Someone told me this would be a good place to post this and I needed to vent, so here I am.
I’m a jogger. It’s my favorite thing to do. I run twice daily, an hour in the morning and before bed. I get up really early, around 4:30 am to stretch, then run at 5 until 6 or 6:30 before work. Then I jog again before bed, at 8pm. I like to jog mostly in the dark because I’m self conscious and introverted… maybe even a touch paranoid.
There’s a slate-grey house near the end of my street. Almost every morning and night when I jog, I hear someone laughing like a psycho in there. It’s very loud, as it would have to be for me to be able to hear it from the street over my footsteps and heavy breathing. You notice lots of weird things when you jog in the dark, but this is way beyond the ordinary.
My son, who walks to the bus stop every morning, has also complained about how often he hears this creepy laughter. I just tell him to stay away from that house, walk on the other side of the street. I’m usually on my way to work before I can take him to school, and being a single mother doesn’t help.
I may be introverted, but when I move to a new neighborhood, I try to make a good impression by baking an assortment of cookies and passing them out in goodie bags…. pretty sure this has saved my ass a few times, lol. I was way too scared to knock on the grey house door though, because of the laughter, though at the time I didn’t realize it wasn’t going to stop. Passing out those cookies really helped in this situation though, because it gave me an in to feep ok to go and talk to my neighbors about this.
Obviously I didn’t ask everyone on my street… I was way too nervous to ask any next-door neighbors to the grey house. What if the crazy lady saw me?
Asking the neighbors about her revealed the following:
Nobody ever sees any lights on anywhere in the house.
We’re all pretty sure she doesn’t have a TV, and if she does, we are pretty sure she isn’t using it.
The neighbor’s kids are all terrified of this house and have dubbed it “the Nuthouse”.
At one point, one of the neighbors had called emergency services on this woman and absolutely nothing happened. Actually, this has happened a couple times. Apparently they go inside the house every time and “check on her” or something, but she never gets arrested or taken to the hospital or anything.
She seems to be the only person living there but according to one neighbor sometimes a black truck will pull into the driveway, very, very late at night. Like, usually around 3 am, apparently. Can’t confirm this yet, but I’m on the lookout as much as I can be. Nobody has gotten a good look at the driver, yet. We don’t even know if it’s a man or woman.
Mail piles up outside the house but is rarely taken in. Sometimes it has been stolen off her porch, according to one of the adjacent neighbors with surveillance.
(This is the weirdest) One neighbor told me that she went and knocked on her door one day (she goes for walks in the afternoon) to see if the woman inside was okay because she’d hear it regularly, too. She said that she knocked on the door and the laughing stopped immediately. The house was was quiet as ever when the woman answered the door. Apparently she’s very short and small for an adult and my neighbor described her as “ghostly-looking”. Her skin was pale and unhealthy looking and she had dark, straight hair and sunken eyes. The conversation went like this: J: “Hello, it’s your neighbor, J*****, I just wanted to see if you were okay because I thought maybe I heard some shouting.” Crazy Lady: “I’m fine. We’re fine. Bye-bye, now!” And she slammed the door in my neighbor’s face.
My neighbor said she stayed halfway behind the door the whole time and her whole house was pitch dark, like she’d covered the windows with blankets and kept off all the lights.
Yeah, I figure by now you guys get the picture–if that many neighbors are involved and showing concern, then the laughter we keep hearing must be pretty harrowing, right?
Right. Well, it’s been driving me CRAZY. It’s like the laughter of a Halloween witch, except a million times scarier because it’s REAL and we all hear it every day. It’s really putting a strain on my mental health, and it’s freaking my son out, too.
Jogging is supposed to be my happy time. I really want it back. This woman is driving me loony, and apparently everyone else, too. It really puts a whole mood to your jog in the dark when you hear this ** every time you go.
The part that’s really freaking me out is that now I’m starting to hear it everywhere. PTSD, maybe? I have never had it before or known anyone else who has, so I wouldn’t know for sure. But I am hearing it everywhere. It wakes me out of a dead sleep sometimes. My son is even starting to complain. I hear it at work and even when I’ve jogged far, far from her house. My son said that he keeps having nightmares about it and it is causing him to fall asleep in class. I really want to go over to that house and try to talk to the woman to calm myself down, but I’m afraid that it will only make things worse if I see something I’m not supposed to.
This morning, I found a neatly-tied lock of black hair in front of my front door, like someone had slid it through my mail slot. My son and I are both blonde, and I have no idea who would’ve pulled a prank like that. Have I been cursed or something?? Is this some kind of voodoo???