Monday, October 31, 2011

I Lived with a Ghost

Then there was the time I lived in a haunted house . . . for reals. And I have to say, it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Actually, it was quite unsettling.

This was back when my husband and I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. We moved into this big old house (practically a mansion for my twenty-one year old self) in the foothills. My sisters-in-law were housesitting the place for a friend, so we didn’t even have to pay rent. And the house even had a pool! Score for us. But, like all haunted house stories, they start out with a “too good to be true” scenario.

It began right away, the “bad” feeling. The “someone is standing behind you” sense that makes you whirl around only to find . . . nothing. There were the doors that would slam for no reason and the objects that would mysteriously disappear, only to be found in some random spot. One of my favorite necklaces went missing, and I searched everywhere for it before finally giving up. A few days later, I found it shoved behind a bookshelf, completely rusted like it had been soaked in water.

Only after living in this house for months did we find out about out about the tragic event that had happened there decades earlier.

Remember that pool I mentioned? Well, we never went in it. No matter what we did, we couldn’t get the filter to work, so the pool remained a disgusting, sludgy cesspool in the backyard. But when we found out what had happened in that pool, we were quite happy never to have gone in it.

You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Yeah, a little girl drowned in the pool. Her parents found her floating facedown in the water. It doesn’t get much more horrible than that.

After we learned about the drowned girl, everything made sense. The presence we felt. The way we’d get nervous if we were alone in a room, because we never quite felt alone. The missing necklace that turned up rusted.

So there you have it. My haunted house story, and the reason I’m now suspicious of anything that’s too good to be true.

Happy Halloween!


Jennifer Bosworth is the author of STRUCK (FSG/Macmillan, May 8, 2012) a novel about what happens when a teenage lightning addict meets an apocalypse. Jennifer no longer lives in a haunted house, but she is still obsessed with all things scary, and watches a horror movie every day in October.
http://www.jenniferbosworth.com
@jennbosworth
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10647702-struck
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jennifer-Bosworth/198817690150452


6 comments:

  1. Yikes, that's freaky. And you wonder about people who don't believe in ghosts. They're real, people!

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  2. Oh that's creepy. That is my biggest fear---buying a house that is haunted. Because I'm totally a believer!

    ReplyDelete
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