Life Downstairs
I decided that the first room I would try to sleep in was the TV room. It had been my
grandmother’s room and had been turned into a tv room after she moved out. I didn’t move
my actual belongings downstairs; I just slept on the couch. Things went smoothly for a couple of
months. I didn’t have any real problems, would occasionally hear noise up in my room, but no
visitors that I knew of. Things started to change towards the middle of 1987.
I would usually go to sleep around 10:30 p.m.. After a couple of months of sleeping in the TV
room, I started to wake up at the same time every night. Not the 3:33 as my mother
had, but 11:34 p.m.. This went on for weeks, every night I would wake up at 11:34
and many times during the day, I would happen to look over at the clock at that time as well. I
didn’t really like always waking up at the same time every night, but it never really bothered me
until one evening. That night, as usual, I woke up at the same time. I looked over at the clock and
it said, “hell.” I sat there for minute trying to focus on what the clock said—it was upside down.
Being upside down, the numbers now read as letters and was spelling the word, ‘hell.’ I had been
waking up at this time for weeks and as long as it was not at 3:33, I had never worried. Now that I
saw the time displayed in this new way, I was very concerned. I had never thought I was actually in
danger of any real evil in the house, the spirit in my room had always protected me, but I had left
the room and something told me the power she held in the room did not carry on within the entire
house.
I continued to sleep in the room until one night when I saw something that ran me out of there for
good. This was the same room my grandmother, aunt and cousin had all had troubles with in
the past and I knew there was a chance that something could happen. I had been keeping the tv on in the room to help me sleep and it really didn’t seem to help all that much. I would wake up most
every night at 11:34 and then had trouble falling back to sleep. On one particular night, I woke
up to some strange noises, kind of like a deep raspy voice. When I opened my eyes, there was a
black hand over my face. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but after blinking a couple of
times, I could easily make out that there was black hand directly over my face and I again heard
something said in a deep voice but couldn’t make it out. I jump up and went right through the hand.
I turned around to see nothing. I grabbed my bedding off of the sofa and headed for the formal
living room after that night.
We Are Family
There was only one house close to ours, it was about a mile away and stood up on a hill that
overlooked our home. My uncle had recently married and had a son. He had been living out in
rural Kansas and decided he wanted to live closer to family. He ended up moving into the home up
on the hill. It was nice to have family close by again, a place to visit when things were acting
up.
It wasn’t long before we were getting calls from my uncle and his new wife. Every so often, they
would call to tell us there was someone out by the barn with a flashlight, or there was someone out
in the front yard with a flashlight. I would always tell him I had just been out there, they
were just seeing me. I knew what he was seeing but never wanted to bring it up. We
hadn’t told everyone about the home’s little tricks and we weren’t sure what my uncle
would think. He finally learned the truth when one evening he called and said there was a light out
in the field. I told him I would check it out. As I was about to hang up, I heard yelling on the
phone, “Don’t go out there! Don’t go out there!” I asked him what was wrong and he said the
light suddenly took off into the air and flew up and around the house. I started laughing and told
him I would be up to his home in a few minutes. My uncle had always been more of a brother to me, we were not all that far off in age and I knew it was time for him to know the truth about the
home. I went to his house and told him everything that had been going on. I explained that it was
good to keep an eye on the house, but every time he called about flashlights, they were really what
the locals had been calling spook lights, and we had been dealing with them for years.
He seemed to believe everything I had told him and would continue to call when ever he saw
something at our home. We had always had people honk at our home in the past. We never knew quite what to think about it, but many times people would drive past our home and honk. By
the time I would make it to the window, they would be long gone. Many times I thought they had
been to our home and I missed them knocking, never understood what to make of it.
One evening I heard a honk and looked out to see my uncle drive up towards his house. I went up see him later that evening and he asked what I had been doing. I told him I had been in the house doing some homework. He then asked why I was out in the front yard running around and why I didn’t wave when he honked. I told him I hadn’t been out in the yard. He then said he saw someone out in the front yard by the Cedar trees running around and thought it was me. This was the same area I always had the crazy energy. Apparently, the entire time people had been honking, they had been honking at the spirit of the woman that had been kept out in the front yard with Alzheimer’s. I started to laugh and told him the story about the woman in the yard. He said it all happened so fast that he couldn’t tell exactly who it was; he just knew I was home and figured it was me. It sure was odd to know that people were driving past my house and honking at one of the spirits, I just hoped she never did anything too crazy when people drove by.
