Submitted by MARIQUE - Director on
This is a strange story about a house I lived in when I lived in Maine. Much more happened while I lived there, this story is just some of the highlights. I lived there for 3 ½ years. This story is very long, just to warn you. If you hate reading long and rambling ghost stories, this is not a story for you. This will be included in an upcoming book soon to be published by an author and friend of mine. This is just a sneak preview for you, not to be shared elsewhere please.
Living in My Haunted Home by Marique Quinn
I wish to share what it was like to reside in a home with discarnated spirits ("ghosts") as co-occupants. It was a very challenging and sometimes a downright frightening and distressing experience.
How I came to live in a "haunted" house is a really short story. My ex husband and I had parted ways and I needed a place to live that was cheap. The house I moved into belonged to the mother of my male best friend from high school and lifelong best friend who had recently divorced and had moved in his mother’s home to take care of her after his father passed away. His mother became ill however, and needed more care than he could give her so she went into the nursing home, leaving him with the house and the bills all to himself. He was glad to acquire a roommate and someone to help with the bills. It worked out well for me because I had limited funds and finding an apartment I could afford on my own was proving to be difficult. So I quickly moved into his mother’s home with him into my rented room, and thus my history with the house began.
It was not long at all after moving in before I sensed that something felt "off" with the house; it had an oppressive feeling upon entering the front door for me and I did not know why. The air felt flat to me and it seemed dismal even when the sun was shining through the big bay window in the front foyer. At first I thought that it was just me and that the emotions of leaving my husband of many years and being in a strange house were just bothering me. The feeling of something troubling me about the house went on for quite awhile but I could never pinpoint what was troubling me about the house. Something just seemed off about the place from my first day there. For awhile I chalked it up to the fact that my roommate’s mother had been a hoarder and the house was totally stuffed with clutter and junk piled high everywhere and that was what I was bothering me because I am nasty neat by nature. I cleaned the house out of all the piles and piles of stuff and made it into a comfortable clutter free home, but the atmosphere and my reaction to it did not change as I had hoped by decluttering it. I felt there was something else wrong with the house and I did not like how I felt there.
Each time I entered the front door I felt an inkling of gloom and dread but did not have any idea why. Many times I would come through the door and the hairs on my arms and neck would stand up and I would feel a slight chill for no reason even when the house was hot. I found that odd. Slowly with my day to day living odd things began to happen. When I was alone in the house I began to feel as if there was someone in the house with me although I knew I was alone. I could not shake the feeling of being watched, at times I would get the sensation that someone was behind me and would feel what felt like breath on the back of my neck. That is how my experiences began. There were many things that happened that made me begin to believe that maybe the house was haunted, that made me think that it was not all in my imagination. I had lived in homes before that had had supernatural things happen and I do believe in “ghosts,” and used to kid and tell my friends I was ghost magnet because so many weird unexplained things had happened in my homes I had lived in in the past. Different things started to happen at my new home that I could not rationalize to myself and I began to get apprehensive about living there, feeling the presence of "ghosts" once again in my life and was not all that happy about it. If it were not for the fact that I had a male roommate who was there most of the time, I think I would have moved out when I began to become uncomfortable being in the house. I did not wish to move however, because of financial concerns and because I knew I had a roommate who I had known for a very long time and completely trusted that could protect me from harm if need be. I liked the security of having a guy living in the home. I thought he could protect me or so I thought.
My roommate did not believe in ghosts, so when I shared my apprehensions, he laughed at my "silliness" and always managed to supply rationalizations about my experiences that seemed reassuring and calming in the beginning of my living there, but as time progressed even he himself began to feel something was off somehow with the house as well. He began to experience things he could not rationalize even to himself. We began to joke about living in a haunted house, but it bothered us both so I felt a lot better, and did not feel I had an overactive imagination, and that my sensations and experiences were valid after all. I mean if a grown man who did not believe in ghosts, let alone anything supernatural in nature, began to believe the house was haunted I did not feel so alone in my concern any longer and felt somehow vindicated. That kept me from packing up and striking out to find another place to call home. Thus my adventures with the "supernatural" began in earnest that house. What a roller coaster of weird my home had progressively become. It was "showtime" for the spirits and a good show they put on.
