House On Islay

About 20 years ago I moved in with a girlfriend, Beth I'll call her. Her husband’s job had transferred him from Calif. to Arizona, he went ahead to start his new job and Beth stayed behind to sell the house. I moved in because I needed a place to stay and Beth didn't want to stay in the house alone. Worked out great for both of us, or so I thought??..

The house was old, built around the 1900s. It belonged to an old woman who died, I don't know if she died in the house or not but it sure felt that way upon walking through the front door. Her family was eager to sell it off so they left a lot of the old woman’s belongings behind in the attic and in the house.

I saw the house when they first moved in it was completely covered in vines and shrubs; the windows were boarded up from the inside and nailed shut. After several weeks of work the old house cleaned up quite nice, the clean up unveiled some charming old architecture that had been buried for years, maybe even decades.

Things went ok at first. I worked during the day and Beth worked at night, so by the time I got home from work she was already gone. I started noticing the chairs around the antique dining room table pulled way out and away from the table in the afternoons when I got home. I would push them back in place, the next day the same thing. I asked Beth one day why she did this and she informed she never touched the chairs (we never ate meals at this table, we ate at the kitchenette table). I was perplexed by this, as it was only Beth and I in the house.

There was this half wall between the dining room and living room, in this wall was an opening like a window about 1 ? foot by 1 ? square it served as a shelf. On this shelf sat a hideous statue carved out of some sort of chalky white substance left there by the old woman, I'm sure it had been there for years as it was dirty and dusty. The statue was about a foot tall and was of a rearing horse a man and a dog all of which had the eye sockets grossly gouged out. This statue faced into the dining room and Beth had warned me if I did any dusting not to touch or move it as it was extremely fragile and would crumble to dust (it was very old). Well somehow the statue got turned completely around to face into the living room, Beth asked if I had moved it, I told her No I had not moved it. Upon inspecting it there wasn't even a speck of chalky dust on the shelf from it being moved. Curious one day I put a finger to the statue and a white chalky dust fell around the base, surly if this statue had been manually moved there would be dust. Neither of us moved it.

Then there was the creepy doll; Elizabeth is what Beth called her. She had been left in the house by the previous owner too. She was very old and had human hair; she had individually set tiny glass teeth in an open mouth. The eyes were glass eyes, and her skin was made out of, I think, animal hide that with age had hideously shriveled up and turned brown. She even had individual fingernails placed at the ends of the now gnarled fingers. She sat in a small high chair that would be shifted around from time to time. Again neither Beth or I touched the doll, I had a hard time looking at it let alone getting close enough to move it.

The doorbell would ring in the middle of the night with no one there. A large beveled edged mirror left in the house launched itself to the floor in the master bedroom in the middle of the night. I had a constant feeling of being watched which made me very self-conscious and uncomfortable in the house alone. I was really glad to leave the house when it sold a few weeks later. I've never even driven by it since and it’s only around the corner from where I live now. Too creepy.