In Sickness and in Health
My father was not himself any more. When he would get home, he would often go
straight out into the barn and build things, nothing of real importance, many times just things
from scrap he would bring home from work. He was always a funny and outgoing person, but over the last couple of years, he had lost his sense of humor and was nothing but angry and self absorbed. He and I had a great relationship before we moved to the home, but now we sometimes went days without speaking much more than a few words. Things between him and my mother weren’t much better. It was though he really didn’t care if he saw us or not.
My father had always sworn there was nothing in the home. When ever my mother and I would be
talking about things that happened, he would always laugh at us and tell us we were just
imagining things. When the lights would fly around the house, he would just write it off as
headlights or reflections. He never appeared to really show much fear towards the home
except for one night. One evening, my mother and I went into Wichita to do some shopping. It was
very late when we arrived home and all the lights were on in the house. My father was the type that
would go around the house and turn lights off just behind you to save energy. Anyway, all the
lights were on and when we unlocked the door, my father was a sleep on the couch with his
pistol by his side. Mother woke him up and he quickly tried to hide the gun. She asked him what was the matter and he said he thought he heard a coyote.
My father never went after coyotes with a pistol, he never slept on the couch in the living room
and he absolutely never left all the lights on in the home. He never did admit to seeing
anything when left alone in the house for the evening, but mother and I were sure that something
had indeed scared my father so bad he had to keep the lights on and slept with his gun.
It wasn’t long before this had happened that my mother really couldn’t handle the
changes in my father and they decided to separate. Odd thing was, neither would move out. They
broke the home in half; father stayed in one half and mother the other. They would never enter
the kitchen when the other was in there. This lasted for nearly 2 months and shortly
after walking into the home and finding father with the house lit up and sleeping with a gun, he
actually started to change enough that he and mother decided to stay together.
My father seemed to be controlled more and more by the home as time went on. He never wanted to leave the home, never wanted to go on vacations and never even wanted to just take small trips into town. His focus was always on the home. Many of the changes of the outside of the home were his doing and we later found out, were often changes that made it resemble what it looked like shortly after it’s construction. He was always determined to belittle anyone that spoke of the home being haunted and even though we knew he had seen things just as we had, he always dismissed it.
My mother had started to bring up the idea of selling the home. She would get upset
about all that was going on, the changes in my father, me not sleeping in my room and her
deteriorating health. She had been getting sick often. They ran test after test on her and never
could figure out what was wrong. She was waking up at 3:33 often, throwing up all the time, getting
dizzy and would go days at a time without being able to eat. She felt as though she were being
watched and wanted nothing more than to sell the home and get out. She was determined that if we were able to get away from the home, things would return to normal.
My father would have nothing of it. He loved that house more than life itself at that point and
wasn’t going any where. I wasn’t too crazy about the idea myself. It was my Senior year in high
school and I didn’t want to move away from all my friends. It seems the more mother
pushed to move, the more sick she would become. She started running fevers and getting
really bad night sweats. As time went on, things just continued to go downhill for her. Looking
back, she now admits that she was more than prepared to die and that she felt it was the spirits in
the home that were doing the killing. She rarely let the house control her actions as father seemed
to do.
I was always caught in the middle. I wanted to stay as my father did, for much different reasons,
but I wanted the best for my mother. By this time, I knew there was both good and evil in the home,
and it was becoming all too clear that my father had lost control to the evil and mother was being
destroyed for not following their plans. It is my belief they wanted us to stay, they knew that my
father would pretty much do anything they wanted and my mother was not the controlling factor
of the relationship. They also seemed to figure out how to influence her health. She had
always been a very healthy and strong woman and with no medical explanation, she appeared to
slowly dying, and she knew it.
The house was interesting to say the least. I myself had been locking myself in my active room
until I just couldn’t take it anymore and started sleeping downstairs. It seemed even the good
spirits had a certain amount of control over rational decision making processes. When confronted
with spirits, most would likely flee the situation, not lock themselves in with it. Looking back it
does seem odd to do such things, but at the time it felt normal, even like the right thing to do.
I never thought about how strange living in the house was until years after moving out and
seeing how it was to live in a quiet home. But that wasn’t to happen for a couple of
more years.