One night about month after I moved in as I was laying in the single antique spindled wooden framed bed in my bedroom it felt like someone had yanked really hard on the leg of the bed and the bed itself moved or dragged about a four feet away from the wall. I was just laying there scared as hell and all of a sudden I found myself on a slope as the top right leg went “flying away from the bed about 3 feet” leaving me on a drastic slope forward and to the right. I hoped that the bed was just old and probably dried and brittle from age and the I laughed and said to myself that I really needed to go on a diet! My roommate down the hall heard a loud "kawang" as the corner of the bedsprings (the old metal type) hit the floor hard. He came running to see what happened because it was the middle of the night and the sound reverberated throughout the upstairs, He was worried something had fallen or even I had fallen. As I lay there laughing out loud at being cockeyed and sloping to the right sharply where the leg was now missing and hanging onto the mattress for dear life to keep from rolling off (don't ask me why, I haven't a clue..); Roley came running into my room. As he got over the door threshold the bottom left leg just shot out onto the floor quite far from the bed (about four feet) and bounced off his leg. The bed I was clutching began teetering back and forth midair like a hammock with me trying to stay balanced in the middle and hanging onto the side bedrail for dear life. The bed was still standing supported by only the top left leg and the bottom right leg with me on it in the middle. It should have tipped over one way or the other but instead there I was like I trying to ride a surfboard and stay afloat with balance. It really was quite comical to view for my roommate so he started laughing with me and we were really hysterically laughing at that point at my totally ridiculous demise. (You really would have had to been there to get the full visual, it defied explanation). I should have gotten out of bed when the first leg shot away but quite frankly was totally shocked and just clung like a person hugging a log to stay afloat. So stupid but it all happened so quickly. Right after the left leg went, the other two legs broke and shot away at the same time. Down with a crash went my mattress and boxspring with me on top of them with the headboard and footboard still attached to the frame minus legs and slats still intact holding the frame up! I wish I could have had a video of that, it was so ridiculous.
This all happened so quickly, but for me it seemed like it was in slow motion. So there I sat on the springs and mattress on the floor very shaken, wondering to freaking hell had just happened. All Roley and I could do was laugh. It was either laughter or hysteria, not sure which. It did not seem so funny after I really thought about it and then all of a sudden the room seemed to drop about 20 degrees in temperature and all the hairs on my body were prickling and standing up straight.
My roommate felt uneasy about what had just happened and began to examine the bed frame where the legs had been connected only five minutes previously. Men are so practical and love to problem solve even when confronted with weird things happening I learned. He was surprised to find that it looked like the legs were yanked off the bed. The wood on the leg remains was all splintered and jagged and did not look like the seam where the leg attached to the headboard and foot board simply got brittle and had simply let go as we first thought and hoped. The legs all looked as if they had been somehow snapped about ¾ of the way up the leg. We both got freaked out about that. If I had been too heavy for the bed the legs would have broken when I first started sleeping in the bed. So we could not figure out how the legs flew off the bed like that, and we were puzzled how the legs could have "shot" so far away from the bed....it was really weird...I felt at that time like I was in a scene from a horror movie or something and I did not like it one dam bit. For the rest of the time I lived in that house I just left the box spring and mattress on the floor and got rid of the bedframe all together, the incident had spooked me so much. My roommate could not think of a single thing to rationalize what had happened so he did not even try. He simply shrugged and said "I think we have a spook, or maybe and bunch of them!"
That same night after the bed incident I sent Roley back to bed and I just laid there on the floor on the springs and mattress and tried to go back to sleep. It was three AM and I was tired and decided to try not to think about it until the morning. Well it was not too long after I laid my head back down on my pillow when I felt a movement in my mattress right beside me. It felt like someone had sat down on the side of my mattress and that made me sit up with a start. I could actually feel breath in my face, but my lamp on the bedside table was lit and there was nobody there but here was a big impression (hollowed out spot) on my mattress as if someone was sitting there. I hollered to my roommate and he came running and told me that as he was laying in his bed trying to fall asleep that he felt like someone was pushing his face into the pillow. He always slept on his stomach with his face into the pillow and whatever it was was pushing his face into the pillow so hard that he could not breath and could not get up right away when he heard me calling out. Finally he wrestled his face out of the pillow after nearly suffocating and came running down the hall to my room. He asked me why I screamed and I told him that something was sitting on the side of my mattress and he could even see the impression on the mattress right next to me plain as day. The mattress was an old goose down filled feather mattress and it got dents and "valleys" when you sat or laid on it. I got out of the bed very quickly and we both left the room as fast as we could and went downstairs and made coffee figuring that neither of us were going to get any sleep after that. There was to be no sleep the rest of that night or the next one either, we were both just too nerved up to go back up stairs. From that event things started to happen with great frequency. One thing after another continued to happen, many things that defied explanation.
