I had been out of high school for a few years and hadn’t really done much aside from working in retail. Most people I knew had gone to college, some joined the military, and others just left town and entered the workforce. I just really wanted my own place and to make lots of money. This was in the early two thousands and the opportunity that had come to my attention via my uncle was flipping houses.
For those of you who don’t know what that is it’s basically buying old run-down houses for the cheap, fixing it up, and then selling it for a larger price. For several few years I worked with my uncle and eventually once I got the hang of it began to work on my own. I got pretty good at it and was rolling in dough by the time I was 25. Business was good. I had been active in different parts of the western US where I’d flip the house and then camp out in it until I got some buyers. Usually, the properties were still owed by someone eager to get rid of it but sometimes they were just abandoned and owned by the city.
One day I came across a project that intrigued me and made me eager to get to work. The house was in central Colorado in heavily forest area. It was located on a dirt road off of a highway that went about three miles into a forest. The backstory behind the house was that it had been previously owned by an elderly woman who lived alone. She was a recluse and as time went on became a hoarder. She eventually passed away but due to the sorry state she left the house, her distant relatives had no desire to keep it and were selling it for a very reasonable price. I quickly bought it and drove up to inspect the property.
The house was in a very isolating setting as the nearest town was about fifteen minutes away and there weren’t really any neighbors close by. The house was in a small clearing surrounded from all sides by the forest aside from the dirt road. From the outside it honestly didn’t look bad however that changed when I stepped closer to the building. The first thing that bombarded me was the stench. The thin outside screen door was loose and the wooden door was covered it old paint that was flaking away. The screen door felt like it could’ve easily broken just by pulling it open. I stepped inside and was met by a grisly sight. The living room was filled with trash that covered the floor to where the carpet was hard to see. Stacks of old filled boxes lined the walls which made it hard to maneuver about. They were the first things that would have to be removed from the house.
There was one hallway on the left side upon entering the house which led to a single bathroom, small bedroom, and a small laundry room. The small kitchen was connected to the living room and was even more so disgusting with old, rotted food scraps resting on the counter tops and table. I didn’t even bother opening the fridge. Instead, I walked down the hallway to inspect the other rooms, each as nasty as the last. The bedroom was locked, however. I never received any key to it but was able to use a penny to twist the small slit on the outside of the doorknob to open the door. Of course, it was dirty but a little less so than the rest of the house. I’m pretty sure the old woman who had previously lived there had died in her bed. The sheets were tossed to the side, and it had remained unmade.
The room contained a long old dresser with a dusty bible on its surface and contained some clothes which were also found in the closet. What put me on edge however was over the bed there was a message carved into the wall. It looked like it had been done so using a sharp object. It simply read, “**GO AWAY**.” I wondered what the message meant. The old woman was a hoarder so perhaps she was also crazy and yelled at ghosts she thought were around her.
I won’t bore you with the details of how I flipped the house except that I had rented a motel in town to stay in while I cleaned the place up along with one of those long temporary dumpsters for the large amount of garbage. It took over three weeks to do and was a huge pain in the ass. When I finally completed the house, it was an impressive sight. The inside looked totally unrecognizable, and the stench was gone. I was able to return electricity to the place but appliances like the toilet and sink still needed to be attended to but decided to just pass it along to whoever wanted to buy it.
I did get in contact with a potential buyer who told me he’d drive by in a few days to inspect the place. By this point I had checked out of my motel and decided to temporarily live in the house until he arrived. All that was with me was a case of water bottles, some snacks, a sleeping bag, coffee maker, my laptop, a flashlight, and a few books.
For most of the first day nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I had walked around the perimeter of the house to give it a final look over. The cool air was soothing, and the vast amount of greenery was a great sight to behold. What really struck me was how isolating and alone everything felt. No other human soul was anywhere around me for a few miles, and I was living a solitary existence in the middle of nowhere.
Nothing could be heard except for the wind blowing and birds chirping in the distance. Maybe the extreme isolation was the cause of the old woman going insane. As the sun went down, I went back inside and began reading one of my books.
