Staying At Grandpa's House

When I was a boy, one of my favorite places to spend at least part of the weekend was with my grandpa! He was my mom's father and lived in a bigger town less than 10 miles away from us in upstate NY. I have fond memories of family reunions and spending time as kids up there. He had an old toy box of toys we could play with in the house or out on the patio in the sand pile. They were older toys from when my parent's were kids, but they were fascinating, especially the ones made of tin. He lived on a dead end loop and we played stick ball on that road since there weren't many cars coming through. He spoiled us in many ways and even had a bowl of M&M's he kept tucked away on the top of a cabinet in the dining room that he shared with us (apparently mom didn't even know about it!)

Many weekends I would go stay with him on Friday nights, my grandmother had died a few years earlier, so he lived alone and loved the company. Mom had told me I was his favorite (maybe because she gave me his first name as my middle name) I would stay up until 10 or so watching Prime time television and eating ice cream sundaes! The kind of stuff you can do at the grandparents but not so much at home!

The place was old, with one of those floor furnaces, the ones with grates in the rooms and one big floor grate in another room, in this case the end of the kitchen. There was a dug out cellar below and a cramped second floor he closed off in the winter's to conserve heat. He slept in a converted front room downstairs behind the living room and I would sleep out on the couch in the living room. Though he lived at the end of the dead end loop, just across the fence outside the living room was the 4 lane. It was actually what ended up cutting the road off and was the main traffic lane for the town/city. There were constantly cars going by, so between that and the street lights, the room was fairly lit, even with shades and blinds.

It was a joyful place to spend time, but at night things changed after lights out and it was kind of creepy being left alone during the day as well. That didn't happen often as there were constantly people coming and going, always visitors, like the house on North Street it was a family place.

Though my grandfather was snoozing only one room over, I always felt a sense of anxiety at night, with no discernible reason. I would roll over facing the back of the couch, so as not to see anything. I felt watched somehow and it was unsettling. The living room felt fairly safe, but there was still an air about the place. Whatever I picked up on seemed to be right at the entrance to the room, at the end of the hall, something or someone watching and waiting. The hall and kitchen and even passing the stairs in the dark to use the bathroom, well it was a bit of a race. There was also something about walking past that cellar door in the hall. I would try to hold it if I could. Many could dismiss this as normal childhood fears, but I didn't feel that way at home. True I didn't live at Grandpa's house, but I spent enough time there, it was like a second home. I also did not watch anything scary prior to bedtime, I was adverse to that stuff, my Friday nights were all about an hour long family friendly action-comedy and ice cream sundaes! I would later be granted a flashlight to use, but it was unnerving to go to the bathroom at night, I felt as if something was there, just beyond my field of vision in the shadows waiting to leap out at me. Once I was in the bathroom, it felt like I was in a safe space. Such a strange shift in energy, but the bathroom felt safe. Mom would tell me years later I would complain 'of seeing things in the dark' but I don't remember what? Occasionally, I would catch a flitting movement out of the corner of my eye, especially on the stairs leading to the second floor.

Sometimes I wouldn't really sleep until nearly dawn, when the sky would lighten and suddenly the oppressive air to the place seemed to fade, especially when Grandpa would get up and bustle about fixing breakfast (I could have anything I wanted, one time he even let me try a cup of coffee). Grandpa made everything feel safer and better! Despite the nights of near terror, The time spent there was worth it, so I put up with it, at least until I got older and developed other interests.

This strange house and those early experiences culminated in an encounter one day which really shook me. It was late morning and my grandfather had left me alone while he went out to take care of some personal business and bring back some fast food (another personal treat to spending time there) I was alone in the living room and again those strange feelings arose. It was daylight though and I shook them off. It seemed to build this time and even though I continued to ignore and play with some toys, I heard a loud creak in the floor at the far end of the hall, at the entrance to the kitchen. No big deal, as the house always groaned and creaked, it was old. It didn't stop there though. The noises in the floor sounded down the hall loudly, as if a heavy person were walking down the hall towards the living room. It was rhythmic, there's no mistaking that sound. We always knew when someone had entered the house to visit because the floor made the same sound when anyone walked down it, the sounds varying only by their size (kids made less noise by weight than adults) I looked up sharply and stopped playing. I couldn't believe this, I saw absolutely nothing, yet something was making its way down the hall towards me and not quietly either! My nerve broke and I bolted, I couldn't use the hall, as it was 'occupied' and running around through the dining room would have taken me past the stairs and I was already creeped out. The front door was in my grandpa's room, and the closest way out, so as "it" entered the living room, I fled the house via that exit and waited on the curb for my grandfather to return, trying all the while to rationalize what had just happened. Again like night and day, I felt the change as soon as I left the house, the feeling outdoors was completely different, friendly, noticeably nicer than the darker air of the house. I was scared but I still noticed the energy shift. I have always been sensitive to energy, I just never really understood it until I was an adult. When grandpa came back I sort of gave him a lame excuse but did make it clear being left alone in there was creepy. I was sort of embarrassed at how I reacted, because outside everything felt different and I believe I overreacted. I stopped my overnight stays shortly after that.

