House Of Horror

In August of 1990 my husband, our small children, and I were out taking a summer's day drive down SR 331 when we came upon this abandoned farmhouse. The house was large, about a four bedroom. The grass had grown up over a porch which four feet off the ground. The yard was enormous and an old willow tree hung over the driveway with two very huge boulders under it. It was white with black shutters, an old two story that had been sided over.

I fell in love with the land and the house at first sight, as did my husband. We were living in a big city at the time and hated it. This house was like a dream come true for a couple with many small children. We just didn't know why it was abandoned. We talked to a neighbor, who was at least a quarter of a mile away. We found out the landowners lived in another state. We managed to get the phone number.

When we got home that night, we called the owners and found they were willing to rent the house to us for $100.00 a month. This dream was becoming more than too good to be true.

The house needed some repairs, and my husband, being the wiz that he is, settled down to this with little trouble.

We just couldn't believe the blessings that we were receiving. The house was everything I could want in a dream house. The yard was forty acres. The town, three miles away, was small, the school even smaller. The rent was perfect. We set to the plans we had for a garden, an old fashion BBQ, and a massive play area for our children. We even got a dog. We were in heaven. That is, we were before the hell started.

After we had spent several days settling in, we finally had an evening where we could just sit down and enjoy one of the evenings of that summer. We were sitting in the open dining room-living room area watching TV (the kids were asleep) when it began. My husband fell asleep watching the television set while I was winding some yarn. Out of nowhere, I started to hear footsteps approaching behind me. (Our sofa sat in the middle of the room to divide the two areas.)

The steps came from the dinning room and walked up behind me, around the sofa, and on over to in front of the TV, where they turned and walked back to the area from which they came. They began again. When they reached in front of the TV, I woke my husband up and told him to listen. I turned down the TV and he heard the footsteps. I was excited. He was not. I have always had experiences with ghosts since I was a little child. He did not believe in such rubbish.

He listened for a while and agreed that they were footsteps from something other than us. Well, this was only the start of it.

My husband and I had retired a few nights later and I heard some one calling for someone named Sarah. I asked my husband if he had heard it. He said no. I thought it might have been him teasing me because of the way I went on about the footsteps. He said it was not him and to go to sleep. I listened for a good while longer while he slept. I woke him up and asked him if it could mean that I was to name the child I was carrying Sarah. He said he doubted it and for me not to answer the call. I didn't.

A little while later I was sitting at my sewing machine, making a quilt for the baby, when I heard music playing. I went to check on the other children; they were asleep. No radios were on and my husband was asleep as well. I listened for a few moments and decided it was a violin. The tune was not one I knew, and was very mournful. I woke up my husband. He listened. He heard it too. Therefore, I know I was not going crazy from my isolation out in the country.

A few days or so passed and a neighbor from down the road came for a visit. She was an older woman and lived in the area all of her life. She was asking us how we were doing in our new house. We said we were doing well. We didn't mention the other things to her in fear she would think we were nuts.

As she was about to go she said, "If you ever hear footsteps or a violin let me know." Well, I don't have to say that this stopped me in my tracks, as well as my husband. We demanded to know what she was talking about. We told her we have heard the footsteps and the violin. I also told her I heard some one yelling for Sarah. This woman just hung her head and said she knew it. Again, we demanded to know what she was talking about.

The story of the house. In the earlier part of the 1940s, a man and his family started a farm, with our house as their home. They had two daughters. The man was as mean as mean could be. If you walked on his property in the middle of a bad snowstorm and asked for help, he would shoot you.

The man managed his land and never paid any taxes on it. Little by little, some of the four hundred acres were sold for tax purposes. This only made the man more hateful. He became ill and was put in a hospital bed in the dining room area. He told his wife, Sarah that no matter what happened to him she was not to sell the land or leave it. Well the old man died in the dining room. Sarah couldn't pay the remaining taxes, so she sold the house, the out buildings and what land was left (forty acres) to a family who also had two daughters.

While Sarah and her oldest daughter (grown) were moving some remaining boxes down from the upstairs, Sarah dropped to the floor of the dining room with a massive heart attack and died immediately after seeing an old work coat that belonged to her husband Charlie hanging in midair in the exact spot where he had died.

