My Grandmother’s House is Haunted
Or whatever you want to label it. Before my fellow Catholics start throwing virtual rotten fruit at me, how about I label it “there are creepy things that go on there that fit the ‘haunted’ description.” How’s that?
Before my husband and I were married, he blew my description off as it just being my loopy self. As of June 3, 2003, my big, bad, born in the South Bronx and “please, I ain’t afraid of that” husband will not spend the night at my grandmother’s unless it is out of a dire necessity. He is very skeptical about “hauntings” but states “I’m not sleeping there, it’s creepy. I don’t know why, it just is.” He usually goes on to refer to the time when the doors started slamming by themselves, or the footsteps we heard climbing the steps repeatedly failed to materialise a tangible person once the top step was reached.
Even for people who have not experienced these more tangible sights and sounds, there has yet to be a person to visit my grandmother who has not said that the creepy feeling and the sense of being watched is just at the unbearable point.
The last time I spent the night there was when I was pregnant and on bed rest with my seven year old due to pre-term labour. My husband and mother thought that since I had a 2 year old to take care of, perhaps staying with my grandmother would be a good idea because my husband had to work. The event that kept me from returning for overnight visits was not the banging noises over the baby monitor, or the creepy feelings or footsteps. To tell the story, you need a bit of background of my grandmother’s house. It is not a very old house (not by my standards), built I think in the 1920’s in the “Fleetwood” section of Mt. Vernon, Westchester County, NY. It is a two family brick home with two three bedroom apartments connected by two stair cases, one in the front and one in the back. My grandmother lives downstairs and her brother and sister live upstairs. My great-grandmother lived up there too until she passed away a few years ago.
I do not think the entire house is haunted. There are some worse parts. The basement is bad, but not the whole basement, just certain rooms (or “work bins” as my grandmother calls them). One is so bad that I cannot walk into it without tearing up and losing my breath. I have to run out of there even to this day. In my grandmother’s ground floor apartment, the bedrooms and bathroom are in the back and connected by a hallway. The bedrooms are bad, but the worst is the farthest bedroom which is not used at all as a bedroom. The hallway is bad also-no one uses the bathroom at night. The front staircase is never used, and needless to say is creepy, and the back stairs, although less creepy have phantom footsteps. All the doors are warped and do not close.
Back to pre term labour. One morning I woke up early to nurse my daughter. There is not clock in my bedroom, so I was not sure how early it was, and if my grandmother was up or not. I was playing with the baby. I heard footsteps going up and down the hall and thought “oh my grandmother is up.” I looked at the door, which was not closed all the way, but cracked and saw a figure walk by. I opened the door quickly and turned my head to say “good morning” to my grandmother only to see the door to the bathroom across the hallway with the water running. My grandmother was in the bathroom, and whoever just walked by was gone. I called my husband and told him to come get me shortly after that. I refused to spend another night in that house since then.