INWhen I was 8, my parents bought a house in Burlingame, California. They got a great deal on the house and loved the location and the town.
I remember the first time I walked into the house I said to my mom, “It’s so dark in here.” My mom assured me that with a lick of paint and novel curtains it would be brilliant and radiant. I think the darkness I noticed wasn’t just the gloomy walls and curtains, there was something much darker hidden in the seams of the house. That darkness didn’t stay hidden for long.
Before we moved our stuff into the house, my dad and one of his friends, Dick, went to the house to refinish the hardwood floors. They had a lot of tough times ahead of them. When they turned on the sander, the radio would start crackling, when they turned off the radio, the lights would come on. Then the power would go out. They checked the fuses, but none were blown.
My dad called the power company, the man who came out said there was nothing wrong with the connection between the power pole and the house. He told my dad he had to call an electrician. The electrician witnessed a strange and inexplicable connection between unrelated switches and a reaction from distant locations throughout the house. The electrician told my dad the entire house needed to be rewired.
To their surprise after this announcement all electrical appliances and lights were working as expected. Everything returned to normal operation at this time. This has happened many times over the years. We just had to wait it out as there was nothing wrong with the fuses, fuse box, connection to the electric pole. There was no technical explanation. I will say that being in a completely gloomy house due to the actions of undetectable intruders was quite scary. We were at their mercy and they had little to no mercy.
When we moved into the house we immediately noticed that sometimes we would hear what sounded like someone walking across the floor or there would be what sounded like knocking on various doors throughout the house. The back door would bang open and shut, followed by what sounded like footsteps coming up the stairs.
My parents explained to me that these sounds were the sound of the house settling. Often when I went to bed at night I would hear bulky breathing right next to my face. My parents told me that this was the sound of the boiler at night when it was heating the water.
I heard my mother calling me and when I answered she said she didn't call me and vice versa.
I often found long auburn hair in my bedroom. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't know anyone with auburn hair.
My parents got to know the neighbors. They told Mom and Dad they hoped they lived there longer than the other people who moved in. The house was always sold, never rented, but it was infrequent for a family to live there longer than 3 months. The neighbors had lived next door for over 20 years.
There were times when I would wake up and someone would grab me by the ankles and pull me off the end of the bed. It terrified me. When I told my parents, they assured me it was just a nightmare.
I would wake up in the morning and find strands of hair cut out of my hair. They would be miniature, jagged strands that I couldn't style. My mom told me it was because of the curlers I was using.
One afternoon I was in my bedroom and I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was staring at me. It scared me so I decided to go out into the living room. Since I felt so uneasy I went down to the first step in front of the door and reached around the corner to turn off the lithe. When I turned off the lithe I saw a youthful woman sitting on the bed right next to where I was sitting. She had long auburn hair. She was crystal clear. I didn't believe in ghosts. My parents had told me over and over that such things didn't exist. Now I was faced with the terrifying reality of a ghost sitting on my bed.
I ran to the front bathroom, slammed the door shut, and locked it. That's when it hit me that if she was a ghost, and what they said about ghosts was true, then she could walk through the wall and I'd be locked in with her. I opened the door and ran to the living room at the front of the house.
In the morning I told my parents about my experience. They exchanged glances and then told me they knew the house was haunted. The ghost I described to them was the one they called “Florence”. It took them about 3 years to believe the house was haunted. They didn't until they exhausted themselves creeping around the house trying to find the intruders making all those sounds and never found anything. One night they had just gone to bed and turned off the lithe and there were two heads floating at the end of their bed staring at them.
They both saw these phenomena and could not deny what they saw.
This led them to utilize a Ouija board to try to communicate with spirits. Knowing what I know now about the reaction of earthbound spirits to the board, I am certain that this practice only made things worse. There were many spirits. I only saw two fully manifested apparitions, but my parents saw and experienced many more. I saw “things”, but only 2 specific ones.
A common experience was seeing objects, such as books, flying around the room. One time, my mother was sleeping on the couch in the living room. The couch seemed to shake. She opened her eyes and discovered that the couch was being transported, floating around the room with her on it.
It could be explained that the door itself opening and closing is due to the door not being latched properly and the wind causing it to open and close. This explanation does not apply to the sliding door between the second and third bedrooms. These sliding doors would often open or close with a bang. This was very disturbing.
Several times my parents came into my room in the middle of the night to see why I was screaming. I was not aware that I was screaming. As far as I knew, I was sleeping like a rock. They described the screams as if I was “seeing bloody heads rolling across the floor.”
There were times when my parents behaved uncharacteristically. They were much stricter than you might expect.
Shortly before she died, my mother told me that her life change had made her “weird.” I asked her what she meant, and she told me that she had once been talking to our elderly neighbor over the fence. She said that it took all her strength to force herself to return to our house without attacking or strangling the neighbor. I told her, “Mom, it wasn’t the life change—it was the spirits. The spirits made them say and do things that were out of character for them. I could see “it” in their eyes and mannerisms—that they were “different,” not themselves.
I have experienced moments where I have been attacked, pushed and brutalized by spirits. I told my parents about this and they told me that I had let my imagination get the better of me.
The invalidation of my experiences made my life very complex because I had nowhere to turn for facilitate.
Visiting family members and friends have often had the opportunity to experience a ghostly encounter, from basic footsteps and knocks on the door, to having their blankets ripped off by undetectable hands in the middle of the night.
One time my aunt was at our birthday party. It was too delayed to go home, but she didn't want to sleep in the house. She slept in our camper with my teenage slumber party.
One time we were watching TV when Hans Holzer and Sybil Leek were visiting San Francisco. They were ghost hunters. They announced that if anyone thought their house was haunted, they would be cheerful to come out and get rid of the ghosts. I begged my parents to call them. They wouldn't because they didn't want anyone in the area to know the house was haunted. They said that if they sold the house, that kind of information would prevent them from getting a good price. I was full of hope, then despondent.
When my parents retired and put the house up for sale, the spirits became especially lively. We occupied the house for 15 years and I think the spirits were quite cheerful with the arrangement.
He told my mom he wanted to move into a camper so they wouldn’t have to worry about constantly cleaning and preparing for the streams of real estate agents and potential buyers who would be milling around the house.
One morning my dad announced that he was lowering the price of the house significantly. We all tried to talk him out of it because we were counting on the profit from selling it to buy a property for retirement and eventually build a house. He wouldn't listen to our arguments.
The house was sold that day.
Mom and I sat in the kitchen while Dad walked the novel owners to the car. Mom and I heard the back door open and close with a bang. We heard footsteps on the back stairs. Together we stood up and looked down the hall to the stairwell. We could still hear footsteps on the stairs, but there was no sign of anyone.
Once they had moved all their belongings out of the house, handed in their keys, and vacated the property for good, Dad confessed to them why he had insisted on moving into the trailer and lowering the price of the house.
The night before we moved into the trailer, my dad woke up scared with a hand over his mouth and nose, choking him with the ghost of the man we had come to call Dave.
Dad was a sturdy guy, but he said it took all his strength to break free from the spirit's grip.
Dad turned to me and apologized for not believing me.
We heard that the original tenant of the house was a minister. I was pleased to think that the minister would pray for the spirits to drive the house out. The minister moved out almost immediately after moving in. After a series of short-term tenants, the house was replaced by an apartment building. Neighbors told my parents that the house had been moved. I don't know if the house was moved, and if so, I wondered if the spirits moved with the house or if they haunted the apartment building built on the site.
I know I would never want to go back and find out for myself.