Well, the family moved into the house. It was not long before they started to experience the crazy things. First the footsteps, then the music, and then the bad stuff started. The wife's mother was ill in another state. She took the two girls and went to be with her. The man stayed behind. He had a small used car lot at one of the buildings that came with the property. He was in the basement one day working on a car part when the cellar door suddenly closed. Thinking it was just the wind, he went to reopen it, but it was locked from outside. He turned and went to exit this back room into the front room of the basement when the big door slammed shut in his face, sealing him in the back room. He tried to get out over and over, but it was no use; the doors just would not open. He was trapped without his blood pressure medication or his heart pills. He finally freed himself by taking the big wooden door off its hinges. It took him three days to do this. He made it upstairs and outside to the road when he collapsed. A passing car came to his aid. He went to the hospital. He was treated, released, and told to go home and rest. He said he would rest alright. He grabbed a handful of clothes and left. He went to his wife out of state. They never returned. They hired a moving company to pack the house up and move everything to their new house in the state where her mother was. They rented the house on two other occasions, but no one stayed more than a few weeks. The house stood empty for more than ten years until we came along.

After hearing the story of the house, we were concerned, but not scared, and we would not leave. In December of 1990, we had our little girl. We did not name her Sarah. When the baby and I came home from the hospital, the other children and my husband all had colds. I would not let them into the same room with the baby because she had had a hard time at birth. Therefore, I slept in our room with her and my husband slept on the couch. The second night we were home, I was up at three in the morning feeding and rocking the child when I heard my husband scream out for me in a way I had never heard before. With my child in my arms I kicked opened, our bedroom door walked through the restroom and kicked that door opened too. He yelled for me to get the lights, I flipped the lights, but I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

My husband was in a half laying half-sitting position and he was bent over the couch strangling something with his bare hands. The "Thing" was a black image of a man, but there were no features--just an image. It didn't fade when the lights came on at first. It slowly faded as my husband choked the life out of its already lifeless body.

He told me he was almost asleep when he heard the footsteps and felt them approaching him from behind the sofa. They went to follow their usual path, but stopped at the end of the soda where my husband's feet were. It was as if it was surprised by him being there on the sofa. My husband opened his eyes and saw the black image standing at the foot of the sofa staring at him with its featureless face. This startled my husband. The thing turned and headed back into the dining room area. Then it turned and came to the back of the sofa. My husband didn't take time to think, he grabbed the thing and flipped it over the couch onto the floor and started chocking it. That is when he yelled for me to get the lights.

A few weeks later, I was putting the baby to bed after her two-something feeding when my husband asked me to come into the living room. I came and he asked me if I heard something. I did. It was footsteps. They wasn’t the usual ones we heard every night in the house, but someone out side walking around the front of the house in a pair of wading boots. Squish! Squish! Squish! We went outside to check it out. No one was there. The footsteps continued. We went back into the house and waited for nearly an hour. Finally, all was quiet and we went to bed. Across the road that ran through our forty acres was a swamp area on our land. We believe that is why we heard the thing in wading boots.

A few small things continued to stir in the old house but we didn't pay any attention them. After all, they seemed quite a relief to some of the other things we heard and saw.

When our little girl was well over a year old, we were sitting in the living room talking late one night about the "Thing"--why it hadn't been around for a while, and we sure didn't miss it. Nevertheless, we were wondering what happened to it.
I told my husband that I was glad it was gone and that it should be too because it didn't want to see me mad. I had a handful of Skittles and I threw them over the back of the couch on the floor into the dining room and yelled into the air "Hey! Black thing, want some Skittles?" My husband became frustrated at this stunt and said he was going to bed. He warned me I shouldn't mess with things I don't know anything about. I said I agreed and decided I'd go to bed with him. I told him to get our things and I would go get the kitchen lights. I turned to walk through the dining room to the kitchen, when all of a sudden, as soon as I looked, the black thing was standing in front of me, seven feet tall. I screamed. I dropped my teacup and just screamed. My husband ran to me and couldn't believe it either. We ran into the bedroom. He gave me a serious talking-to about messing with things I didn't know about one more time. Believe me, I learned my lesson.

This still isn't the end. Months later, my husband was making a singing tape. We turned it on to listen to how it turned out, and right in the middle it becomes silent and then this evil voice comes on and says "You are going to die ________!"

It was using my husband's full name and said he was going to die. We called our pastor and had him listen to the tape. He was just as speechless as we were. We had prayer clothes made and put everywhere in our home. When we listened to the tape again after doing this, it had changed. It said, "You are not going to die ___________!" Unbelievably, it is true.

I didn't think this black thing ever bothered our small children. They were always asleep when the rubbish occurred. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. My four-year-old son was asleep one night in his infant bed when we heard his screaming. I got up and ran out to him. He was curled up into a ball on the head of his bed screaming. He said a black man was in his mirror and came out at him. He said it tried to pick him up. I grabbed my son, and my husband ran to get our other two children. We all ganged into the master bedroom that night and every night that followed until we were about to find another place and got out.

Another family since moved into the farmhouse. I wonder from time to time how their life in Hades is going. I can only say one thing more on that subject: Better them than us.

Our son had night terrors for nearly five years after we left that house. As for my husband and me, we have since found that we are more accessible to the supernatural. However, those are other stories.