Hello, it’s Spooky Boo Rhodes. This is a true story about the strange house we lived in when I was a teen.
When I was 14 years old we lived in a creepy old house in the middle of a suburb township. The town wasn’t yet formally a city, but it had its own history of strangeness. By looking at the trim of the windows in the house we lived in, it was built sometime in the late 1800s. In fact, the house was probably an old ranch hand place that was once a part of the big house down the street that looked the house from the show the Big Valley. The house down the street was a huge home with marble pillars and a grand entrance.
The house we lived in was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath little house with add ons. It looked like the original house consisted of just a living room, a dining room, and two bedrooms. There was probably an outhouse when it was built. The walk in porch looked added on as did the kitchen and the bathroom. Two of the bedrooms which were on the right of the living room and dining room each had the original trim in each room just like their adjacent rooms. The kitchen, bathroom, 3rd bedroom as well as two rectangular rooms that were new and lined the other side of the house all were added on later in the 20th century.
When they added on the side rectangular rooms, they didn’t remove the old windows. The old trim windows looked into these rooms which had newer windows looking into the backyard. The yard sported a 6-foot fence. I tell you this because one night my sister and her friend were playing a card game at the table. My sister’s friend went pale white, got up, went into the kitchen, and grabbed the biggest knife she could find. She sat back down and stared out the window, that peered into the other room. When my sister asked her what was wrong, she said she saw a face in the window. A white faceless, face whose features were hard to discern. We looked both in the room and the backyard but there was nothing.
I can’t remember if that was the first thing that happened in that house, but there is so much more. Some of the strange things that would happen include dust and feathers falling from nowhere over our heads. Just over our heads. We would also get hairline scratches up and down our torsos and arms. It wasn’t just one scratch, it was 3 or 4 lines at a time. One minute it wouldn’t be there and the next we would feel a burning sensation on our bodies at different times and a scratch would happen. My cat was always somewhere else so it wasn’t her.
Then, one day my brother’s friend came over and took a seat in the corner of the living room. From that corner of the living room, one can see the bathroom and the back bedroom. The back bedroom was a place that no one wanted to sleep in because it was always cold even in the 90-degree summer weather. It also had a strange hollow or empty feeling to it as if it was a larger room but it wasn’t. It was very small. my mom eventually just stored her sewing work in it because nobody wanted to be in there. So when my brother’s friend was sitting there waiting for my brother, he got up and left to go sit outside. We asked him why and he said that while he was waiting he saw a rather large yellow fuzzy cat walking on two legs like a man walk from the back bedroom into the bathroom and it gave him the strangest, darkest feeling he had ever felt and had to go outside.
My room was the biggest and sat next to the living room. I had two windows. One was facing the garden and the other looking into the driveway. There was a security light outside so we could see everything just in case the deer decided to try to eat the garden. My cat was very protective of me. She would bite guy’s hands when they tried to touch me and would freak out if I was under the blanket too long. When she became really protective though, is when she would walk around my bed growling and looking out the window. She would sit on my shoulder while I tried to fall asleep and would just stare outside, growling at nothing every night.
The place also attracted strange people. One day while walking home from the store we all frequented, a creepy old man in a Cadillac drove up to me when I was about to cross the street to get to my house and asked if I would spend the evening with him for $50. I yelled at him and ran down a different street so he didn’t know which house I lived in. I believe I was about 13 at the time. About a year later after coming home from school on the bus we noticed a man in his 30s walking down the old highway. I got off the bus and went home and he must have seen me because not more than 20 minutes later there was a knock at the door. It was him. He said he had broken down up the road and needed to use a phone. Since my sister and I shared the house phone it had a 20-foot cord on it and I was able to put it out on the walk in porch for him to use then shut the door. A few minutes later he was standing behind me telling me I had to do what he said because he had a knife at my back. I was an obnoxious teen and instead of doing what he said, I felt behind my back. It was his finger. I screamed him out of my house as he called me a whore for inviting him and not “doing anything with him.” I was about 14 when this happened.
I found out later that area was a farming area and there were people of all races who were farmworkers who were treated poorly. There is a stream running about 1/4 mile from where my room sat, probably right after the big house I talked about earlier. People would walk the stream and camp out for farm work in the past. Some supposedly died there but since they were migrants from all areas no one kept track of their names. I have tried to find out more history about this house but I haven’t found any records of any death records inside the house. I wonder if those who traveled the stream were the ones who haunt the little place.
