I Lived in a Very Haunted House. I’ll Never Buy an Old Home

The house I grew up in was not normal. It looked normal enough from the outside: two stories, white wood, red brick, black shingles. And it looked normal enough on the inside — living room, family room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms. It had all the stuff that makes a house normal. But the house I grew up in had more going on than just a family’s day-to-day existence.

The house I grew up in had creaks and groans, chillingly cold rooms, doors that opened and closed on their own, voices that whispered in the night, furniture that moved, and windows that rattled when there was no breeze. The house I grew up in was home to an entity (i.e., a spirit or ghost). 

My father bought our house from his father-in-law, my grandfather, and he got it for a steal. It was 1984, and he spent the next two years renovating it before we moved in in 1986. I was 8 years old. I was young, and it was a long time ago, so I can’t definitively say what my first unsettling experience was in the house, but I think I knew from the start that something just wasn’t right.

In the beginning, my parents told me that all the creaks and groans were just the settling of a 100-year-old house, and I tried to believe them. But as time passed and we lived there longer, they started blaming the noises on a woman named Mable: “Oh, Mable’s sure busy tonight” or “Quiet down, Mable, we’re trying to watch Jeopardy!.” Soon enough, Mable was just a thing we all accepted.

It wasn’t until later that they told me that a woman had died in the house in the 1970s (in what would become my sister’s bedroom) and had not been found for several days. See, our house was built as a single-family home, but it went through many iterations before it became a single-family home again. In the early part of the 1900s, it was a family home, but it didn’t stay that way. In the 1940s and ‘50s, it was a home for the nurses who worked at the hospital across the street, and in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was a boarding house. Mable was one of those boarders.

My parents knew her; she was a “town character,” which most likely meant she had a mental illness and was living with addiction. But to my parents and the rest of the people in our small town, she was just “a character.”

The first time I remember being afraid, like afraid-for-my-life terrified, in that house was when I was about 10. My sister was in college, and it was the ’80s, so I was home alone after school every day. My grandparents lived next door, and my mother worked just a few blocks away. Every day when I got home, I grabbed the cordless phone, went to the bathroom, and called my mom to let her know I was home.

That day, as I sat in the bathroom, the phone was full of static and noise. The numbers wouldn’t dial, and I couldn’t get it to hang up. No matter how many times I pushed the hang-up button, I still heard the scratchy static. As I held the phone to my ear, I very clearly heard a voice on the other end talking to me. “Kristi, don’t hang up the phone, Kristi. I’m coming.” It wasn’t a human voice — but it also certainly wasn’t my mom. There was no one else in the house with me; I know that for certain. This voice sounded like it was built from static — scratchy and digital like the throat it came from was filled with white noise and barbed wire.

I didn’t even hang up. I just dropped the phone on the floor, flew out the front door, and ran the three blocks to my mom’s work.

She believed me. She knew we weren’t alone in the house. She had her own experiences by that time — we all had. But that was the first time I felt threatened and afraid.

It wasn’t unusual for plates to slide across the counter. Many people will try to attribute that to steam under the plate, but it happened on every counter and the kitchen table, with dry plates and dry surfaces. Lights would turn on and off, and doors would open and close. Those types of incidents were so commonplace in my house as to be unremarkable. Bigger things — stranger things — started slowly and built over the years until my parents finally sold the house in the early 2000s.

As a teenager, I leaned heavily into the spooky stuff, embracing horror movies and haunted houses. When I didn’t have a Ouija board of my own, I DIYed one, using handwritten letters taped to my wooden bedroom floor, with an empty cassette tape case for the planchette. It worked, and my best friend and I talked to Mable, as well as another entity who said it was not Mable, a few times before I got scared and put the liner notes and cassette back in the tape case and never tried again.

Once I left for college, my mom was alone in the house during the week — my father worked out of town and only came home on weekends. And she had a few terrifying experiences that she told me about after they happened but would never discuss again. One night, as she laid in bed, the house was noisy, and she couldn’t sleep, so, as we did, she asked Mable to pipe down. A male voice spoke, “I am not Mable.” Mom said the voice was disembodied and wispy, an ephemeral voice that came from nowhere. After that, she was convinced there were two spirits in the house and that Mable had been protecting us from a malevolent being for all those years.

I agreed with her.

When you live in a house like the house I grew up in, or in any house, you convince yourself that whatever happens in your house is normal because it’s all you know. I knew it was unsettling, sometimes scary, and sometimes downright terrifying, but it was all I knew. Lying in bed at night listening to the house move and rattle, knowing that your door would most likely open on its own and then slam again while you were trying to go to sleep, hearing whispers in dark rooms, and feeling your skin prickle as you laid there was my normal.

I didn’t realize just how much it had affected me until I was married and in a home of my own. My husband and I were home one night and there was a strange noise in our house. Jokingly, he said, “Maybe we have a ghost.” Our house was built in the 1940s, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. That was when I had my first-ever panic attack.

My family lived in that house for 20 years, and these aren’t even a drop in the bucket of things we experienced. The house recently came on the market again, and, thankfully, it’s way outside my budget; while I was tempted, maybe somewhat masochistically, I can’t convince myself that it would be good to live with Mable again.

Now that I’m well into middle age with children of my own, I still lean into the spooky side of life. I love scary movies — the creepier, the better. But haunted house stories, when done well, make me panic. I’ve always said my dream is to live in an old farmhouse or renovate a dilapidated Victorian. If push came to shove, though, I honestly think I’d opt for a nice, sturdy ranch house with one previous owner who absolutely did not die in the house; if they did, I hope they were surrounded by love and light, and not left, forgotten and alone for so long that their spirit became restless and now wanders the halls looking for a family to belong to again.