This is a story that I’ve only told to a handful of people, and not until I was well into my 20’s. I don’t know if it would be considered a repressed memory, but it was definitely something that I had forgotten for the rest of my childhood and teen years. When I finally told some of my closest friends, it would send shivers down my spine as I could remember it so vividly. I still haven’t told my family, two of whom were there at the time.
When I was around 8 or 9 years old, my Mom started dating a man named Jim. He had recently received a massive family inheritance when both his parents suddenly passed away in a car accident. They had lived in a large house on some 70 or 80 acres of dense woodlands just outside of town. While I don’t know the details of how the estate was divvied up, I do know that the property was given to both Jim and his brother. Shortly after moving into the house, Jim’s brother fell out of a tree stand while hunting on the property and broke his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Requiring full time attention and care, Jim’s brother ended up moving out of the house and into a community where he could be cared for. This, of course, left Jim with the property.
We would visit the house frequently, much to my dismay. It was not a place that I found comfortable. It almost felt too big, like the rooms would swallow you whole. You could always hear yourself echoing as you spoke, the ceilings stretching above you. He had been renovating the house for the few years since acquiring it, but it was very piecemeal. The kitchen was modern, but then would lead into a dining room straight out of a movie, a table for 14 extending through the room with windows lining the outer wall. He would leave these windows without curtains and they would be black at night, making me glance toward them once in a while, thinking that anyone could be standing right outside of them and we wouldn’t even know it. At the front of the house was a huge circular foyer, a staircase spiraling with the curved wall up to the second floor. The ceiling stretched almost three stories high, a large crystal chandelier hanging in the center. We wouldn’t use the front door very often because we would come through the garage straight into the kitchen most of the time. This would lead to me getting confused as everything in the house led to that front foyer. Once I got a bit older, I felt more confident with the layout and eventually with being in the house in general.
When it happened, I was probably around 10 or 11. My older brother and I had been over at Jim’s house for most of the day while him and my Mom were out. He had a son that was even older than my brother who was away at wrestling practice, so we were more than content to sit in his room playing on his Sega Genesis for the afternoon. Throughout the day I kept hearing someone calling my name. It was so subtle the first few times that I ignored it, thinking I was just hearing things. It was almost too quiet to hear but I could just barely catch it. Like someone was saying it at conversational level in an adjacent room. I got up to go to the bathroom at one point and while in the hallway I heard it again, this time so clearly. It wasn’t an unfamiliar voice, almost like it was my own but just a tone off. Not wanting to be ridiculed by my brother, I kept it to myself.
At last Jim and my Mom came back from their day out and we started to get ready to go out to dinner with them somewhere in town. As we walked out to the car I remembered that I had left something in the house. To this day I still can’t remember what it was that I had left, but it was something I was not willing to leave without. After pleading with my Mom that we just run back in to grab whatever it was, Jim finally turned the car off and handed me the keys, telling me to go in through the front door of the foyer.
His sons bedroom was up the stairs and at the end of the hallway. The hallway had two doors on either side of it, three of which were more rooms and one was the bathroom. The hallway turned 90 degrees at his sons door and continued to the right to another two bedrooms. As I walked in to his sons room, I thought I heard a noise behind me, so I turned on my heel and looked back through his door. The bathroom door that I had just passed was cracked. When I had walked in I was almost positive that every door in that hallway was closed. I felt the familiar pressure of fear in the center of my back, as if a hand was pushing me to run away. Grabbing my stuff quickly I closed his door and started for the stairs. At this point everything happened very quickly, within a moment. Just as I reached the top step of the stairs, I heard another noise behind me, like the creaking of a door. As I turned to see, somebody came sprinting out of one of the rooms to the left, the door slamming open into the wall, and straight down the hallway to the right, slamming one of the doors at the end of it so hard that it shook the house. They were running so fast that all I positively saw was their general figure, nothing about them stands out, not even what they were wearing. Then it was silence, as if nothing had happened at all. My adrenaline kicked in full force. I scrambled down the stairs so fast that I almost fell head first onto the floor below. Shocked and in a daze, I walked back to the car and got in. My mom asked me if I was ok, and knowing I had never liked the house, accepted my answer when I said I was. Handing Jim the keys, I didn’t say a word and we went to dinner.
To this day I still can not come up with a rational explanation for this. Was it possible this person was Jim’s lover and they were hiding? My brother and I having been there all day since the morning, and Jim being instrumental in the planning of that day kind of negates that. Why would they have been there if he had known we were coming? Could it have been more sinister, like this was a person being held there against their own will? Once again, that doesn’t really make sense, because they were obviously free to run around. Why wouldn’t they just leave then? And then I start to consider the actual action. Like why run from one bedroom to another, also in a full sprint. That means that whoever that was must have lined up against the opposite wall of that room to achieve that speed. The lack of even semi rational answers to all these questions is what still gives me pause, and is likely why I never spoke about it to Jim or my Mom.
After this incident, I refused to go back to the house. My Mom was a little upset, having thought that I had gotten over my general fear of the place, but ultimately respected it and stopped bringing me. Soon after, she stopped dating Jim, and I tucked that memory away, I thought, for good.