I was a smoker and my roommate was not so I agreed not to smoke in the living area in the house. I set up an area in the cellar as a smoking area complete with an easy chair and a table and ashtray. I spent quite a good deal of time there because I was a heavy smoker and hated being outside in the cold of the winter. I always felt very uneasy down there but not enough to stop me from going down there. One evening I was sitting there smoking and reading a book and sipping my coffee and a wooden heavy steamtrunk that was in the cellar started to make a scraping sound. I looked up to see what had made that scraping sound and noticed the trunk was no longer under the cellar windows where it had always been since I lived there, instead it was now in the middle of the cellar floor. That really frightened me because if "something" was strong enough to haul a heavy steam trunk full of old books about 9 feet into the middle of a room, what could it do to me. I quickly jumped up and literally flew up the cellar stairs to tell Roley what had happened. He came back down with me to see for himself and the trunk was now down to the end of the cellar under the window, only in a completely different place in the cellar from where the trunk had set for many years. That was very unsettling to say the least, and that was just the beginning of happenings in the cellar. One day I was sitting having a cigarette and actually watched the trunk move across the floor. The scared the hell out of me. I was up the stairs in a flash, shaking and kind of freaking out, I have to admit! After the moving trunk incident, other weirdness began to happen in the cellar.
We kept losing the heat because the furnace began to shut down for no reason, and when we went to the cellar to see why the furnace was not running the emergency switch was always turned off. So we would then trip the switch and the furnace would come on and the minute we got up the stairs the furnace would cut out again. Then we would go down and push the emergency switch again to start the furnace and by the time we would get back up the stairs the furnace would switch off again. At first Roley figured that it was a faulty switch or a problem with the furnace because it was a very very old furnace. We had a technician come to check the switch and furnace out and was assured that there was nothing at all wrong with the furnace, the wiring to and from it or anything at all wrong with the furnace. The game of the furnace going on and off and all the subsequent trips to the cellar to restart it was getting very tedious and in Maine in the dead of the winter, having the furnace going on an off was no fun at all and we were rapidly losing patience with the furnace shenanigans and was getting very exasperated. This continued to happen the whole time I lived there. Many times the furnace repairmen from our oil company and other repair men from other companies were called in, and every time they said that the furnace was fine. Also the pilot light would go out daily for no apparent reason as there was no draft in the cellar but still it kept going out so we constantly had to check and relight it. Our furnace and the cellar became a battle ground for us and a monumental pain in the butt, but Roley could not afford to buy a new furnace so we were stuck tending it to it constantly, as Maine is the winter is a very cold place when your furnace decides not to run.
After my living there for about 8 months, we decided to go to the Animal Refuge League to adopt their dog of the week, whose video was on the website. We fell in love with her from the video. We went and adopted her. She was a one year old female lab/shepherd whom we named Shana. She was a sweet and goodnatured dog we were told and she took to us immediately and we were so happy to have adopted such an awesome dog. The moment we got her home and opened the front door, she obviously sensed there was something in our home that made her very skiddish. She came through our front door for the first time and immediately scrunched down on her haunches and gave off a very low and throaty growl and seemed to be staring straight up the stairs to the upstairs, and she growled and cowered and actually peed on the floor as she growled and shook with the fur on her back standing up like a rooster comb. There was nothing that we could see but she practically physically dragged Roley into the living room on the left because he was holding her on a leash and she obviously wanted to get away from the front hallway and the stairway very urgently. She was very riled and kept growling for quite awhile and we could not calm her down. We figured it was just being away from the pound and in a strange home may have upset her. She did however seem more at ease in our downstairs, or at least for a time, but she definitely wanted nothing at all to do with the stairs leading up to the second floor where the bedrooms and bathroom was. When we went up to bed her first night there, she seemed scared to death about going up those stairs. We did not want her alone downstairs worried that she would go to the bathroom on the carpet or furniture.
We had to force and cajole her and literally drag her bodily to get her up those 13 steps and by the time we got to the head of the stairs she was already growling and her back fur was all standing up again...I brought her into my bedroom and she laid down on the floor next to my mattress on the floor but did not close her eyes and kept growling and looking into the corner of my room as if she was seeing something there, which of course to the visible eyes there was nothing or nobody there that I could see. Neither she nor I slept hardly at all that night, and I laid there thinking that I had gotten a dog to protect me but it looked like I would end up getting tired of her growling at nothing really quickly and end up being the one to protect her. The growling at nothing and the staring intently at things I could not see made me very very nervous. I felt sorry for Shana because she was such a sweet dog, but she seemed afraid all of the time and I did not know how to make her feel any better.
