Haunted by a Decision
Some hauntings don’t need a ghost
Every old house has a story. This one started telling it from the driveway.
Robert saw it first, and Robert wanted it. I want you to remember that part, because it matters later. Not that I’m ever going to say I told you so. But in this case, I didn’t offer a “maybe not.” I didn’t offer a strong enough “I don’t think we should.”
From the outside, the house looked like it had lived a few lives and wasn’t ready to talk about all of them. Paint that had given up in places. Windows that seemed to be looking out at you, keeping an eye on the whole street.
You tell yourself a house can’t tell you anything. It’s wood and nails and an asking price. You keep telling yourself it’s just a house.
But this house wore two perpetual expressions, depending on the time of day you approached it. One was a warning: Stay away. The other was exasperation: I thought I told you to stay away.
This house clearly had its own agenda.
The price should have been the first clue. The house wasn’t on the market the usual way. Somehow it had ended up with the city, and the city put it up for auction. Robert saw an opportunity. A good buy. And it was a very good price, the kind of price that hints a house has more going on than just being a house.
Inside, there were no rooms. Not in the way an old house is supposed to have rooms, small and closed and full of corners. Here, one space poured into the next. From the front door you could see straight through to the kitchen and out the back windows. There was nowhere to hide that you couldn’t be seen.
On the first day, we didn’t mind.
By the second night, we wondered why exactly there were no private spaces here.
By the third night, we wanted some.
The house smelled like dusty, wet carpet. Not freshly wet. The kind of dampness that seemed to have settled in years ago and decided to stay. We tried everything we could think of, but the smell never left. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was coming from the house or whether the house itself was the smell.
It felt as if the walls themselves were always looking at you. And they weren’t just looking. They were judging. I distinctly remember one night eating chicken from a questionable restaurant, the only place still open because we’d waited too late to go get food. The house groaned as we ate. It creaked. It had an opinion about what we had brought in.
Can I prove that? No.
Did I feel it? Yes.
Do we believe it? Absolutely.
Then there were the stairs.
Upstairs, things looked almost normal. A bedroom to the left. A bedroom to the right. A bathroom. But next to the bathroom was another set of stairs. Nobody mentioned them. Nobody explained them. They were simply there, the way a question is there when no one wants to ask it.
If you were brave enough to climb them, you found a room made of concrete and some tile. A spigot with a hose attached. And a drain. A big drain.
Not a bathtub. Not a shower. Just a hose, a hard floor, and a drain built for something that needed to be washed away.
Robert went up first. He stood there looking around, and his thought was a very somber one: What have I gotten myself into? Then: What is this place? What would someone do with a room like this?
He stood there longer than he intended, looking from the hose to the drain and back again. There was nothing moving, nothing making a sound. Still, he had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d walked into a room without knowing what happened there, or why it had been left behind.
He came back down the stairs thinking about it. And somewhere on the way down, he remembered the name of the town. I won’t tell you the real one. I’ll just say it ended in “ville,” and suddenly it sounded a lot like Amityville. So we’ll call it Ville.
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The town didn’t help matters.
Ville felt as though someone had carved it out of another time and forgotten to bring it forward. There was a post office that looked like an ordinary house, except for a handwritten sign announcing ‘Post Office’. Next door was another house that apparently served as a hardware store. It looked as though someone had simply painted the name on the side and opened for business.
He ventured into the post office once. To this day, he doesn’t remember what he went in to ask. He remembers only that he wanted to get back out.
It wasn’t that anything happened. That was the unsettling part. Nothing ever quite happened.
Then the neighbors started appearing.
I say appearing because that’s what they did. Robert would be out front, or carrying something in from the car, and someone would simply be there. No footsteps. No car door. Just a neighbor, standing a little closer than you’d expect, as if they’d been waiting for him to come outside.
It was an investment house, so we didn’t live there full time. Every visit, we arrived as strangers all over again. And every visit, someone was already waiting.
I started to wonder. Were they being creepy on purpose? Was it just these neighbors? Or was the whole town creepy, and the house simply fit right in?
And they only ever talked to Robert. Never to me.
They knew things. That was clear. But they didn’t tell things. One would nod at the house and say, “Yeah, you know. There’s a story.” And you’d wonder, well, what is the story? But no one ever told us. Another would ask how he was settling in, then look up at the second floor for a long moment and say nothing at all. They alluded. They hinted. They let a sentence trail off and then went back to wherever they’d come from.
Robert finally asked one of them outright. “I don’t know what’s going on with my house. There’s a room upstairs.”
The neighbor said, quietly, “Yeah. Yeah. We heard about that. We think that’s where they slaughtered animals. And then the blood just ran down.”
That was the most anyone ever said.
Robert’s mind went straight to the questions no one wants answered. The blood ran down. Down where? Why would anyone bring animals upstairs to do that? Where was the blood now? Had it run through the house?
He shook his head. “That’s one of those things I might not ever really want to know.”
Once he shared that, it was my turn to speak up. And this time, I didn’t hold back.
“I think it’s time we sell this house.”
We put it on the market. We didn’t make any money. We didn’t lose any either. We broke even, and the peace of mind of being rid of it was worth more than any profit.
The buyer was someone from the town. When we brought up the house, he said, and I quote, “Yeah, I know the history.”
We never asked him what he knew.
We just wanted to leave.
Some hauntings don’t need a ghost.
A first for me: an eerie story, written for The Writers Circle Spooky Storytime challenge. The house was real, the drain was real, and the neighbors were very, very real.
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I’m a writer and executive leadership coach, and I love to tell stories. I’ve found that stories help us see things more clearly, look honestly at hard things, and sometimes discover something we might have missed otherwise. I work with leaders who are ready to think differently about how they lead and the kind of leader they want to be.
Come explore more of my writing at Natalie Ann Coaching, or follow me here on Medium.
