was fine and other times they would get the feeling that they were unwanted and shouldn’t be there. I could relate: I frequently hung out in the basement and more often than not, found it comfortable, with its two recliners, two couches, dart board, TV and surround sound system. But every now and then, I too would get the weirdest sensation from that part of the house. It was kind of heavy, like a pressure mixed with emotions of sadness and gloom. I can’t really explain it other than that, but on those nights or days when I’d start to feel that while going downstairs, I’d turn around and just avoid that area for awhile. It wasn’t a constant fear of the basement. It’d just come and go and I hadn’t connected it to possible paranormal activity until that point.

At the beginning of August, one of my roommates moved out and I knew that at the end of August, I would be leaving too, not because of any paranormal activity but simply because I wasn’t making any money at work and needed to get on better financial footing before living outside of my parents’ house. The home owner went on a business trip to Minnesota, something he frequently did in those days. I ended up having a couple of friends over to hang out and at the end of the night, we all crashed upstairs on the three couches in the living room. As we were lying there, suddenly a noise came from the kitchen.

It sounded like the faucet had turned itself on.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered. My friends answered that they did and asked what it was. They both knew the stories of the house and the suspicion that the place was haunted. They asked me what the noise was and I replied, “The faucet turned on by itself.”

Immediately, they both wanted to leave and one of my buddies suggested that we go crash at his house five minutes away. I began laughing: it’d been the ice maker kicking on. I’d heard the noise long before and discovered that it sounded like the kitchen sink after I’d investigated it. I explained to them what it was and eventually they calmed down, but for a while there, they’d been pretty scared (what can I say? Sometimes, I’m a jerk, haha). Despite my faking that one, there were other legit instances that would happen that month.