We moved out here when I was nine. We used to live in Omaha, but my parents decided they’d like to live closer to our grandparents (both sets) so we moved here to Kansas City. My mom had always wanted to live on a farm, so they bought a farmhouse built in the early nineteen hundreds. No one is really sure how old it is, because there wasn’t building permits or anything around here back then, so as far as we can figure from looking at deeds, old maps, and records, the house is between sixty and one hundred years old. It was re-done in the seventies, and a rear portion (about twenty feet worth) was removed. I think something bad happened in it. You can still see the stony foundation poking up out of the yard in parts. This become important later.
We had been living here for a year or two when my cousin Sam stayed the night with us. The girl’s room already had all them in it, and my parents didn’t want her sleeping in the same room as Jacob or I, so she slept in the hallway. She says that some time during the night, someone stepped over here, opened the attic door, closed it, and walked up the attic stairs. No one admits to getting up and going upstairs, in fact, there’s nothing upstairs to go up to. Sam has since refused to stay here.
When we first moved in, heck, for the first five or six years we were here, my sisters refused to go upstairs alone. Maybe it was because they were young, maybe it was because they were girls, but they were (and sometimes still are) scared witless to go upstairs alone.
I’m here alone quite a bit. When I’m here alone, I prefer to stay downstairs. It’s not quite as creepy. Sometimes I’ll hear someone walking around upstairs, and start to call out, only to remember I’m here alone.
I thought I was the only one who heard this. This changed for me one day when my mom and I were here alone. She was watching TV, and I was sitting across the room where I am now, at the computer. We heard someone walk up the stairs in the next room, cross the upstairs entry, walk down the hallway, and fade out through the closet that USED to be the hallway that led to the ‘servants quarters’, the area of the house that was ‘removed’ in the seventies. We both looked at each other wide-eyed. I asked mom is she heard that also, and she slowly nodded her head. “Let’s forget that happened…” she said. And she did. To this day, she claims not to remember it.
The attic has since been finished off as a fifth bedroom, for my older brother. Since he moved out, it’s been my room. Sometimes it seems like, late at night, there is someone in there with me. I hear things, noises like the house settling, but they seem pretty out of place on the third floor. I try to just shut it out, keep my eyes closed, and go back to sleep. I keep 100w bulbs in all my fixtures upstairs. The less shadows on that floor, the better. All the doors to the other parts of what remains of the attic are closed and locked at ALL times.
The basement is very strange. The house was built before particle board was used for flooring, so the floors have subfloors of 2x8s, which are exposed on the bottom floor. When they removed the back of the house, they also removed the original staircase to the basement, and extended the hallway at the back of the house to the outside entrance to the basement, and enclosed it. What was the entrance to the basement is now a closet that gets shorter and shorter the further back you go, and winds around on itself. Very creepy closet.
The basement showcases the laid-stone foundation. It used to have a dirt floor, but some years ago someone poured a concrete one. In the basement, what remains of the coal chute is still visible, but new cement has been put over it. The basement has a remainder of the basement for the servant’s quarters of the house. It features what seems to be a small room that three of the walls to have been removed, and a doorway has been cemented over. Normally, this wouldn’t raise anyone’s suspicion, since the doorway is right where the house stops, but it’s also right under one of the steps to the basement, which, when you tap it with a hammer, sounds out hollow. The basement is an alltogether creepy place.
We’ve completely redone the interior of the house, relocating walls to their original position, redoing the lathe-and-plaster with sheetrock, raising the ceilings back to their original ten feet (someone dropped them to eight for some God-awful reason), and we luckily found all the old trim in the shed, and it has been re-finished and put back up. We pulled all the particle board and carpet flooring, so it’s back to it’s original wooden floors and throw rugs.
It’s been quiet around here since we redid the interior. I think we made the spirits happy by putting their beloved house back to it’s original form. We plan on tearing off the back end and rebuilding the part that was removed at some point in the near future. Hopefully they can rest, then.
We got to a family reunion in Iowa every summer in august. We always get the rear corner room, since it’s the largest, and we’re a very large family. Jacob didn’t go a few years back, so I got the corner bed in this room. I fell asleep quickly, but awoke with a start at about three a.m. I felt a cold terror, but didn’t know why. I was lying on my stomach with my face buried in the pillow. I could see out of the side of my eye, there was an incredibly bright light pouring in through the window, piercing the heavy courduroy curtains. I tried to turn over so I could breathe easier, but my body was frozen. I could see shapes moving in the bright light, but everything was washed out by it’s glare. Finally, just as I was about to pass out from lack of air, my body freed itself and I rolled my head to breath and fell back asleep. No one else in the family recalls being woken up by a bright light that evening.
–Tim
