I grew up in an old Victorian farmhouse in the heart of the Adirondacks. I lived there on and off for over 13 years. This house was in my family for over 30 years. My mother purchased the house from my grandparents when I was 13. I lived there steady for over 3 years. I used to stay with my grandparents for months at a time while growing up. I remember, as a child, wondering, when the summertime arrived, which room would I be staying in. I would call them “good rooms” and “bad rooms”. I loved the house but I knew that there was more there than what met the eye.
When my mother moved us into the house, my brother and I were in our early teen years and just about to deal with our parents divorce. That was the purpose of the move, so my mother could leave my father. With this emotional trauma entering our lives, the ghosts fed off this energy and decided to have a field day. My brother hated the house and when alone he would leave on every light in every room. He hated the sounds and the vibes. I, on the other hand, left the house dark and hung out in my bedroom with the stereo cranked. My mother’s “LAW” was that we were not allowed to talk about the ghosts while we lived there.
I used to have terror dreams at night. Blood, gore and intense violence would permeate my dreams. I am not one for horror flicks ever, but my dreams with that house were on that level of violence. I have awoken many a night in cold sweats and screaming. My mood swings were vicious. I hated everything and wished to die. Depression is the key to spirit activity and communication. I had discovered that they communicate through emotions and they were speaking to me. This is why an individual “feels” them. The house had cold spots and the attic was too emotionally intense to trespass. I used to apologize before entering the attic to retrieve some trivial item left in storage. My brother used to beg me to go up there with him when he had to go up there. I slept under the main portion of the attic and would hear footsteps above me at night. The funny thing about the attic is that it had a locking doorknob. I have now since found out that in the early 1900′s, people in this area of the deep woods used to lock up mentally ill family members in their attics as a way to contain them. The person would either die of old age or abuse, (sexual, physical, neglect, let’s not forget mental as well). This reality was very common with these victims and often the real result of their lives ending. This would leave intense feelings left etched into the home long after the person or people died. Because some mental illnesses are genetic, often one would have both the abuser and the victims being closely related and living under the same roof.
My home was a boarding house in it’s earlier years. My grandmother purchased the house from a man (Mr. Lewis) who inherited it from two spinster aunts after the returning from the war (WW2). We have photographs of the house back in the 1800′s. We had figured out the age of the place as being closer to 200 years old. This house is located in the Northern part of the Adirondack Park (NY, USA) and it is literally surrounded by mountains. There is a river across the street called the Au Sable River. Because of this beautiful scenery, my grandmother turned it back into a bed and breakfast for a brief time in the 70′s and early 80′s and to capitalize on the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, NY. When my mother bought the house she turned it into our family home to raise a new family there with her new husband and his children. The house had two ghosts that we knew of positively. I went into a trance one night chatting with a friend and they gave their names as Joshua and Jessie; one male and one female spirit. Many days later while chatting about our haunting with family, this friend brought this conversation up and how I went “weird” on him. (The female did make a physical materialization for me on one occasion by walking through my door and up to my closet, which then the stereo record player jumped across the record. Otherwise, most of the time their game was to terrorize the hell out of the people in the house by making loud noises, horror dreams, and hiding personal items or sharp knives. My mother used to scream at us that we were supplying a person for a new home with all the household items that was missing. Knives, towels, silverware, spoons, sheets, money and jewelry were often the target of these spirits. Sometimes we would find the missing items, but more often we would not.
I wanted to give a brief history before I describe into detail the scenarios of their games. One night while my grandmother was on holiday, my aunt was alone in the house. That night the ghosts attacked and gave a startling presentation of their behavior and personality. She claims that she heard major banging in the back of the house, almost like a bear throwing propane tanks against the house. The banging continued to get louder until she saw a black figure float down the stairs toward her. She yelled some profanity at it and grabbed a bottle of vodka and proceeded to drink herself into oblivion thinking this would solve the problem. The next morning after she complained about the ghosts to my mother on the phone, she hung up and went into the backyard to see the damage; everything was in it’s place and nothing was even scratched. The propane tanks were even in their place like the event from the night before was just a play of one’s imagination.
Another story of this house, when my grandparents bought the place my grandfather went about repairing it. The house was in poor shape and he was painting. Out of the blue, something pushed the ladder while he was on it. He fell to the ground, luckily he wasn’t hurt. Many years later my grandmother was talking to me about the house, she said that the noise in the attic was so loud at night that it would wake her up. She said that she used to yell up to the squirrels (in combat boots) to “shut their mouths” and the noise would stop. She is and has always been a disbeliever of the spirits in spite of the heavy activity. She is from Holland and english is her second (maybe fourth or fifth) language. I didn’t have the heart to inform her that 1st) squirrels are not nocturnal, 2nd) squirrels don’t understand dutch broken english, and 3) if it was an animal, that they wouldn’t have stopped making noise because she commanded it.