Life Downstairs, Part II…
I decided that the first room I would try to sleep in was the TV room. It had been my
grandmother’s room and had been turned into a tv room after she moved out. I didn’t move
my actual belongings downstairs; I just slept on the couch. Things went smoothly for a couple of
months. I didn’t have any real problems, would occasionally hear noise up in my room, but no
visitors that I knew of. Things started to change towards the middle of 1987.
I would usually go to sleep around 10:30 p.m.. After a couple of months of sleeping in the TV
room, I started to wake up at the same time every night. Not the 3:33 as my mother
had, but 11:34 p.m.. This went on for weeks, every night I would wake up at 11:34
and many times during the day, I would happen to look over at the clock at that time as well. I
didn’t really like always waking up at the same time every night, but it never really bothered me
until one evening. That night, as usual, I woke up at the same time. I looked over at the clock and
it said, “hell.” I sat there for minute trying to focus on what the clock said—it was upside down.
Being upside down, the numbers now read as letters and was spelling the word, ‘hell.’ I had been
waking up at this time for weeks and as long as it was not at 3:33, I had never worried. Now that I
saw the time displayed in this new way, I was very concerned. I had never thought I was actually in
danger of any real evil in the house, the spirit in my room had always protected me, but I had left
the room and something told me the power she held in the room did not carry on within the entire
house.
I continued to sleep in the room until one night when I saw something that ran me out of there for
good. This was the same room my grandmother, aunt and cousin had all had troubles with in
the past and I knew there was a chance that something could happen. I had been keeping the tv on in the room to help me sleep and it really didn’t seem to help all that much. I would wake up most
every night at 11:34 and then had trouble falling back to sleep. On one particular night, I woke
up to some strange noises, kind of like a deep raspy voice. When I opened my eyes, there was a
black hand over my face. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but after blinking a couple of
times, I could easily make out that there was black hand directly over my face and I again heard
something said in a deep voice but couldn’t make it out. I jump up and went right through the hand.
I turned around to see nothing. I grabbed my bedding off of the sofa and headed for the formal
living room after that night.
We Are Family
There was only one house close to ours, it was about a mile away and stood up on a hill that
overlooked our home. My uncle had recently married and had a son. He had been living out in
rural Kansas and decided he wanted to live closer to family. He ended up moving into the home up
on the hill. It was nice to have family close by again, a place to visit when things were acting
up.
It wasn’t long before we were getting calls from my uncle and his new wife. Every so often, they
would call to tell us there was someone out by the barn with a flashlight, or there was someone out
in the front yard with a flashlight. I would always tell him I had just been out there, they
were just seeing me. I knew what he was seeing but never wanted to bring it up. We
hadn’t told everyone about the home’s little tricks and we weren’t sure what my uncle
would think. He finally learned the truth when one evening he called and said there was a light out
in the field. I told him I would check it out. As I was about to hang up, I heard yelling on the
phone, “Don’t go out there! Don’t go out there!” I asked him what was wrong and he said the
light suddenly took off into the air and flew up and around the house. I started laughing and told
him I would be up to his home in a few minutes. My uncle had always been more of a brother to me, we were not all that far off in age and I knew it was time for him to know the truth about the
home. I went to his house and told him everything that had been going on. I explained that it was
good to keep an eye on the house, but every time he called about flashlights, they were really what
the locals had been calling spook lights, and we had been dealing with them for years.
He seemed to believe everything I had told him and would continue to call when ever he saw
something at our home. We had always had people honk at our home in the past. We never knew quite what to think about it, but many times people would drive past our home and honk. By
the time I would make it to the window, they would be long gone. Many times I thought they had
been to our home and I missed them knocking, never understood what to make of it.
One evening I heard a honk and looked out to see my uncle drive up towards his house. I went up see him later that evening and he asked what I had been doing. I told him I had been in the house doing some homework. He then asked why I was out in the front yard running around and why I didn’t wave when he honked. I told him I hadn’t been out in the yard. He then said he saw someone out in the front yard by the Cedar trees running around and thought it was me. This was the same area I always had the crazy energy. Apparently, the entire time people had been honking, they had been honking at the spirit of the woman that had been kept out in the front yard with Alzheimer’s. I started to laugh and told him the story about the woman in the yard. He said it all happened so fast that he couldn’t tell exactly who it was; he just knew I was home and figured it was me. It sure was odd to know that people were driving past my house and honking at one of the spirits, I just hoped she never did anything too crazy when people drove by.
