This submitter wishes to remain anonymous. The story has been edited for flow and clarity but reflects the events as recounted to us. This our final Spooky Tale (for now anyway!)
While I can be a bit woo-woo, I am also a skeptic. My husband is very logical. He is not a believer. But he believed in this house.
So this was probably back in 2004-2005. I was 24 or 25 years old, and our son was young. My husband and I were renting a house on [redacted] Street. The house was never truly dark at night. There were big windows that faced the road, and there was light from the street lamps. The windows of our upstairs bedroom also faced the street, and we didn’t have curtains so there was always some light in the room.
During the time we lived there, most nights were normal. But maybe a half dozen times, I would wake in the middle of the night with a feeling of complete terror. Everything would be pitch black, like a black hole was above me and it was sucking all the light into it. It was just this inky black mass of nothing, an absence of anything at all. It felt like it lasted all night, though it was probably only a few minutes. One morning I said something about it to my husband, who again is very science-y and logical. Very much a non-believer. As I told him about it, he said that he’d had the exact same experience. The black nothingness floating above him. The absence of light. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.
Occasionally during those years we would have friends couch-surf. One morning we were having coffee with a couple friends who had stayed over and they said to me, “so, your house is terrifying. I woke up in the middle of the night and I heard these weird noises.”
At first, I was like, “well it could be the pipes, or it could be the neighbors, or it could be my kid,” and they replied, “no, the noise was on top of me”.
Here the submitter put her hands above her chest and made a motion like something pushing down, similar to a motion she made earlier when describing to me the absence of light she had experienced.
They didn’t stay over again after that.
My oldest, who was around 5 or 6 at the time, also had his bedroom upstairs, and we had a third bedroom we used for a playroom. After a couple of months of living there, he stopped going in the playroom, telling me there was someone in there. Then he stopped sleeping in his bedroom. He started coming into our room during the night, and we’d find him sleeping on the floor at the bottom of our bed because he was seeing somebody in his room.
The basement was also unsettling. It was, of course, where the washer and dryer were, so I had to go down there often. But it always felt like I was seeing something move out of the corner of my eye, or like something was following me as I would run back up the stairs.
The last straw was not long after this. We had a terrible rain storm and we could see a spot in the ceiling upstairs that looked like it was getting wet. There was a cupola space above it that the landlord kept locked. My husband was able to get the lock off, and he went up to check for leaks. He came down a few minutes later, white as a ghost. To this day he will not tell me what he saw. He only said we needed to move out of the house immediately and I was never, ever to go up there.
When my husband told the landlord about what happened, he said, “oh, yeah that place is haunted, you don’t want to go up there.”
To this day I still get the chills when I drive by the house. I hope no one lives there now, and if they do, those poor people.
Note: the photo of the window is of the actual house, taken in September by Google maps. The only enhancements have been to increase the exposure.
Note: The cover photo is a street in Brandon taken by the author, but not the street in the story.
