My Haunted Life, pt. 3

(Read previous entries in My Haunted Life: Part 1 and Part 2)

On August 6^th, 2002 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was making its first appearance on DVD. My roommate was still in Minnesota and a couple of friends came over the night before the DVD release, with our intent being to pick up the DVD at midnight from Wal-Mart. One of those friends asked to play my roommate’s guitar and since my roommate always let him, I told him to go upstairs and get it from the bedroom. Now, my roommate’s bedroom was in an obvious addition to the house: it was just off the kitchen and up some stairs in a kind of tri-level fashion, except that it had its own “basement,” which we used as a computer room, and was somewhere halfway between the main level and the regular basement. So, we basically had four stories, with one story being only a half floor up and having just my roommate’s bedroom and one other story being on the way to the basement.

Well, my friend went up the short stairs to the first and a half floor bedroom and fairly quickly came back down. I asked him where the guitar was and he said he couldn’t find it. None of the lights would work in my roommate’s bedroom. We all thought it was weird that my roommate would let the lights burn out – he had three lamps. I don’t think any of us gave it any further thought and we went and bought Fellowship of the Ring as planned.

When we arrived back at the house, one of us (I don’t remember which one) noticed that the lights were on in my roommate’s bedroom. I asked my friend if he’d been sure they were out and he said that he’d tried them all and couldn’t get them to work. I told him he could grab the guitar then, but he refused to go up there. I said it was probably a short in the wiring; he was being ridiculous and I decided to go up there myself. The other two accompanied me up the stairs and into the bedroom. All three of us entered and I pointed out the guitar in the closet. We walked into the center of the room.

All of the lights went out.

Faster than I would have reckoned was humanly possible, we ran back to the kitchen. Out of breath, the three of us tried convincing each other that it was a wiring problem, though in our minds I’m pretty sure none of us believed it. We tried faking anything other than the truth that we were three very scared college-aged guys freaking out in a kitchen. It had to be the wiring. I said I’d go up and turn the light switch off to make sure we didn’t burn the house down.

I went upstairs, alone this time, and stood in the doorway of the darkened room. I reached my hand through the door and around the corner, feeling the light switch. Sure enough, it was already turned off. I hurried back to the kitchen and assured the others that we wouldn’t be burning the house down that night and the light was off. Somehow, the three of us managed to go downstairs and forget about the event, watching Fellowship of the Ring and crashing on the couches and recliners in the basement.

The next morning, I was the first to wake up, around 8:00 AM. I headed back upstairs and into the kitchen. I just so happened to glance up towards my roommate’s bedroom.

The lights were back on.

I walked up the stairs and saw the switch in the “on” position, which was not how I left it. Turning it off, I went back downstairs and pretended nothing had happened.

A short time later on, those same two friends would spend the night again (there was constantly someone crashing at the house) and we would all sleep on the couches in the basement. One of them had to get up early for work and threw his shirt in the dryer to try taking out some wrinkles while I jumped in the shower. Myself and the other friend stayed in our places on the couch and recliner, respectively. After a couple of minutes, the dryer turned off. I thought it odd that my friend only set it for a couple of minutes, but I tried to go back to sleep. Then the dryer turned back on. A couple of minutes later, it turned back off. At that point, I was wide awake and lying on the couch. Something was going on with the dryer, again turning back on followed only minutes later by turning off. It repeated this five or six times before I finally jumped up and ran to it, threw open its door and turned it off for good.

“What’s going on?” my other friend asked from the recliner. I asked him if he had heard the thing turning off and on too and he said that he had and was wondering what it was doing. I checked all of the settings on the dryer – everything seemed to be normal. Yet it had been starting and stopping on its own over a period of maybe ten to fifteen minutes. It was weird and I was a little freaked out. To the best of my knowledge, the dryer had never done that before or did that since.

Another one of the weird things that happened in the house didn’t happen to me, but to my roommate that owned the house and I’ve only heard the story second hand through him and the others involved. One day, my sister and a mutual friend decided to come over. They pulled up in front of the house and started up the sidewalk towards the front door. They got halfway there when my roommate opened the door, completely white and visibly shaken. They asked him what was wrong, but he said nothing and didn’t want to talk about it. After an hour, he finally seemed to calm down and they asked again. “It was really weird,” he started. He’d been lying on the couch in the living room and was kind of half asleep when he suddenly heard the voice of an old woman say, “Get up. Your friends are here.” Of course, he’d jumped up off of the couch to find himself alone. And when he looked out the window, my sister’s car was just pulling up.

My final week in the house arrived and we were throwing a huge party. My roommate had taken half of the day off of work and the two of us were cleaning up around the house. All that was left to be cleaned was the basement and my roommate still had to run to the store to buy some of the food. While he was doing that, I went downstairs and began sweeping and vacuuming and all the fun stuff associated with cleaning. While I was down there, I suddenly began hearing footsteps upstairs. At first, I thought that maybe my roommate was home but then the footsteps turned to running back and forth and sounded like a house full of people were upstairs and in a hurry. That freaked me out, but I lied to myself and said that it was just water through the pipes. I needed to finish cleaning the basement and didn’t want to tell my roommate that I hadn’t because I’d been too scared to stay down there. Especially since he didn’t like talking about the house being haunted as it was. I continued what I was doing and the running subsided. I finished and began up the stairs.

No one can ever tell me that the paranormal isn’t real, for what happened next is the one thing that solidified me from being on the fence about it to becoming a believer in there being something more than what we normally can sense. If I had to pick one thing and one thing only from my experiences and say, “This is real. This was not imagined. This was not the product of an over-active imagination,” the following would be it.

I was going up the stairs after cleaning the basement when quite clearly I felt a hand place itself upon my shoulder and give me a push up the stairs.

That was enough. I freaked out and ran the rest of the way up the stairs, through the kitchen and into the living room. I took a seat in the corner of our sectional couch, windows on each wall next to me and a clear view of the hall to the kitchen and the hall to my bedroom and the empty bedroom. I sat there and waited until I saw my roommate’s car pull up the driveway. Once he was home, I got up, said nothing, and continued helping him out with the party.

That night, I slept in my bedroom. A few friends crashed in the basement and my sister slept on the couch in the living room. Sometime in the night, she said she was woken by what sounded like people running up and down the hallway. She too got the feeling of being unwanted and knew that she wasn’t supposed to be there at that moment. When I woke in the morning, she was asleep on my bedroom floor.

That was the last night I slept in the house, though I still had nearly a week left on the lease. I began moving my things out and opted to spend my nights at my parents’ house instead. On the last day that I moved things out, my roommate pulled me aside.

“Jesse, I suspected this place was haunted before you moved in,” he told me. He talked about one time he’d gotten out of the shower and noticed that written in the condensation on the mirror were the words, “I’m here.”

I laughed. “That was me,” I admitted. I’d written it a couple of months before moving in and was wondering if anyone had ever noticed my prank. My roommate called me a jerk but relief filled him. There’d been other odd things that happened to him before my arrival but he was glad to know that the one that scared him the most hadn’t been real. I often wonder what other weird things he’d experienced. And if they still happened after I’d left.