About an hour later I heard what sounded like a shriek coming from outside which lasted a few seconds. My blood chilled with the sensation one would have after being jumped scared while watching a scary movie. It sounded almost like a raspy woman’s yell. I quickly got up to peer out through one of the windows at the back of the house.
Above the back and front doors, I had installed a light outside with a motion sensor and it was on. It was bright enough to illuminate the backyard and the outer edges of the forest tree line. Nothing was out there that I could see and so just assumed the sound might have come from a mountain lion which are known to live in the state. After a few seconds the lights outside turned off and I went back into the living room.
The next day I went back outside to see if I could find any mountain lion tracks or anything belonging to animals but came up empty. Deciding to let it go I got into my car and drove back into town to eat and then buy some supplies to chip away at the “go away” message and fix that section of wall. I worked throughout the day repairing the wall.
In the late afternoon something else occurred. A loud **THUD** hit the house which made me drop my paintbrush. Quickly I ran to the living room and again towards the back window to look outside. Still nothing was out there but this time I went out to investigate. The sun by this point had already began going down which made me feel more nervous. I took a complete lap around the house to inspect it. Nothing was broken or dented which confused me. The thud sounded as if somebody had thrown their whole body against the building, yet I found nothing. I took a final gaze around towards the forest before going back inside and at first glance there was nothing but trees.
I turned my body around but as I did, I caught a glimpse of something out of the ordinary in the opposite direction from where I had been previously facing. A buck was standing a few feet into the forest looking directly at me. Most of its body was shielded by the trees and flora and all that stuck out was its head, neck, and antlers. It was around thirty feet away, but I could feel it staring into the back of my skull. I took my eyes off of it and began to make my way to the backdoor. As I neared it, I looked up once again at the buck to see that it had not removed its gaze from me.
I quickly entered the house but as soon as I closed the door behind me and took a deep breath and exhaled, I once again heard that horrible screech that I had heard the night before. Shaken up, I ran to another window that was sort of in the direction of where that buck was to see what had happened. It was gone. “What the hell was going on?”, I thought to myself. Was this buck trying to challenge me over his territory or something? I hadn’t ever seen anything like this. I had been inside the house most of the time and didn’t go deep into the forest so why was this buck acting all hostile?
My cellphone went off as I went back to the living room. The buyer of the house had texted me saying that he was coming by the next day to check the place out. This was reassuring as I didn’t want to be alone anymore and wanted to get the hell out as soon as possible. I tried to keep my mind occupied with my books but that didn’t really work. I was too startled.
As the hours passed, I did eventually begin to drift asleep at some point however, I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of glass breaking. I rushed to turn the lights on to see where the crash had come from and saw the same back window had been shattered.
I walked over to inspect the damage. The wind had been blowing profusely which I felt as I looked out the window. The light outside was on and again illuminated the yard but not the tree line. I picked up my flashlight to aim at the forest. The light’s beams had revealed the buck which had positioned itself towards the house and again I could only see its head and neck. I stared at it for a few seconds when the impossible happened.
The creature raised itself and stood up the way a bear would. Instead of a deer’s torso, it looked vaguely humanoid with forelimbs ending in hands instead of hooves. I barely had a second’s moment to react because the creature let out a horrifying roar that this time sounded more like a combination of a pig and deer. I had never screamed as so loud in terror as the way I did in that moment. Franticly, I picked up my phone and laptop and rushed towards my car and sped away as quickly as I could towards the town. I checked back into the motel that I had previously used and stayed there until morning, too scared to go to sleep.
As the sun rose my phone began to ring. The caller was the home buyer. He had shown up to the place and had been knocking on the door for several minutes, but no one had answered. I reluctantly drove back to the property to greet him and at that point just gave him whatever price he named off just to get rid of it and drive as far away as possible from that place. I never bothered to call the cops about the broken window or about what I had seen because they obviously wouldn’t have believed me, and I didn’t want a reason to have to deal with the property any longer.
That was one of my last ventures into flipping houses. It never felt investing as it once had and the 2008 housing crash ended that career altogether. I lost my own home during that time and had to move back in with my parents and was back again working in retail in the years following to get out of debt. I am finally building myself up financially and have taken steps into becoming a real estate agent. However, I’ll never take a job that requires me to go anywhere near the deep woods again.