My mother was in bed one evening and she heard footsteps coming down the hall. She figured it must be one of us kids had returned home that evening and on our way to bed. She heard the footsteps stop at her door and then witnessed the doorknob turn back and forth, repeat, back and forth; but nothing opened the door or came into the room. She finally got out of her bed, ready to rip to shreds the person behind the door, for playing around; she threw the door open and surprised herself, there was no one there. Imagine her surprise to find that the only other person besides herself home that evening was her sleeping husband (who was laying right next to her at the moment of the incident).
Another classic example of the spirits being active was when my step-sister got up in the morning and found water in the Hotshot, all set up waiting for her. (A Hotshot is a machine that heats water for a cup of tea, etc one cup at a time). Because of the age of the house and the poor electrical set-up, it was family law to not leave things plugged-in to prevent an electrical fire. Well, this was not only filled with water, but it was plugged in and pulled out for her in the morning.
When I got older, I went to bed and asked the universe why I was afraid of those spirits, what did they do to me. I had a memory return in the form of a dream with me being in bed as a little child and them dancing all over me. Most of the time I sleep so deep that I literally black out, but on rare occasions I can get answers to questions I ask before closing my eyes. The extreme attack on my psyche as a child caused me to forget many of my experiences there. I used to hear the noises, the footsteps up and down the halls, black shapes roaming the house, terror dreams: of murder (normally with me as a witness), people coming after me in my dreams, and personal possessions vanishing were common happenings. The spirit manifestation in my bedroom, noises in the backyard and many other things were a daily event for all of us. The most common way for spirits to get my attention was through my emotions which swung like a pendulum. As for spirit photography, our photos always had orbs or white streaks. We thought that our film was old or that our lighting was poor in the room. We weren’t educated on spirit photography.
The house was finally and questionably sold to an odd fellow and his wife. The issue of ownership was a problem, and has stayed that way to present day. This man was a Vietnam vet and went insane at the beginning of winter. He went after his wife and tried to kill her with a shotgun. He ran out of the house screaming causing the neighbors up the road to call emergency services. Police, ambulance, and firemen were summoned to the house. The wife disappeared shortly after that………? This man started tearing down the walls and destroying the house inside, then out. After he moved out, the house went into foreclosure due to illegal loans he took out against the property.
My husband and I came back to the area around that time. We went to the realtor to see about buying the place. We were going to turn it into a haunted bed and breakfast, as well as make it our home. While touring the inside and evaluating the damage, the house started taking on the scent of when my family used to live there, almost to the point of like we never left. Despite bags of garbage, walls and floors ripped up, dead animals all over the place, the scent returned. The evidence of the heavy destruction exposed how he lost his mind while living there alone. One time my brother came to visit him to see if he was alright while living alone there. The man attacked him in the driveway with a gun, hitting him in the face with the blunt end. The man was screaming that it was his house and that no one was taking it away from him or chasing him from the house.
When I was touring the house I went into the backyard and saw a new ghost. A beautiful blond woman stood in front of me where the garden once grew. I knew that she was a new spirit and I also had the feeling that she met a quick death. I don’t know exactly what happened to her or what “that man” did (I know his name but for my protection I will keep it to myself) but I have a feeling there may be evidence in that garden bed.
I went home afterward the tour of the house and property. I mediated and thought long and hard about whether to buy the house or not. I started having pleasant dreams about me living in there. I talked to a few psychic friends of mine about the possible purchase. They brought up an interesting idea: I may be able to live with the ghosts but what would they do to my husband. I decided that it wasn’t worth hurting anyone and called the Realtor to cancel the whole thing. After that night I started having the nightmares again about being in the house. I had a man chase me with an axe in a dream claiming to be my grandmother’s illegitimate son and that it is his house. (My grandmother never had any male children, just 3 daughters.) I ran up the road to get away from him (the funny part about the beginning of the dream is that a Realtor showed me around the house like I never canceled the sale). I had another dream of being attacked a few nights later. I had to have a spirit cleansing done to remove the strings of attachment that the spirits entangled me with by withdrawing the sale (since the clearing, the dreams about the house ended).
Finally, a man, who served time for child rape, purchased the house. He too, started ripping the walls apart. (During the depression, people hid money and family jewels in the walls.) He trashed the place even worse then the prior tenant (unbelievable that there could be any more further damage even possible). After this, another good couple moved in, with hopes and dreams of fixing it up, on a land contract. This couple also have had experiences with the ghosts talking about both good and bad spirits. After investing much money, the man (at the beginning of this paragraph) cheated them and sold it to another person, right out from beneath them. The bank eventually ended up foreclosing and selling it to a person out of state. This person hired some unsavory characters who stripped the house bare and sell the pieces. What is left is an empty shell of a house. There are no windows, no doors, no floors, no stairs, but just wood boards and dust.
I truly believe that the spirits in this house didn’t want to continue living with other breathing humans. The spirits drove the occupants insane with dreams of fortune, causing the tenants to destroy the house down to the bare frame (think of gold fever). Depression runs high with this house and that the spirits are not at peace, and don’t have a desire to move on. I think the spirits have succeeded with their goals because they are now free of all human interaction (at least, from now until the end of time).
