5 Bed House With Cheap Rent

Back when I was a young, broke college student, a friend and I thought we had stumbled upon the deal of a lifetime: A huge 5 bedroom house with 2 bathrooms for dirt cheap rent. The house was in a kind of out of the way place in Virginia, but it suited our needs and the rent was unbelievably cheap. Let me preface this by saying that in the Commonwealth of Virginia, there are no disclosure laws in real estate, meaning that the buyer/renter is not entitled to know the history of the house before signing on the dotted line.

Within a month of moving into this house, odd things began happening. The electricity didn't work very well. At first we attributed this to the fact that the house was very old, built in the early 1900's and the most recent re-wiring of the house had been done in the 50's. Also, the main breaker for the house was located outside in a barn that stood about 20 yards from the house itself and was connected by several crude-looking overhead wires. Whenever the breakers tripped (which was at least 4 times a week) we'd have to get the flashlight and go to the barn to flip them back on. The electricity wasn't the only problem. We had an answering machine that never recorded any messages. Sometimes the light would be blinking and when we'd push play, it was nothing but static. This was before DVR and we worked a lot of nights, so we would try to record our shows, but it never worked. Just static and white noise. We also found it odd that pictures never turned out in or around the house. We went though 13 rolls of film before finally giving up.

The first time we realized that we were dealing with more than just bad wiring was approximately 4 weeks after we moved in. As we were heading to the garage (which was only accessible through the door in the kitchen or the heavy old automatic door outside) we came to a dead stop. There was a man standing in our garage! He just stood there and was completely oblivious when we screamed. My friend slammed the door and locked it and called out to the man that we had a gun and were calling the cops. She retrieved the said gun and we opened the door again. The man was gone. Just poof, vanished. As previously stated, there were only 2 ways in - door through kitchen or automatic door outside. The automatic door was very noisy, so we would have heard it open and we had been in the kitchen all morning so there was no way he got in that way. We were baffled, but went about life like normal. That incident seemed to open the floodgates, because after that it really became obvious we were dealing with something not of this world.

We used to hear the sound of a baby crying, followed by the sound of a rocking chair up in the attic. We investigated and found nothing. Certain spots would always remain cold. Cold is not something you come across in Virginia in the summer. Numerous times we woke up to find all the contents of the pantry on the floor. There were dozens of other odd things that happened, but I'm just highlighting some of the more bizarre occurrences.

As things began to escalate, we got more and more nervous. The pinnacle was when we were sitting in the kitchen one evening, playing cards and waiting for some guests to arrive. Naturally, the lights went out, so we went out to trip the breaker. When we came out of the barn, we saw our friend running up the steps of the porch with a baseball bat. When we asked what he was doing, he told us that he saw a man standing in our living room then walk up the stairs! Scared, we crowded behind him and searched the house with the bat and a gun. Nothing!

About 2 weeks after that, my roommates boss asked her why she never returned his call about switching a shift. She said that she hadn't gotten any messages and he proceeded to tell her about the man that answered the phone and told her we were out! Upon further investigation, we discovered that several other people had the same experience when they called! We were thoroughly freaked out by this time, so we decided to ask some of the town's resident's about the house.

We found out that the house was always vacant within 6 months of it being rented out. Although we were scared, we still stayed because of how cheap it was.

One evening, we were in the living room watching TV. When we heard a huge thud against the basement door. When I say thud, I mean the whole wall shook and the door frame came loose. The door was locked, but we were scared and put a chair against it. We could hear growling on the other side and claws on the door, so we again got the gun. We figured at first that a wild animal must have gotten in there, so we went outside to check the entrance. It was bolted shut. We even checked the tiny windows, nothing broken.

We finally went back into the house and opened the basement door. Nothing there! I've never seen claw marks like that before or since. It was as if whatever had done it only had 3 toes! Besides, nothing that was indigenous to the area was 3 toed or could have gotten in there without opening the door or breaking the window! Not to mention, none of the local animals, say a bear, could have exerted that much force to warp a door frame! We moved a week later.

We could never really come up with any idea of what happened in that house or why. To this day, it remains a mystery. And to this day, nobody lives there for more than 6 months before leaving.