INWhen I was in fourth grade, my family moved into a house in Cypress, California. From the outside, it looked like any other house in the neighborhood, but inside, it was anything but normal. The layout of the floor had been changed by the previous owner, going from four bedrooms to one gigantic mezzanine. But there was something else about the house that, for a long time, only we kids were exposed to.
The first day we moved in, we saw a spice rack that was on the back of the counter. It had slid across the tile counter and over the edge, then crashed to the floor. Our parents didn't believe us when we told them, they just thought one of us had done it ourselves. But as the weeks went by, it happened again.
The clock in the kitchen would periodically bounce off the wall and land on the refrigerator 3 feet away, never hitting the ground. The TV and stereo would turn on by themselves, tuned to a station that had nothing but stationary. Three to four times a week we would hear scratching on the east side of the house, and there were no bushes or trees on that side. My younger sister and I would occasionally hear someone moving around in the upper closet when no one was there. My parents thought it was all our imagination, though, until one night.
My sister Kina and I, along with two other sisters, were up in her attic one night (which was on the east side of the house) watching TV. We started hearing music from music boxes on the other side of the attic where my two sisters' beds were. They decided to see what was going on and as soon as they turned the corner by the stairs, that's when it happened.
From outside Kinas's window came a voice, a whisper calling her name over and over. When he called her a third time, we were already descending the stairs, followed by my two sisters. They were running because when they reached the music boxes, they had stopped playing.
We ran to Dad, and after telling him what had happened, he decided to investigate. We followed him up the stairs to the window, all moving as one. But you could have heard a pin drop in the silence that fell after he opened the curtains. There were two smudged handprints on the window outside, and a noose was hanging from a roof beam. My Dad thought someone was trying to break in and called the police.
Upon arrival and checking the house and surrounding property, they found nothing. They told my dad that no one could have gotten into that side of the house from the outside, only from the inside. That's when they informed my dad of what had happened in the house many years earlier. It seemed that the owners, before the ones we got the house from, had a teenage daughter. One day they came home early to find her body swinging from the same window, and on the outside of the window were two smudged handprints. That's all my dad needed to hear. We moved out that week, realizing that for some reason she was still there and didn't want any other children in the house.
Every now and then I walk past that house in Cypress and I always feel like something is watching me. But to this day, when I hear something outside my window, I hesitate to look, afraid it might be looking my way.