About a week after we brought her home she began what looked like chasing something invisible around the house like she was playing or chasing another animal. There was of course no animal there that we could see. She used to take her dog bones and take one to a particular chair in our house and leave it there and eat the other one. We used to then put the spare bone back in the box. She did this every time we gave her 2 dog biscuits twice a day. It was like she was saving a treat for another pet or something and I thought it was cute, at first anyway. Her behaviors at times were off the chart squirrely, so we took her to the vet’s to make sure she was not having seizures or something because she would get so anxious in certain rooms in our house and get so frightened that she would lose control of her bladder and have accidents on the floor. There was one bedroom upstairs that she would absolutely not go in ever, and would just sit outside the room and growl and act like she was seeing something she wanted to attack but did not dare to do anything other than growl. The vet said there did not seem to be anything physically wrong with her, but maybe she had emotional issues from something that may have happened to her when she was a stray. What ever was happening with her we felt very badly for her moments of abject fear reactions and being unable to console her.
One night I was laying in my bed and it was about 2 AM and my dog who had taken up sleeping on my bed started her low throaty growl and all of a sudden it seemed like someone had latched a vice grip on my big toe and tightened it. It shot a shooting pain through my toe like a nail had been driven through my toe, and then an unbearable pinching pain shot through my toe and all the way up the front of my lower leg. I tried to jerk my foot off the bed to get my toe where I could see it and out from under the sheet and blanket, but found I was unable to even lift my foot off the bed, and I sat up and flung the sheet off of my legs, and could see deep purple bruising circling around the middle of my right big toe, but was unable to make the dreadful pressure go away on my toe, and was unable to move my foot at all. I started to panic and screamed out for Roley. He came running and as he entered the room all of a sudden the pressure released and I was able to move my foot again. It was such a relief but my toe still hurt like heck. I told my roommate what had happened and he believed me because my toe was beginning to swell and the bruising became raised and well defined and it looked like finger prints. It looked as if someone grabbed my toe with a thumb and fingers and just pushed in and squeezed and pinched with force. Roley told me that he thought it might have been his deceased father who did it, because when Roley was a child and he overslept for school, his father would latch onto his big toe and squeeze really hard until he woke up, which Roley always hated! Roley thought that maybe his departed dad was angry, because his father always thought the world of Roley’s ex wife and maybe he was angry because there was another woman living in the house with him. Of course that was simply speculation on Roley's part but the thought of an angry ghost Dad did nothing to make me feel less threatened, that was for sure. During all of this commotion my dog never stopped growling. Eventually we all did get some sleep, but I never slept soundly at all after that. It was the first time that whatever was there got painfully physical with me. After that things would happen like feeling that someone was sitting on my legs in bed or touching my face and it was terrifying.
Roley had more episodes of having his face forced into the pillow and had been sleeping on his back because of it. Neither of us nor the dog were getting much sleep at all at night and more strange things kept happening that we could not explain. We would set things down in one place and leave the room briefly for whatever reason and reenter the room only to find that whatever we set down would not be where we put it, and sometimes we would find it in another place in another room for no apparent reason at all. Sometimes things would disappear and never reappear at all. How strange it was living there.
Sometimes I would get awakened from my sleep by hearing my name said very loudly right next to my ear...that really rattled me. Roley told me that his mother used to hear voices and music playing in her room and she always blamed it on having loud and rowdy neighbors. Roley said that his mother had used to call him to her room and ask him if he would call the neighbors across the street and tell them to shut off the music! She was hearing loud music, but Roley could hear nothing and told his mother it was all in her head (and he secretly thought to himself that she was old and getting senile and more than slightly dotty.) He later regretted thinking that because then he also started hearing music at night that seemed to have no source after I moved in. It was not loud , it was slightly distant sounding, but definitely discernible, loud enough that it used to keep us both awake at night wondering where to hell it was coming from. He only heard it infrequently, but lucky me heard it every single night for as long as I lived in the house. The music reminded me of music from the 40s, although I could never make out the words, the melody sounded like Glen Miller type of music or ballads or something. Very melodic, soothing and pretty actually. It was just on the edge of my hearing...sometimes I even hummed along with it, although I felt really silly and my dog looked at me like I was nuts.
So much stuff had happened to rattle us that Roley decided to sell the house. To keep our sanity, which was slowly dwindling, along with our health from lack of sleep and anxciety, it seemed like the logical thing to do. His mother had passed away while we were living there and he now owned the house so he put it on the market and he decided to move as far away from Maine as possible and decided to move down south to escape the Maine winters, which were very tough on both of us. I could not have been more thrilled when he asked me to come along. At least in the south we would not have to deal with buying fuel oil for heat and a "haunted" furnace that gave us no end of trouble the whole time we lived there.
