Okay, here's this.
I grew up, and spent the first quarter-century of my life, in a very old house by North American standards; it was built sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, as one of two very similar in-patient cottages for people who visited the doctor. For a hundred, hundred fifty years, there was always a doctor next door; the last was Dr Van Wort, who died maybe fifteen years ago. Last I know, a young family moved in.
Over the years, the house was gradually modified. If you were to carefully study, you could kind of reconstruct what it must have first looked like, and in what decades the alterations were made. The kitchen area, for instance, that connected the entranceway and what was once a corridor connecting the living room and the east wing of the house, was added in the 1960s -- as, probably, was the "new" basement under that section of the house. The corridor itself was added in the early twentieth century. It connected the main cottage to an outside shed (turning that into a large room, with its own door to the outside), and added an attic and a bathroom. Around when I was born, my parents added a large room above the kitchen, connecting the old upstairs to the slightly less old attic. Later an enclosed porch was added, running along the whole of the old portion of the house in an L shape.
So the place was a little convoluted. Old things opened into new things. Barriers were removed and built. Several bits made no sense, architecturally. It was a little like growing up in the Winchester Mystery House.
My parents moved in just before I was born; my sister was about ten at the time. When I was very young, my parents' old bedroom was in the old part of the house, upstairs at the end of the hall; later they moved to the room above the kitchen, turning the old room into a sort of dumping ground for dusty old crates of my father's dusty old books. For about twenty years its door had a panel missing, where my father once punched it out in a burst of anger, leaving a jagged, roughly rectangular hole at the top-left.
There was always something weird about that room. One night when I was three, I was lying in bed with my mother. The door was open about perpendicular to the jam, its missing panel opening like a window into the corner where my father kept a filing cabinet. I was perfectly awake; I had been unfocusing my eyes to stare at those red pinpricks you can sometimes see swimming in front of your vision. This was a new discovery for me, that night; I tried describing it to my mother, but she was more interested in sleeping. She told me it was just shadows, and to go to bed.
Well, clearly that wasn't. But soon I began to feel very strange, and I looked over to my right, to the open door. The missing panel -- there was someone watching me through it. A looming, dark figure of a man, darker than the surrounding darkness. Where the eyes might have been were two dull red dots. I was unsettled, but it didn't do anything. It just kept watching. I kicked my mother to try to wake her; she just grunted and thrashed back at me. For what seemed like ages I lay like that, watching it watch me. Then abruptly it turned aside and was gone, and the feeling passed.
So okay. Just the once, a three-year-old, in the dark -- nothing too abnormal there, you'd think. But then I kept seeing the frickin' thing. And usually in that room. It wasn't like clockwork; I might go months or years without seeing it. Then there it would be again.
After my parents moved down the hall and my father began filling the place with boxes, the room became a kind of cluttered guest bedroom. Thing is, everyone who slept there reported feeling very disturbed the next morning. I had a friend who stayed in there once and refused to again. He was seriously freaked out. He cited all kinds of little details, in themselves fairly innocuous. The sum of it was, any other time he stayed over, he slept on the couch downstairs.
One summer night, maybe around 1995, my parents and I were sitting in the living room, watching television; I was on a mat on the floor, futzing with something; they were on opposite ends of the room. Suddenly to my left, the glass door to a record cabinet -- the one holding my old game consoles -- exploded outward. Safety glass sprayed across the floor in a wave, fizzling and popping. For several minutes afterward, the glass kept cracking and jumping as if on a hot griddle. No one was near it at the time, but it was clearly visible to all three of us. So that was a little weird.
For the first few years of college, I continued to stay with my parents. I did, however, move to the larger bedroom next door -- my parents' old room. I poured in weeks of effort to clear the place out and redecorate, all by myself. It's then that our friend started to come solidly back into the picture. For years I had irregularly seen that shadowy, hunched-over form in the living room or the entranceway and stairs, or around the door to the basement. I always tried to dismiss it, but this line of terror always shot right up my spine. I would become cold, and the hair on my arms would stand up.
Sometimes I got these strange moments when suddenly I would turn on all the lights full power and close all the curtains, lest faces look in at me. As they do. It was only really the old part of the house that was a problem. I felt fine once I retreated to, say, the kitchen, or the hallway by the bathroom. Or my parents' new bedroom. It was irregular enough that I didn't much think of it when moving to my new room.
And, well, that's when the fun started. Fairly frequently I would be lying in bed, and I would look up, and there the shape would be at the foot, looming over me. Or I would be at the computer late at night, and I would sense something behind me. I would look over my left shoulder, and there it would be, inches away, intangible, but darker than the surrounding darkness. Often as not, with those eyes. Generally I would spring up, hold back a shriek, slam on the lights, and run out of the room. For the next few years this happened, I don't know, maybe once every month or two. Sometimes I felt something was following me around the house.
Then in... when was it? It would have been after my father left. Maybe 2002, after I returned from Orono? I was, I believe, in my room; my mother came knocking, clearly shaken. She asked if I had heard her just a moment ago. No, I said, I was oblivious. What was up?
She had been rummaging in the new part of the basement. You go down those stairs, you can turn right or you can turn left. Go left, and you're in the new basement. It's cobwebby and damp and can flood sometimes, but it's just a basement. Turn right and you're under the old part of the house, by the furnace. I don't even know how deep it goes, or what's in there, as somehow I've never dared to go more than a few feet in. So she had been to the left, looking through some boxes. She chanced to look up, into the old basement, and she saw a dark, looming, hunched-over figure staring at her. She shrieked threw something, rocketed up the stairs, and locked the door.
As she got to the part of the figure, I butted in and described it to her -- and she just stared at me. Yes, that was it exactly. I said, oh, yeah. I've been seeing that my whole life. Later we told my sister about all this. Normally she's the practical one, frustrated with both my mother's and my own flightiness. And she was also unsurprised. Yes, she said, there was always something wrong with that house. She said she had always refused to go into the old basement. If my father asked her to go in there to get a tool, she told him to get it himself, because there was no way she was going down there.
Now here's something sort of interesting. If you line them up, the living room is directly above the old basement. My parents' old bedroom is directly above the living room. The worst areas of the house are all aligned vertically over the same space.
...
I'm sure given the effort this all can be explained as some mix of psychology and environmental factors. But how boring!
) that I can't find one person who had something unexplainable happen. That says a lot.
