Monster With Red Eyes

Twenty years ago, things were much different for me than they are today. I was a widowed mother with four young children that I supported partially by being a musician playing keyboard and singing in a band in a nightclub on weekend nights, and a part-time deli waitress by day.

Things were very tough financially. We lived in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, so when an old friend who used to be my neighbor, called me one day to invite me to come to her house in the country for a visit, I jumped at the chance to spend the weekend at her farm in the country.

It wasn't long before my children began to look forward to staying at "Aunt Marcy's" on the weekends, and soon I began to look for a place of my own in the quaint little town where she lived.

Marcy, her husband, and I spent one Saturday driving all over in search of houses for rent. After driving around for hours on end looking, we finally turned down an old dirt road that was shaded on both sides by lines of tall trees, and right in the heart of the country where I so desperately longed to escape to and raise my children in safety.

Suddenly we noticed on the left an old ramshackle house that looked like just the perfect little place for the kids and me! Marcy and I got out of the car to peer in through the windows while her husband Dale sat in the car smoking cigarettes. Even though the place would take a lot of fixing before it could be made livable. At that point I was willing to settle for a garage (and it was darn close) just to get my kids out of the city. So we decided to check with the next door neighbors to see if they knew who owned the place.

When I knocked at the door, I nervously straightened my hair and clothes. I heard shuffling footsteps approaching and when the door opened I stood face to face with an older wrinkle-faced, grey, curly haired woman with a suspicious glare in her eyes. "Yeah?" she inquired, "what can I do for you?"
"Do you know who owns the house next door?" I asked, wearing my most charming smile. Just then, a grizzly looking old man with craggy features and the exact same suspicious glare in his sinister blue eyes appeared out of the shadows behind her.
"Yeah we do!" he answered for her," and we ain't interested in rentin' it out!"

My friend and I spent at least an hour promising to clean fix and paint the place, joking with them, complimenting them on their grandchildren etc. just about promising them the moon to talk them into letting me rent the place. Finally they relented.

The following weekend, we moved in.

The house was very small. There was a kitchen, livingroom, bathroom, utility room and three bedrooms. All three bedrooms were off the livingroom.

At first, all went well. The kids were so happy to be out in the country and have their own yard to play in that they didn't notice anything amiss and neither did I. Then, as time wore on we began to notice things were not all peaches and cream.

My oldest daughter woke up one night from a nightmare in which she dreamed her dad had tried to drag her into his coffin with him saying to her "Come with me, Rita!!" Several nights she awoke with the feeling of someone playing with her hair, running their fingers through it as they sat beside her on the bed. Thinking it was me, she would fall back to sleep.

One night she awoke, and being thirsty she got up and got a drink of water. When she came back into her room she was hit in the forehead by a piece of drywall that flew out of the wall and straight at her head!

My son Sean who was 2 at the time, refused to go into his sister's bedroom for any reason. If they called to him or tried to coax him to come in he would begin to cry and say "No there's a monster with red eyes in there!"

On weekend nights, I would come home from work exhausted, and just want to take a bath, get some pyjamas on and hit the hay. But as soon as I began running bath water I would feel as if someone was watching me. I knew it was ridiculous, I had an opaque curtain over my window, there was NO ONE in the house but me (the kids were at the neighbor lady's for the night) all the doors were locked. But you know how it is when you KNOW SOMEBODY IS WATCHING YOU. I also felt that it was a young man! Finally, after the third time of feeling creepy and being fed up with not being able to sleep soundly, I knocked on my neighbor lady's door the next morning, and as she presumed I was there to pick up my kids, I sat down at her table and addressed her with "Donna, why didn't you tell me that house is haunted?!?!?" She looked at me very surprised and said "Yes, I've heard that it is". Then she proceeded to tell me the morbid details of why her husband's parents didn't want to rent the house to me.

It seems that their oldest son, her husband Chuck's brother committed suicide in the bedroom which now belonged to my daughter, by hanging himself from one of the rafters. He was 15 years old at the time and I guess his parents were abusive to all the kids, but they pushed their oldest to excel in sports and shamed him if he couldn't perform to their standards. I guess the boy just cracked under all the pressure and decided to end all the abuse by taking his own life.

So after the suicide, they built the house next door, closed down the little house and never spoke the child's name again. Just pretended like he had never existed and it had never happened.

We moved back to the city shortly thereafter, but because I started recieving survivor's benefits we were able to live in a much nicer part of it.

My kids all grew up, left home and are all supporting themselves now. Sometimes we get together for family dinners and the conversation drifts back to twenty years ago.
Sean still remembers vividly being afraid of that room, and the MONSTER WITH RED EYES in there.