In Sickness and in Health
My father was not himself any more. When he would get home, he would often go
straight out into the barn and build things, nothing of real importance, many times just things
from scrap he would bring home from work. He was always a funny and outgoing person, but over the last couple of years, he had lost his sense of humor and was nothing but angry and self absorbed. He and I had a great relationship before we moved to the home, but now we sometimes went days without speaking much more than a few words. Things between him and my mother weren’t much better. It was though he really didn’t care if he saw us or not.
My father had always sworn there was nothing in the home. When ever my mother and I would be
talking about things that happened, he would always laugh at us and tell us we were just
imagining things. When the lights would fly around the house, he would just write it off as
headlights or reflections. He never appeared to really show much fear towards the home
except for one night. One evening, my mother and I went into Wichita to do some shopping. It was
very late when we arrived home and all the lights were on in the house. My father was the type that
would go around the house and turn lights off just behind you to save energy. Anyway, all the
lights were on and when we unlocked the door, my father was a sleep on the couch with his
pistol by his side. Mother woke him up and he quickly tried to hide the gun. She asked him what was the matter and he said he thought he heard a coyote.
My father never went after coyotes with a pistol, he never slept on the couch in the living room
and he absolutely never left all the lights on in the home. He never did admit to seeing
anything when left alone in the house for the evening, but mother and I were sure that something
had indeed scared my father so bad he had to keep the lights on and slept with his gun.
It wasn’t long before this had happened that my mother really couldn’t handle the
changes in my father and they decided to separate. Odd thing was, neither would move out. They
broke the home in half; father stayed in one half and mother the other. They would never enter
the kitchen when the other was in there. This lasted for nearly 2 months and shortly
after walking into the home and finding father with the house lit up and sleeping with a gun, he
actually started to change enough that he and mother decided to stay together.
My father seemed to be controlled more and more by the home as time went on. He never wanted to leave the home, never wanted to go on vacations and never even wanted to just take small trips into town. His focus was always on the home. Many of the changes of the outside of the home were his doing and we later found out, were often changes that made it resemble what it looked like shortly after it’s construction. He was always determined to belittle anyone that spoke of the home being haunted and even though we knew he had seen things just as we had, he always dismissed it.
My mother had started to bring up the idea of selling the home. She would get upset
about all that was going on, the changes in my father, me not sleeping in my room and her
deteriorating health. She had been getting sick often. They ran test after test on her and never
could figure out what was wrong. She was waking up at 3:33 often, throwing up all the time, getting
dizzy and would go days at a time without being able to eat. She felt as though she were being
watched and wanted nothing more than to sell the home and get out. She was determined that if we were able to get away from the home, things would return to normal.
My father would have nothing of it. He loved that house more than life itself at that point and
wasn’t going any where. I wasn’t too crazy about the idea myself. It was my Senior year in high
school and I didn’t want to move away from all my friends. It seems the more mother
pushed to move, the more sick she would become. She started running fevers and getting
really bad night sweats. As time went on, things just continued to go downhill for her. Looking
back, she now admits that she was more than prepared to die and that she felt it was the spirits in
the home that were doing the killing. She rarely let the house control her actions as father seemed
to do.
I was always caught in the middle. I wanted to stay as my father did, for much different reasons,
but I wanted the best for my mother. By this time, I knew there was both good and evil in the home,
and it was becoming all too clear that my father had lost control to the evil and mother was being
destroyed for not following their plans. It is my belief they wanted us to stay, they knew that my
father would pretty much do anything they wanted and my mother was not the controlling factor
of the relationship. They also seemed to figure out how to influence her health. She had
always been a very healthy and strong woman and with no medical explanation, she appeared to
slowly dying, and she knew it.
The house was interesting to say the least. I myself had been locking myself in my active room
until I just couldn’t take it anymore and started sleeping downstairs. It seemed even the good
spirits had a certain amount of control over rational decision making processes. When confronted
with spirits, most would likely flee the situation, not lock themselves in with it. Looking back it
does seem odd to do such things, but at the time it felt normal, even like the right thing to do.
I never thought about how strange living in the house was until years after moving out and
seeing how it was to live in a quiet home. But that wasn’t to happen for a couple of
more years.
Life Downstairs, Part II…
