Let me preface this by saying that I am a long-time lurker, and I have been reading Nosleep stories since 2014. I had a weird experience this past 4th of July that triggered a lot of memories that me and my friends have collectively tried to laugh off over the years. I finally decided to reduce my experiences down to writing, so here it is: My best friend’s dad’s house is haunted. There is no other conclusion I can come to.
Just a little background, I had a close group of friends in high school, and we’ve only gotten closer over the years. We’re now grown up in our 30’s and having children. Brian is one of my closest friends from this group, like “groomsmen in my wedding, our kids are in the same daycare class” close. Brian’s dad owns essentially an older mansion on a huge lot, which is unusual to have inside the city limits for such a large metropolitan area. We’ll call Brian’s dad John. This house is the definition of eclectic, there is Japanese art around the house, full Knights of Armor standing throughout the house, ceiling to wall glass windows, etc. It reminds me of the house from that horror movie 13 Ghosts (Not THAT eccentric, but you get the point). Finally, the house has a gigantic pool surrounded in essentially an outdoor garden. Over the years dating back to high school, my friends and I would go to John’s house to use the pool and throw occasional parties there. To his credit, John is very accommodating and given that he lives there alone, he seems to enjoy the company. But everyone of my friends, including Brian and his wife, have had bizarre experiences at this house. The following are the experiences that we’ve had at John’s house:
• Years ago, Brian was throwing a party at the house when John was out of town. Near the entrance of the house, there is a restroom with a door that blends perfectly with the wall. It’s hard to see unless you know it’s there. At some point, my then girlfriend and I were in this restroom when we both started to hear horrific screaming coming from the walls. Like, someone being tortured type screaming. It sounded like it was coming from every direction at once. My then girlfriend and I were freaked out and immediately walked back out to the party to see what had happened. To our surprise, no one heard a thing and everyone was chatting like nothing happened. We didn’t want to make a scene, and rationalized that maybe someone left a movie on in the next room. I put it out of my head until a few years after that, Brian told me that he had another friend over who had the same experience. I’ve never talked to this other guy before, but apparently, he told Brian he heard horrific screaming coming from the walls when he used the bathroom that no one else heard. No one really has an explanation on where the screaming came from.
• Brian’s wife Paloma is also a good friend of mine dating back to our high school years. Brian and Paloma started dating back in high school, and they’re now married with a young child. One night early in their relationship, Paloma was sleeping over with Brian at John’s house. Paloma woke up one night to the sound of heavy scraping along the marble floors on the first floor. Paloma told me the scraping would start and stop in infrequent patterns. Paloma was too scared to investigate what was happening, and Brian didn’t wake up to hear it. Figuring that it might have been John moving furniture in the middle of the night, Paloma eventually went back to sleep. When she went downstairs the next morning, Paloma discovered that the knights of armor in the dining room had changed positions over night. No one knew how they changed positions, and John told them he was sound asleep all night.
• In the dining room, the opposite wall is just one big mirror from the ceiling down to the floor. One night when we were all outside by the pool, I walked inside to go to the bathroom. In doing so, I passed the dining room. Most of the lights were off in the house as we were mainly outside, but as I walked by the dining room, I clearly saw a silhouette of a bright light on the large mirror wall which formed what looked like a door. In other words, it looked like there was a door in the mirror wall, and the next room had a bright white light shining through the cracks. I’m not too familiar with all the nooks and crannies of the house, so I didn’t think much of it. A few weeks later I asked Brian what room was behind the dining room, and he gave me a confused look. Apparently, there is no room behind the dining room where I saw the light silhouette. I even walked it at some point, and the dining room mirror wall is also the side of the house, so there can’t be a room behind it. There are also no cracks or seams in the mirror wall that a light could shine through. It’s as if a door appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast.
• Speaking of doors, one time I accidentally walked into a door on the first floor that I had never been in before. Like I said, I’m not too familiar with every part of the house because: (1) it’s huge and (2) we usually just go to hang out at the pool. But when I walked into this room, the walls were filled with animal mounts of huge game like buffalo and moose. I took a brief moment to see some of the crazier mounts but quickly backed out because I was in the wrong room. I did remember thinking it was weird that John has so many animal mounts considering I had never known him to hunt or even own any guns. A few weeks later, I mentioned that room to a mutual friend JR who is actually big into hunting. JR has been over at John’s house just as much as I have, and he told me he has opened that door that I’m describing and it’s just stairs to the basement. We were both adamant that the other one was wrong about what was behind that door. The next time we were all over there, JR and I walked straight to that door and opened it. To our surprise, it was just a closet. We asked Brian about it and he said John’s house doesn’t have a basement nor does John collect animal mounts. That door has always been a storage closet.
• Another night, we were all at the pool drinking and hanging out. The configuration of the house is hard to explain, but if you walk to the side of the house away from view of the pool, you can climb onto the roof. The roof has a corner which extends right above the pool, which makes a good place for dumbass high school kids like us to jump off the roof into the pool. On this night, we had a friend (really just an acquaintance to me) walk around the corner of the house to climb up the roof and jump into the pool. Except, once he walked around the corner, he didn’t jump down. The guy just disappeared. We walked over around the corner, checked up on the roof, walked the inside of the house, and we couldn’t find him. We were all dumbstruck on where he took off to. 45 minutes later, he finally came running off the roof corner and into the pool. After our initial scare of him suddenly running off the roof, we asked him where the hell he went to. He told us that he went straight up to the roof and directly to the corner to jump off. He didn’t take any breaks or get lost along the way. He couldn’t explain to us the 45-minute lapse in time from when he disappeared and when he finally re-appeared on the roof. When we explained how long he was gone, he became visibly confused and accused us of all playing a group prank on him. I have only hung out with that guy a few times, but he’s not the kind of person to lie about that or joke around. None of us (himself included) could explain the missing 45 minutes.
• Finally, the event that prompted me to write down my experiences occurred just this past July 4th. My wife and I have an infant child that we brought to John’s house for a small July 4th gathering by the pool. An hour or two in, my son predictably got cranky so we took him to one of the bedrooms to lay him down in a portable crib we brought. After some fussing, he finally went down to sleep and we set up a baby monitor near him. My wife and I joined everyone else out by the pool. At some point, we realized that he had been too quiet for too long and went to go check on him. When we went to the room, he was missing, play pen and all. After our initial freak out, we searched the house and found him in another bedroom upstairs. He was still asleep in the play pen, just in a different room on a different floor of the house. Everyone else was outside with us while he slept, and no one else arrived at the gathering. It’s as if someone or something transported the whole play pen with him sleeping in it to a different room upstairs without waking him up once. The baby monitor was still plugged in the original room we laid him down in, so we know we didn’t confuse the rooms. The whole thing has really shaken me, and the more I have thought about these experiences, the less I can explain them. These are the stories that I can personally vouch for, but I know my other friends might have some different experiences. If anyone has any plausible explanations, please let me know because I don’t think I will be returning to John’s house until I know it’s safe for my family.