Darkness Rising Horror Stories - Chapter 25 Haunted House

When I was eight years old, my family moved into the house I grew up in. It wasn’t an old house, and no one had died in it, and it didn’t even feel creepy. Just an average suburban house in your average southern suburbs.

The way the house was set up, when you came in the front door, there was a hallway with two bedrooms and a bathroom to the right, the large living room in front of you with a half wall separating it from the dining room to the left, and the kitchen on the other side of the dining room. Where the kitchen and the living room met, there was another small hallway, and the master bedroom, a bedroom that was used as an office, and a bathroom, and then breakfast nook leading to a laundry and utility area at the end of the kitchen.

My room was to the right of the front door and down the hallway past the bathroom with the other bedroom on this hallway used for storage mostly as I was my mother’s only child, and my half brother and sister didn’t live with us and rarely came to visit.

The first time anything really happened in the house, I was about nine, and had lost my last tooth. Still being a kid, of course the tooth fairy was expected, so when I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a figure standing in the middle of my room, I assumed it was the tooth fairy. It was bald, and only about three or four feet tall, about the size of an average child, standing completely still in the middle of my room.

I remember my parents telling me that if I was awake, the tooth fairy wouldn’t leave me any money, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. When I got up the next morning, I excitedly told my parents that I’d seen the tooth fairy the night before. I described what I’d seen, but they told me it was just a dream.

For the next several years after that I continued seeing and hearing minor things in the house. When I was home alone, cabinet doors would open and close, I’d hear dishes being moved around in the kitchen, or catch movement out of the corner of my eye. The most common was often at night I’d wake up to see a young woman hovering over my bed.

She was dressed like the Rosie the Riveter character from the old posters from the 1940s, with the red and white bandanna around her hair and a denim shirt. When I would see her, she’d stare at me for a few minutes and then slowly float over my body and out through the wall behind me. I was never afraid of her though.

When I was about twelve, my parents divorced and it was just me and my mother living in the house. By the time I was in my late teens, my mother was rarely home, and my house became the hangout for me and my friends, most nights everyone gathering together to play Dungeons and Dragons or something similar after work.

One night we were hanging out, but didn’t want to play, so I pulled out a ouija board I’d picked up at the local toy store a few weeks before, wanting to try it out. We sat in my room to play with the lights out and the door closed, and it went pretty normally, nothing crazy happening for the most part. The only strange thing that happened was at one point we asked something like show yourself, and at that point we heard the front door open and close, and heavy footsteps come down the hall towards my room.

The handle of my door started to turn, and one of the guys jumped up and locked the door before it could open. We didn’t hear anything else, no footsteps moving away from the door or anything, and after a little while we turned on the light and opened the door to see if my mother had come home unexpectedly. The house was empty and the front door locked. We decided we’d had enough of the game at that point, put it up and everyone went home.

A few weeks later, we were hanging out at my house again, this time playing Dungeons and Dragons, though one of the girls that usually came had to work late and had classes in the morning, so she’d said she wouldn’t be coming.

While we were sitting in the living room to play, at around 2 in the morning, suddenly we heard footsteps run across my wooden front porch. It sounded like someone very short or a small child running quickly. Everyone in the room heard it, and we had a conversation as to if our friend had changed her mind and had just arrived as she was very short, and it made more sense than a child running through the neighborhood at that time of night.

When she never came into the house, we all got up to look and there was no one outside and her car wasn’t in the yard. Her boyfriend, who was with us gave her a call, and verified that it wasn’t her as she’d just arrived home on the other side of town and was headed to bed.

Around this time, the activity in the house picked up. I saw shadow figures with red eyes often in the living and dining room of the house, footsteps and other noises at all hours of the day or night. I started waking up in my room to see hooded figures standing near my window and door.

It was around this time my half brother, who I was close to passed away. It was sudden, and I hadn’t seen him in years as he’d gotten into drugs, and my mother had decided to keep me away from him because she didn’t want him to be a bad influence on me. After that, I’d wake up hearing his voice saying my name in the middle of the night often.

On a whim one night, I sat down and typed out a letter to him on my computer that was in my bedroom since I was home alone that night and was bored. Now this computer was hooked up to an old dot matrix printer, one of the really loud kind that makes all kinds of racket when it’s running.

After I wrote the letter, I felt silly for it, and deleted it without saving or printing it and shut down the computer before I went to bed. Around three in the morning I woke up and my bed was soaking wet. At first I thought my puppy had peed on the bed because he was too small to get down, even though he was housebroken and I’d taken him out just before bed. I got up to let him outside and change my bedsheets when I realized the wet was just water and it was more than a tiny puppy could have made.

On my way to take my blankets to the laundry room, I passed the bathroom in my hallway and noticed the light was on, even though I’d turned off all the lights before bed. There, sitting on the counter was a pitcher from the kitchen, with the inside still wet. When I was really young, my brother used to wake my sister and I up by throwing water on us because it made me laugh.

When I got back into my room and started making my bed, I noticed a piece of paper laying on top of my printer. It was the letter that I’d written to him and never saved or printed. The computer was still shut down and the printer was off, but it’d been printed out, torn off the printer and laid on top of it as if someone had read it.

The normal things like this continued for a few years when I lived there off and on before turning dark shortly before I moved out of the house for good. The hooded figures appeared more often, I woke up one night with the feeling that I was being stared at, only to roll over and see what looked like a rotting corpse a few inches from my face, and one night woke up to a hooded man standing at the foot of my bed with my bedroom door open when it had been closed before.

He held up his hand and a ball of blue light appeared in his palm, which he threw at my face. He and the ball disappeared just before it hit me, but the room was so cold that I could see my breath, on a normally hot southern summer night.

When I was in my early twenties, after I moved out for good, I had one last experience in the house. My mother hadn’t been to the house in months and was preparing to sell it. I’d told one of my cousins about the things that had happened there through the years, and he decided that one night out of boredom, he and a friend of his would pick me up to go ghost hunting in the house while it was empty.

We each had a camera, and he had a voice recorder that we brought. We set the recorder in my old bedroom, and spent an hour or two wandering around the house taking pictures. When we got done, we came back to my room and sat to listen to the recording and discuss all of the nothing that we’d found.

On the recording we could hear our voices moving from room to room and talking about how my cousin’s friend’s camera had a “sexy” shutter sound, and the fact that my camera stopped working almost as soon as we walked in the door. About twenty minutes into the recording, when we could hear all three of our voices echoing from the other side of the house, a deep voice that sounded like it was right up against the microphone on the recording spoke “GET THE FUCK OUT”. We immediately obliged.

I found out a few years later that my mom actually had several experiences in that house with waking up to find an older man in his 50s or 60s looking through her closet, or seeing him just wandering around the house.

When she’d say anything or get his attention, he’d turn around and look at her, and then vanish. She always thought she was just dreaming or something, but with everything I saw over the years at that house, I can’t help but think it was something else.