Two Women Thought Their House Was Haunted. It Was Much, Much Worse.
My mom separated from my step dad in early 2013, when I was 17. He had already threatened to kick me out of his home for a multitude of reasons — anything from violating curfew to being bisexual — and really, I wasn’t a bad kid. All I did was work and go to school. So I moved out with my mom and agreed to pay 1/3 of the rent, or about $400 a month.
At the time I made $7.50 an hour to get verbally abused by customers and flip burgers, and I worked around 20-25 hours per week. Plus, I went to school. Plus, I kind of had a social life. So usually on any given week, I was home for about two evenings, and out otherwise. My mom was pretty lenient with me since I was paying rent so my curfew was usually between 12-2:30.
My mom worked full time at a Wawa that was 45 minutes away. She was also in school and had a boyfriend that lived a town over; she was home about as often as I was. We had a cat. It was just us.
And this apartment used to be a barn. It’s split into 4 apartments, two on both floors, and has an inaccessible attic and a basement that’s creepy as fuck. It’s off of a main road, a ways back down a driveway, in an open field with a few other ancient buildings around it, and not much else besides trees. Initially, we took comfort in this.
But then it got weird… like, really weird.
There was a closet in her bedroom that locked from the inside, and randomly, it would be locked. Same with the pantry. Small things would be moved. And more and more, we noticed we were missing things, things would happen by themselves; “Did you smoke a bowl out of my grinder?” “Why/when did you eat all the Cheez its?” “How did the cat flip over the litter box?”
It was eerie, but it was right outside of a civil war zone, a major one, said to have hosted the bloodiest battle outside of Gettysburg. It was so dumb, but at first, we thought it was a ghost, or we thought it was the other person. Obviously it was a tense, weird time.
And I was getting sick of my mom smoking my weed. So before I left work one day, after she had left work, too, I set up a simple string trap that would snap when she opened the door. I just wanted to know for sure it was her, and that we didn’t have a pothead poltergeist floatin’ around our house.
An hour before my shift ends, my mom calls to tell me that she needs to cover another shift, so she’ll be doing a double, and did I have bus money to get home? I did, so I went home. To my surprise, the string trap had been tripped. I was, again, missing a pinch of weed. I was so sober and beyond explainably paranoid. My chest was starting to feel tight with anxiety, and I grabbed the pepper spray out of my bag. As I left the room, I heard feet shuffling above my head. My heart dropped, I might have even shit myself. I grabbed the paraphenilia, set it somewhere safe outside, and bolted from the house and ran to the burger king across the street while I dialed 911.
After a little bit, the police showed up. I was beginning to feel like I definitely overreacted. I felt so stupid. I wanted to tell Officer Jones to go home, I changed my mind, there was nobody smoking my weed in my house. But I did feel better when they told me they would go search the house, and one of them stayed outside to wait with me while the others searched for the foot steps.
And I’m on the phone with my mom, who’s a mixture of pissed of and concerned, telling her that it’s probably all good, and I’m sorry for scaring her. But then the door to the house swings open. I can hear a struggle, and I walk to see it better. A police officer and a husky, bearded man are wrestling at the foot of my stairs, just in front of the door. The beard guy is holding onto the door knob with one hand. I was so shocked and afraid. I had to hang up the phone.
The beard man gets away and makes a sharp left, across the patio, over the short wooden fence, and into the field with all of the trees in it. He is gone into the night. The officers disappear after him, only to return and tell me that he got away.
They did a thorough sweep of the house. They found his semen around the drain of the shower, as well as (oh god oh god oh god) on our loofas and razors. The discovered that the pantry had an attic dropdown door that was painted over, that this man had chipped at to get inside long before we showed up. He had been squatting there since summer. When people moved in, he took to hiding in the attic, pantry, or closet. He came out when we weren’t home. He ate our food. The officers didn’t know, but he smoked our weed. He probably had a bond with our cat. If he didn’t actually see me have sex, he definitely heard it. And seriously, who wanks it onto a razor blade?
Ew, it just makes me want to die to this day when I think about it. My mom’s boyfriend moved in with us shortly after, and I was home even less. To this day, I am paralyzed with fear when I hear a strange noise like the “house settling”. I keep mace on me always. Everywhere. At all times. This guy wasn’t even violent, I guess, but just the idea that he wanked his freewilly onto my loofa makes me feel unsafe in a profound way.
