My time in the 400-year old haunted house is over. I really didn’t witness anything that I can definitively say was a ghost, but since I first told you about the house a few weeks ago, I’ve heard a bunch more stories and I’d like to share them with you.
I’ve met some awesome people so far on my trip, but the Air BnB guest (I’ll call him “Matt”) who stayed upstairs is the most unique. He and I saw eye to eye on a lot of the world’s issues. We shared a lot of our opinions on world events, and on his last day, I wanted him to share one more thing with me – his haunted house stories. When I brought up the topic, he said he hadn’t heard that the house was haunted, but he definitely had some things to say. It was as if he had these stories to tell, but didn’t want anybody to think he was crazy, so he’d been bottling them up inside. Now, he finally had somebody to share them with.
When he first got to the house, he stayed in the front room on the top floor of the three-story farm house. At some point, he had to move to the back room because somebody else had reserved his room (the front room) before he told the owner that he wanted to extend his stay. He gladly moved to the back room, being an easy-going guy.
He probably wishes he’d been quicker and more diligent about extending his stay in the front room, instead of sleeping in the back room.
His first night in the back room, he woke up from a bad dream. He said it was about the very room he was staying in. He couldn’t recall the exact details of the dream because it was a few weeks prior, but he vividly remembered that it was a dream about something bad that had happened in that room. He kept telling me, “It was a bad feeling. Very, very bad.”
The next morning, he was conversing with one of owners. We’ve all had people ask us, “Did you sleep OK last night?” Matt said the owner asked him how he slept, but not in the way that most people would ask. He said she had a very genuinely concerned, heart-felt, curious tone to her voice. He told her he had slept well.
Even creepier than his dream was the story he told me about his door. He had the window open only an inch or two. The bedroom door was latched shut, there was only a very small breeze outside, and no other windows were open on the third floor, so there was no draft.
In an instant, the door unlatched itself and violently swung open. He said that was when he really started to ask himself if he believed the house was haunted.
Matt also noticed that the owners had put a fake lavender plant in the room. Lavender has been said to drive off the evil eye and chase away demons and evil spirits. The lavender plant stands over a small desk. Matt said he had always had this feeling that he shouldn’t stand in that spot – that he shouldn’t be where the small desk is – so he never went to that corner of the room, unless it was to quickly throw something in the trash.
When Sally’s brother (I’ll call him “Jack”) came to visit, he shared some stories from the approximately 10 years he’d lived in the house. Like me, Jack was very skeptical, but open-minded about ghosts.
A lavender plant similar to the fake plant in the back bedroom.
Even though he confirmed the story Sally had told me about seeing the little girl ghost floating near his bed, he was sure to tell me that he thought it could’ve been simply that he expected his sister to be there, sneaking up on him, so he may have just been seeing things that weren’t there.
On a few occasions, Jack had slept in the back bedroom on the third floor (the same room that Matt had experienced). In the winter, he said no matter how hot he made the radiator, even when it was piping hot, “the room was ice cold”. When he opened the bedroom door, the area outside his door was always warm. Being skeptical, he said he thought it could also just be because it’s a 400-year old house that has spotty insulation. When I asked Mike about this, he told me he’d never experienced anything like that, however, he stayed in the back room in the fall and early winter, so perhaps it wasn’t cold enough outside to experience the same thing.
Being in a cold room clearly didn’t convince Jack. If there are ghosts in this house, they’d have to be heard, so they chose a musician to listen to their sounds. Jack told me they had a musician staying in the back bedroom (again, the same room). The musician was recording himself singing and playing guitar when he heard three knocks on his bedroom door “knock, knock (pause) knock”. He stopped playing his music, opened his door, and nobody was there. He went downstairs and asked Jack’s mom (the only other person in the house) why she knocked on his door and ran away. She said she’d been downstairs the whole time. He retrieved his recording, rewound the tape, and the two of them listened carefully. There it was. They both heard the knocking on the recording.
Another audible ghost story came from Jack’s mom’s friends, who was living there for five years. One day, while in the back room, he heard a small child crying. It sounded like it was coming from the second floor. First, the crying started lightly, then it slowly turned into hysterical, loud crying. Concerned, he opened his bedroom door and, as he walked down the stairs, the crying got even louder and he could tell it was certainly coming from second floor. As soon as he opened the door at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor, the crying immediately stopped. Sally and Jack were about 15 and 12 at the time, and there were no small children in the house at the time.
This man also said he saw the rocking chair outside his room rock itself slightly and slowly.
A door latch, similar to the one on the back bedroom.
I’d also like to add one more detail to the second story that Sally told me about the little boy ghost she saw who was looking up at the trap door in the ceiling of her bedroom. I’ll give you one guess as to which room is on the other side of that trap door. That’s right, the back room on the third floor.
These stories were from years ago, so I brought up the topic with Jack’s wife. She said, just that morning, when she was sitting in front of the mirror and putting on her make up, she felt her shirt tugging. Her son wasn’t in the room and the dog was lying down clear across the room. She continued putting on her make up and felt another distinct tug on her shirt. She again looked for the dog, who was still laying in the same spot.
I’d love to tell you that I experienced something, too… wait, who am I kidding? That’s not true. I’m actually glad I didn’t really experience anything! I already told you about my closet light story. Besides that, I definitely heard a sound while getting out of the shower one day. It’s hard to describe. It sounded like wood crashed, scratched, cracked, or hit something, all at once. The sound lasted about a second. I peaked around the corner and the dog was sleeping in the middle of the bed. Nobody else was in the house. Again, it’s a 400-year old house, so it could’ve just been that the wood was still settling.
With that part of my life behind me, even after hearing all of those stories about the house, I can honestly say that my opinions about ghosts haven’t changed. I’m still not sure if they exist. But I’ll tell you this much: Like Jack, I would never choose to sleep in the back room on the top floor of that 400-year old, three-story farm house. No way. No how.
