A couple of years ago, my boyfriend and I bought a house in
the suburbs of Atlanta, but before that, we lived in a one
level duplex much closer to the city. The home was built
in the 1950's and numerous people lived there before we
moved in the fall of 1998.
Nothing horribly terrifying happened there, but it never
felt like home and I hated when my boyfriend was not home
because I always felt like i was being watched. He worked
nights at the time and I worked during the day, so I was
usually at home all night long by myself.
The first thing that was immediately unsettling was the
attic hatchway in the ceiling. The hatch was in the
hallway that connected the livingroom to the bedroom area.
For some reason, the door would never close completely. If
you held it closed, it would stay, but as soon as you
removed your hand, it would open about an inch or so.
Maybe it was just my overactive imagination, but as I would
sit in the living room, I always felt like I had an
audience peering at me through that slit in the ceiling.
Occasionally, the cord that hung down so that you could
pull open the door would sway back and forth as if someone
had just moved the hatch, but I would never see the actual
door moving. Sometimes I would notice that the door
appeared to be open wider than usual. Perhaps it was all
in my head.
Also, If I was standing in the living room I could look
down the hallway and see into the master bedroom (just half
of one wall). It was unnerving when I would see, during
the middle of the day, shadows dancing on the wall. There
were no trees to shade the sun coming in the window of that
room and therefore, no reason for the quality of the light
to shift as often and almost rhythmically as it did.
When I was in bed at night, I would often hear footsteps in
the hallway coming towards me from the living room, but
they would always stop about halfway down the hall, where
the attic hatchway was. Sometimes my little dogs (2 Jack
Russell Terriers), who would always sleep in bed with me at
night, one on the left of me and one on the right, would
wake up and run out into the hallway staring down the hall,
cocking their heads to and fro. Once in a while, they
would growl softly down the hallway, sending icy shivers
down my spine. Occasionally, I would wake up in the night
to hear scratching inside the wall of my bedroom. My
boyfriend said it was just squirrels that would climb into
the walls for warmth and maybe he was right, but it sure
did scare me! I would also wake up and see strange
shimmery "clouds" floating across my ceiling. They looked
not so much like clouds as ice crystals on a window, with
the sort of veiny look that ice gets on glass. You could
see through them, but everything on the other side looked
wavey, like heatwaves.
There always seemed to be a sad, dark cloud hovering over
us in that place. I would have irrational bouts of terror
that would send me scrambling out of a room squeaking in
fear and my boyfriend said he was always depressed.
Finally, the basement was very, very strange. It spanned
the entire distance between the two units. One side was
finished (the side under our unit) and the next door
neighbours had installed a pool table and often went down
at night to play. You could only get into the basement
from an external door in the backyard that was never
locked. Over the decades, people who had lived there had
stored all sorts of strange and seemingly unless things in
that basement. I use to love going down there (always with
another person) to rummage around, but I would always steer
clear of the unfinished portion of the basement. There was
a doorway that connected it to the rest of the basement.
No lighting fixtures were on that side of the basement and
the ground had not even been cleared. In fact the entire
space of the floor was dominated by a huge rock. There was
about a foot and a half of space around the perimeter of
the space that you could walk along, but other than that,
the rock loomed up almost to the floorboards of the house
(about seven feet on that side of the basement). All along
the wall were old, antique mirrors. I never understood
that. They looked like they had been left there like
everything else, but for some reason, only mirrors were
stored on that side of the basement. Very strange.
One last thing. We found out from our neighbours that in
the 1960's an elderly woman had been strangled in our unit
by an estranged member of her family, or so the story
goes. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.
Anyway, we have since bought a new house (built one month
before we moved in) and since then, we have both felt like
an ominous cloud has been lifted from us. I have had no
unnatural experiences in my new home and only feel a
constant sense of peace and warmth there. Although, it was
built on old plantation land where many slaves lived and
died over 100 years ago, so who knows.....
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