It was a very old house and needed work and rewiring but it had charm and was in a very desirable neighborhood so we did not anticipate too many problems with selling it, but trouble came up right away. Many people who looked at the house told Roley’s realtor that there was something that they were sensing about the house that was disturbing to them but just could not pinpoint what it was. One person said it was like a gloom that struck them as soon as they walked in the front door. It was beginning to be problematic and we were desperate to just leave the house behind, but it looked like it was going to take a lot of time to sell it. We kept making improvements on the house and put a lot of money into it, hoping to get offers. Offers never came. We got very discouraged and Roley was very afraid he was stuck with the house, and he wanted out of there very badly. I was so pleased when he asked me to go to whatever new house he bought and be his room mate there too. At that time it seemed to me that we were stuck there in the house however, and that frankly scared and depressed me. I loved having a roommate that was a life long friend, and felt safe because I knew and trusted him. I did not want to consider just moving out and leaving him to deal with the house alone. I figured I had made it that far.
One day I ran into another friend from high school that I had not seen in years and I found out that she did paranomal investigations, was a veritable established “ghost hunter, ghost whisperer.” She is the owner of a paranormal investigation firm called Frontiers of the Mind, in Maine, and also does many other things such as connecting people to communicate with deceased loved ones ( like Jonathan Edwards style) and she does psychic readings in person and via the phone with astonishing success. She teaches paranomal classes and is also an author. She has a great reputation in the field of the paranormal and so does her investigations firm. They do a lot of work for historical societies and all sorts of other work. Her investigation firm also performs what I call “spiritual house clearings” for houses that seem to have lingering spirits and other paranomal happenings. Roley decided that it would not do any harm for her and her trained professional psychic friends to come to the home to do a clearing. We were optimistic after reading about many other homes and haunted historical sites they had cleared.
Her team of 6 and she came and walked through all of the rooms in the house to pick up any information they could pick up about the presences there. Then there was a beautiful ceremony of releasing the spirits to the light. At the completion of the ceremony there was like a bright vortex of brilliant light that shot up to the ceiling and then disappeared. We just sat there spellbound and in awe. She and her team found there were many spirits in the house, even a spirit of a white poodle (which explained for me what my dog chased and played with and shared his milk bones with)! After the ceremony each of the investigators told us their impressions and what they had learned from the spirits. Each one filled in more and more details of what they had seen, felt, discerned and just picked up picked up psychically. One investigator said there was an old woman riding up and down on the riding stair climber that told him to get to hell out. From the description of the woman, Roley and I surmised it was his deceased mother (who we thought was there because Roley's father's spirit was there.) We were told that one of my deceased foster sons was lingering with me and afraid to move forward, and Roley's father was the toe pincher after all! There was the spirit of a man who had severely injured himself on my cellar steps when he lived there long ago and had bled to death there on the steps all alone. There was a little girl there that may have been one of the original occupants in the early 1900s who had died naturally and was afraid to leave home, and there was an old woman's spirit as well, or so we were told. It all fit into place. I still do not know how were ended up with so many earthbound spirits, but it was a moot point after the ceremony because after the ceremony was over the whole atmosphere of the house seemed to lighten, even the smell, and we could sense there was a peace in the house now. It was interesting to note that some of the psychics who had been part of the ceremony said that the cellar was intensely uncomfortable for them to be in, and one of the psychics could not bring himself to go beyond the bottom of the cellar stairs because he was getting the impression of someone’s legs being badly injured on those stairs and there was a great deal of pain associated with those stairs and that he felt actual leg pain on the stairs that was very bad. No wonder. I myself would feel something in my legs when I went up and down the stairs.
It was only after the clearing that anyone took any interest buying the house. We had had about 40 people look at the house and not a one showed any interest at all. Within a few weeks after the clearing we got three different offers and we attributed it directly to the home being freed from ghosts and the oppressing atmosphere that people were sensing. We were very thankful that I had run into Eddita after years of not seeing her and were glad that she was willing clear our house for us. That house had been on the market for months and months and after the clearing it was only a few weeks before the house was under contract and sold. We both were extremely thankful and relieved that we had been freed from that house and gave us the opportunity to move south and start a new life. I often wonder if the new occupants ever experienced anything odd after we left, but we hoped that the spirits that had occupied it had indeed moved forward into the light and were not earthbound any more.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Marique Quinn, All Rights Reserved