It wouldn't be until years later that I may have found some probable cause to what happened or what was there. My Grandfather's house was old but unremarkable. It was a very simple place that my grandfather had added onto when he acquired it, including digging out the basement and adding most of the upstairs. No deaths there, nor at least not any that were talked about. My grandfather, though of Irish descent, didn't really seem to believe in an afterlife.

When my brother and I were teens we found an old Ouija board in the upstairs of the garage at my childhood home, still in it's box. Again I didn't really watch horror movies until I was almost 20, I only had an slight idea of what we had found. My brother though had seen all kinds of stuff a kid his age probably shouldn't be watching, so he knew much more about what we had found. When we opened the box, we found the board was worn and old. We also found a bunch or scribbled notes, someone had apparently transcribed the sessions, similar to a secretary taking down the minutes at a board meeting. Looking back on it, I wish I read through them more carefully, but I was more interested in the board. I only recall someone's name mentioned that I didn't recognize and some reference to drugs.

It was full daylight and under my brother's instruction we sat down in the lower level of the garage and proceeded to 'contact the dead' I was fascinated but sort of unassuming about the whole affair, so when nothing seemed to be happening I decided to have some fun. Applying only slight pressure I moved the planchette where I wanted to spell out what I wanted and attempted to convince my brother and his friend that we had contacted the ghost of a man who had disappeared from the area many years ago. The man may have been murdered after a poker game gone bad, but a body was never found and the mystery remained. Either way, my brother was familiar with the story. I spelled out that the body was buried beneath our garage and I was pretty convincing, though I admit, at the time, other than goofing off I had no idea what I was doing or with what. I later admitted to what I had done, it was all in fun for me. My brother wanted more convincing evidence and believed taking it to a place considered full of spirits, the local cemetery would yield better results. I KNEW this was a bad idea, I could feel it and washed my hands of any further involvement.

My brother and his friends went to the cemetery and returned in short order visibly shaken. He was pale and withdrawn and to this day I cannot get him to speak about what happened there. He apparently went to my grandmother's grave (mom's mother) Whatever happened was pretty bad, and from what little I saw of the notes included with the board, I knew it had belonged to my mother. So I left the board on the kitchen table with the intent to question her about it when she got home. We never used the board in the house at all, only the garage. When mom got home, she flipped out when she saw it. She thought my dad had gotten rid of it, but her idea of getting rid of it and his, apparently were different. She ordered it out of the house and coupled with my brother's bizarre behavior, I took it out to the garage, opened the door a little ways and tossed it in there and closed the door again.

Later when my mom calmed down she revealed the origin of the board and her strong responses to it. She and her siblings had used the board at Grandpa's when they were young. The name in the notes I didn't recognize, was the dead sister of one of her friends and the reference to the drugs was a probable cause of death, or at least played into it. They had used the board quite regularly and she had become familiar with the spirit of the board, who she said later threatened her physically. They stopped using it after that, but strange things started happening at the house. She confirmed the same odd feelings I had shared in my time there and only told me of a few personal instances. One being 'knowing' someone was standing in the doorway of their upstairs bedroom one night. Another was she woke up to something sitting on the end of the bed in that same room one night. She didn't get a good look at it in the dark, but it curled up into a ball and rolled up the bed, passing through her and into the wall. She said it was a really bizarre feeling. This would explain the reason why I had a bad feeling of being watched emanating from the upstairs. She had thought my aunts had some kind of experiences as well, but they wouldn't talk about it.

That same night, my brother continued to get more paranoid because of what he had experienced, which he still wouldn't tell me about. He asked to stay in my room for the night and his hysterics had me half convinced that if I looked out my window at the garage, I would see glowing, flashing lights of some vengeful spirit out there, like something he described in one of his movies. Seeing the awful affect it was having on him, I was determined to go out to the garage in the morning and get rid of the thing myself. Enough was enough, I wasn't sure of what to make of my mother's story and what had happened to my brother, but what had started out as curiosity and a game had changed into something more sinister and had gone too far.

When I opened the garage door that next morning, there was nothing there. The board was gone. My mom thought maybe dad had finally gotten rid of it like she originally wanted (especially after she lit into him when she found out it was still around) However, in the short time that elapsed between last evening and that morning and if you knew how slowly my father took care of things, this seems unlikely. That and he never admitted to it, like he didn't know what we were talking about? My brother told me that years later he found the board again in the garage, but wouldn't touch it. Like before, it disappeared when he went to show me?

I don't know what to make of that, but as near as I can figure, apparently my mother, her friends and siblings, in their tinkering with the metaphysical world, opened some kind of portal in my grandfather's house that remained behind years later, when I encountered it. There's of course the board with a mind of it's own, that hopefully is gone for good. I say that, because when my parent's pass, I inherit the house and the garage is full of the junk they've accumulated and I'll end up being the one who has to go through it, so if it's still out there... It's been many years, my grandfather passed, and his house sold off to another branch of the family whom we don't really know well and who seem to have completely rehabbed the placed and live in it currently. It only somewhat resembles what I remember of it. I can still clearly remember how bizarre it was, the safe energy pockets in that place, like night and day. Places like the bathroom, and for the most part the kitchen, dining room and living room, the energy felt so much better in those spaces. The upstairs, was off as was the basement and that hall, it was like walking through some sort of energy force field and very noticeable!