The House on Gamma Road
Ronan Burton, UT, USA
May 2010
This story happened in late September of last year, to some friends of mine and I.
There's a busy road in my town called Geneva Road, it goes through several cities and there are several roads that branch off of it, some of them are fairly busy but most of them are just old farm dirt roads, one in particular is the road my story takes place on.
My buddies and I were bored, and decide that we should hit up all the scary places we can before Halloween gets too close and the overcrowding kills the scare. So we talk about what places everyone knows, and the ones we've heard of but never been to. My friend (we'll call him Jeff) tells us about a place his grandpa and his buddies used to go to, that was supposedly haunted. It's a single house on a dirt road a couple of miles off of Geneva road. We asked him why it was scary, what the supposed story behind it was. He said that, "The only time my grandpa ever started to tell me about the history of the house, my grandma poked her head around the corner, and just shook her head at him with the sternest look I'd ever seen on her, and grandpa said, "Nah, never mind, you're too young." But his grandpa did tell him where it was.
So we all loaded up in our buddy's (we'll call him Louis) car, and headed off. There were 4 of us Me, Jeff, Louis, and our other friend we'll call Jason. We were all excited to see this place that none of us had ever heard of, a place that was old and run down when Jeff's grandpa was young.
We found the road, I still laugh at the sign, I'm not sure if someone put it up to be funny or if someone was serious, but it was the classic Halloween sign that read "BEWARE!" in painted red letters, haha, now I wish we'd listened.
I think it was when we were driving down the old dirt road, that we started feeling uneasy, I mean more than just scared, like a heavy sick feeling sat in on all of us.
There were dead fields on both sides of the road, with gnarled dead trees every now and then, and then we saw it in the distance, the house. It was a lot older than I expected it to be, peeling white paint on wooden siding, and semi-exposed brick, but most of the windows were still intact. We all had the feeling of being watched.
As we pulled up to it we started having second thoughts, but we got out anyway. We cautiously approached the house. At one point it had four steps leading up to the porch, now only two of those steps were still there, the whole porch was falling apart. We climbed what stairs were left. We weren't even going to try the door, and Jeff was the only one with the guts to look in one of the windows. We suddenly all felt the need to whisper, even though we knew no one was around for miles.
Jeff said, "I can't see anything, it's too dark." Louis quickly said, "I've got a flashlight in my car, I'll go get it." I think he was just looking for an excuse to get the hell of that porch. I didn't blame him. He got the flashlight and handed it to me, because he was going to stay in the car.
This is when the REALLY weird stuff started happening. Jeff got the flashlight on and looked inside. The light beam only went about two feet into the window and stopped. It didn't land on anything it just stopped. We thought the light was broken so Jeff pulled it away from the window and turned it off and back on, when he put it back to the window we could see inside (weird) there was just some old furniture and graffiti on the walls, but the creepy thing was the shadows. In the corners of your eyes...
They moved.
Not like a moving object, but like water, we couldn't figure it out.
But whenever we looked at them straight on they stopped. While we were preoccupied with that, we suddenly heard what sounded like a piece of metal scraping along the wooden floorboards inside, we all jumped. Then Louis honked the horn, and if it's possible to double jump like in the videogames, then we definitely did that. We started sprinting to the car, half to beat the crap out of him, and half because we couldn't take anymore, but as we turned to run, window on the second floor EXPLODED.
That did it we were in the car in .0001 seconds and getting the hell out of there. We almost forgot about Louis honking, but then Jason punched him in the arm and asked him what the heck that was for. Louis was still terrified, all he said was, "He was staring at me from the window...the window that shattered." before we could ask any questions we saw police lights and heard sirens.
We still weren't that far from the house when the cop walked up to the car. He started, "You know you're tresspaa..." He quickly looked up, looked back at us and said, "Make sure you get home safe" faster than I've ever heard anyone talk. And he could've beaten any Olympic runner with how fast he speed walked back to his car.
We weren't sure what he saw but we weren't in the mood to find out.
We got home, still baffled at what happened. We sat in silence for a while, then Jason asked Louis what he saw in the window. He said, "There was a man, an old man standing in the window. I don't know how long he was staring at me I only noticed him a second before I honked the horn."
We still don't know what/who Louis saw in the window, or what the story behind the house is, and unfortunately Jeff's grandpa never told him before he passed away. It's one of those things, I think to be better left unsaid, and undisturbed.